Ever since the very beginning, there has been a need to convert sports related titles to video games. After all, the original Pong was nothing more than virtual table tennis, and in the early days of video games, sports games were essential for sales since while many didn’t grasp the concept of video games, the public knew what a sport was. While many baseball game series have come and gone (such as Home Run for the Atari 2600), one of the coveted baseball games of our youth was certainly the “R.B.I. Baseball” series, originally released for the Nintendo NES. SportsBusiness Journal as well as Major League Baseball themselves, have announced that this popular franchise is set to return in 2014.



The original “run batted in” (R.B.I.) Baseball was released for the Nintendo Famicom in December of 1986 as “Pro Yakyuu Family Stadium”, and was brought to North America in 1988. Originally developed by Namco, it was published by Tengen. This was the first baseball title that was licensed by the Major League Baseball Players Association, and used actual Major League Baseball player names within the game itself. However since it was not an officially licensed MLB product, team names and logos were not incorporated. R.B.I. Baseball spawned two sequels on the 8-bit NES, with other versions made over the years for consoles such as the Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Super NES, portable consoles like the Game Gear, and even computer systems of the era like the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

In 1993, Time Warner Interactive had purchased a majority stake in Atari Games, which was Tengen’s parent company, and the final titles in the series were thus released under the Time Warner name. With a total of 8 games in the series, these final games to be released under the “R.B.I.” title were “RBI Baseball ’95” on Sega’s short-lived 32X add-on and “Super R.B.I. Baseball” on the SNES, also released in 1995. Now, 19 years later, it seems that this is all about to change. Earlier this month, Take-Two Interactive (who had previously had a license agreement with the MLB for the “MLB 2K” franchise), announced it would not renew its licensing with the league. Which would have left some current generation gamers without an official MLB game for the upcoming year. MLB, meet RBI! Tweets from Eric Fisher, of the SportsBusiness Journal:

“The revival of RBI Baseball by MLBAM presumably brings baseball back to Microsoft platforms after demise of MLB 2K franchise… RBI Baseball will be first game MLBAM has made for gaming consoles. Release in the spring. No other details yet re price, etc.”



While there are extremely few details available at this time, a simple website from the MLB states that the R.B.I. franchise is set to return this spring, with the all new “R.B.I. Baseball ’14”. The same website states that the upcoming title will not only be available for current and next generation gaming consoles, but will also be available for mobile devices as well. There is currently no word on when the game will be released, other than the Spring timeline, and there is no work on pricing information, or exactly what platforms the game will be made available on.

Official “R.B.I. ’14” Website: http://rbigame.mlb.com/rbigame/home.jsp