Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

About Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (1994) is Software Creations' SNES baseball game with real teams and stadiums but made-up players, a 1.2-million seller often ranked among the best baseball games ever.

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball in Depth

The game had an MLB licence but not a players' association licence, so it has real teams and ballparks but fictional players, apart from Griffey himself, who carry the statistics of their real 1993 counterparts and can be renamed. Many stadiums are recreated in detail, from Fenway Park's Green Monster and the warehouse at Camden Yards to the waterfalls at Kauffman Stadium and the ivy at Wrigley Field, while cartridge limits put other teams in generic parks with green or blue walls. A battery-backed season mode runs for 26, 78 or 162 games, with a choice of four or six divisions, since the game appeared after MLB proposed six divisions but before the first such season. After each game, box scores appear in newspaper form with joke headlines, and a home run derby pits players against Griffey or fictional sluggers such as Barny Tater and Can O' Corn.

The invented rosters follow themes. The Braves are dance DJs, the Orioles honour John Waters films, the Red Sox include Cheers characters, the Dodgers, Mets and Padres are punk pioneers from Los Angeles, New York and England, the Expos are figures from the Manchester music scene, the Royals are US presidents and the Giants are Software Creations staff, among them the Pickford brothers.

Making Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

Software Creations developed the game and Nintendo published it for the SNES in 1994. By July 1994 it had sold 750,000 copies, and it ultimately sold 1.2 million. Reviews were mixed: GamePro criticised its lack of realism, from the fictional players and inaccurate parks to the ability to steer a pitch after release, but praised its music, its manual and its accessibility for beginners, while EGM found the computer too hard to beat alone but liked its digitised voices of Palermo and Jack Buck and scored it 6.6. It is nevertheless often rated by the public among the best baseball games of all time, and Complex ranked it 91st among SNES games in 2018. A 1997 Game Boy version, programmed by freelancer Brian Beuken, used only one stadium but was the first Nintendo Griffey game with both MLB and players' association licences. Nintendo followed it with three more Griffey games by Rare and Angel Studios, and MLB: The Show has included a retro mode emulating it.