It's funny how despite the full-color background, the actual graphics are the same as the original Random House version of the game. One of the legitimate criticisms of the game is that when sending a runner around the bases, there are literally no clues to guide the manager as the written description doesn't do a very good job of giving you the odds. Joe Elinich ended up reverse engineering the chances but someone shouldn't have to do that; there should be a physical representation of the runner on the basepaths at the very least.
One other surprising factor looking back at it is how expensive the Random House game was when it was released: $90 and this didn't include StatMaster which not only was sold separately but didn't come out until two years later! I think this was because Random House sold the game to APBA for whatever software cost at the time (maybe $30) and then APBA marked it up, acting as a retail outlet for its own game instead of insisting on a discount from Random House. Once the game became the domain of Miller Associates the price came down to a reasonable level. Of course, back then you had to actually know how to use a computer in order to use one so Phil Medon's column in the beginning was very nuts-and-bolts rather than strategy based.
I'm going to get to it eventually (all my projects take so slow, lol) - but the original APBA computer baseball game also received really strong reviews. Computer Gaming World called it basically the best baseball game on any computer platform, and there were other positive reviews as well.
I watched one of the late season 1985 Mets - Cardinals games a few months ago. After the game, the guy who taped it included part of the local New York news station broadcast, where they used a computer based baseball simulation to predict the rest of the season. The game they showed was clearly the old APBA Baseball computer game (I'm not sure if it was the Apple II version or the DOS version), though I don't know if that's actually what they used.
I also love reading those old "computer corner" columns in the APBA Journal. We've come a long way in terms of computer use.
Family Computing had Tug McGraw review it as well as MicroLeague and HardBall and Tug liked the verbal descriptions in APBA better than MicroLeague's hybrid of graphics and words. HardBall, of course, was an arcade-style game but I enjoyed it. As I owned a Commodore 64 APBA wasn't available for it but I owned the other two.
It is worth noting that the Random House game came out 40 years ago this month 😲
Funny I came across that review a little while back when I was doing research on the football game NFL Challenge for the Sports Games Journal. NFL Challenge was also released in 1985. I never played APBA computer games, and like NFL Challenge would have been too pricy to try.
I think XOR NFL Challenge is probably the best American football sim released before the 3D era. The graphics aren't much, but the gameplay really is deep.
I agree with you 100 percent. The flow of the game feels like football. Of course, the 1985 interface has to be navigated and it doesn't have things we consider basics like comprehensive stats and result tracking built into the program. But as far as the game from kickoff to final whistle I think it is great. Also, I like the X&0 animation better than APC . It was a landmark game of its time for sure.
In issue 5 of my publication Sports Games Journal, I feature its history, as well as its use in the ESPN Dream Season. Anyone interested in the issue can go here
Yes. I remember the baserunning issues. What I did was only try to advance when it made baseball sense, i.e., don't get thrown out trying to advance when you were behind unless...
Thanks Dan. Are there any updated reviews of BBW out there? When last I played it, in the early 2000s, the stat package had not been updated. I decided to make DMB my game of choice for replays because it came with actual lineups and pitching rotations. And I've stuck with it, though the DMB computer manager is often lacking.
It's easy to forget how ahead of the curve Baseball for Windows really was, especially since APBA as a company has always had this image of being behind the times...
It was a Windows product when just about every other game at the time - Strat, Diamond Mind, Lance Haffner, etc. - were still DOS.
It had Ernie Harwell giving detailed play-by-play descriptions. Seriously, the play-by-play was (and still is) great.
You could import entire seasons through the Bill James Encyclopedia. Before sites like Baseball Reference and Fangraphs gave you access to every stat imaginable, the BJE gave you a host of sortable traditional and advanced statistics and was a useful tool in its own right. In addition, the imported seasons were considered more accurate than the seasons you could buy through the company. You needn't have to buy a season disk unless you wanted the "authentic" ratings. Frankly, it's still astonishing to me that they allowed this.
Finally, it was sold through traditional retail outlets like Software Etc. and EB games. I bought mine at an Electronics Boutique in a local shopping mall. Its text-sim competitors were mail-order only.
There were quite a few other things that made the game stand out. It's just unfortunate that it was forgotten and now exists in a kind of non-development stasis.. I maintain that it is still a great game.
Daniel probably knows for sure, but APBA still sells BBW but the game I believe is kind of stuck development wise from where it was in the 1990s or early 2000s. But you are right for its time it was a pretty amazing piece of software.
I remember seeing this game for sale at game stores in the early '90s, but I was still tied to games that had animation—starting with MicroLeague and Earl Weaver Baseball, then moving to the LaRussa Baseball series. The game looked nice, but no players running around? That seemed odd to me at the time. Eventually, though, I got tired of the LaRussa line as it leaned more toward arcade-style play.
That’s when I decided to step into the world of “text” sims. I went with Pursue the Pennant—which was renamed Diamond Mind a year later—mainly because it allowed easy team and season creation. I wanted to recreate current Japanese League seasons and used that game to do so for the 1994–1999 seasons.
Back then, there was a little rivalry on the online forums between Diamond Mind, Strat-O-Matic, and BBW over which was the best. I also remember buying the Bill James Encyclopedia they sold—it was the closest thing we had to Baseball Reference at the time.
It's funny how despite the full-color background, the actual graphics are the same as the original Random House version of the game. One of the legitimate criticisms of the game is that when sending a runner around the bases, there are literally no clues to guide the manager as the written description doesn't do a very good job of giving you the odds. Joe Elinich ended up reverse engineering the chances but someone shouldn't have to do that; there should be a physical representation of the runner on the basepaths at the very least.
One other surprising factor looking back at it is how expensive the Random House game was when it was released: $90 and this didn't include StatMaster which not only was sold separately but didn't come out until two years later! I think this was because Random House sold the game to APBA for whatever software cost at the time (maybe $30) and then APBA marked it up, acting as a retail outlet for its own game instead of insisting on a discount from Random House. Once the game became the domain of Miller Associates the price came down to a reasonable level. Of course, back then you had to actually know how to use a computer in order to use one so Phil Medon's column in the beginning was very nuts-and-bolts rather than strategy based.
I'm going to get to it eventually (all my projects take so slow, lol) - but the original APBA computer baseball game also received really strong reviews. Computer Gaming World called it basically the best baseball game on any computer platform, and there were other positive reviews as well.
I watched one of the late season 1985 Mets - Cardinals games a few months ago. After the game, the guy who taped it included part of the local New York news station broadcast, where they used a computer based baseball simulation to predict the rest of the season. The game they showed was clearly the old APBA Baseball computer game (I'm not sure if it was the Apple II version or the DOS version), though I don't know if that's actually what they used.
I also love reading those old "computer corner" columns in the APBA Journal. We've come a long way in terms of computer use.
Family Computing had Tug McGraw review it as well as MicroLeague and HardBall and Tug liked the verbal descriptions in APBA better than MicroLeague's hybrid of graphics and words. HardBall, of course, was an arcade-style game but I enjoyed it. As I owned a Commodore 64 APBA wasn't available for it but I owned the other two.
It is worth noting that the Random House game came out 40 years ago this month 😲
Funny I came across that review a little while back when I was doing research on the football game NFL Challenge for the Sports Games Journal. NFL Challenge was also released in 1985. I never played APBA computer games, and like NFL Challenge would have been too pricy to try.
If you haven't seen it yet, I made a video on NFL Challenge the other week: https://youtu.be/6udZGDbethk
I think XOR NFL Challenge is probably the best American football sim released before the 3D era. The graphics aren't much, but the gameplay really is deep.
I agree with you 100 percent. The flow of the game feels like football. Of course, the 1985 interface has to be navigated and it doesn't have things we consider basics like comprehensive stats and result tracking built into the program. But as far as the game from kickoff to final whistle I think it is great. Also, I like the X&0 animation better than APC . It was a landmark game of its time for sure.
In issue 5 of my publication Sports Games Journal, I feature its history, as well as its use in the ESPN Dream Season. Anyone interested in the issue can go here
https://www.facebook.com/groups/sportsgamesjournal/files/files
Yes. I remember the baserunning issues. What I did was only try to advance when it made baseball sense, i.e., don't get thrown out trying to advance when you were behind unless...
(You fill in the blanks). :)
Thanks Dan. Are there any updated reviews of BBW out there? When last I played it, in the early 2000s, the stat package had not been updated. I decided to make DMB my game of choice for replays because it came with actual lineups and pitching rotations. And I've stuck with it, though the DMB computer manager is often lacking.
I honestly haven't played the newest version of BBW yet. I don't believe there were any updates to the stat package, however.
It's easy to forget how ahead of the curve Baseball for Windows really was, especially since APBA as a company has always had this image of being behind the times...
It was a Windows product when just about every other game at the time - Strat, Diamond Mind, Lance Haffner, etc. - were still DOS.
It had Ernie Harwell giving detailed play-by-play descriptions. Seriously, the play-by-play was (and still is) great.
You could import entire seasons through the Bill James Encyclopedia. Before sites like Baseball Reference and Fangraphs gave you access to every stat imaginable, the BJE gave you a host of sortable traditional and advanced statistics and was a useful tool in its own right. In addition, the imported seasons were considered more accurate than the seasons you could buy through the company. You needn't have to buy a season disk unless you wanted the "authentic" ratings. Frankly, it's still astonishing to me that they allowed this.
Finally, it was sold through traditional retail outlets like Software Etc. and EB games. I bought mine at an Electronics Boutique in a local shopping mall. Its text-sim competitors were mail-order only.
There were quite a few other things that made the game stand out. It's just unfortunate that it was forgotten and now exists in a kind of non-development stasis.. I maintain that it is still a great game.
Daniel probably knows for sure, but APBA still sells BBW but the game I believe is kind of stuck development wise from where it was in the 1990s or early 2000s. But you are right for its time it was a pretty amazing piece of software.
Yeah, it is. The core of the game is essentially unchanged from the original game that was designed back in 1984.
There are a few bells and whistles, though they mostly just separate the game from its roots in the APBA Master Game.
I remember seeing this game for sale at game stores in the early '90s, but I was still tied to games that had animation—starting with MicroLeague and Earl Weaver Baseball, then moving to the LaRussa Baseball series. The game looked nice, but no players running around? That seemed odd to me at the time. Eventually, though, I got tired of the LaRussa line as it leaned more toward arcade-style play.
That’s when I decided to step into the world of “text” sims. I went with Pursue the Pennant—which was renamed Diamond Mind a year later—mainly because it allowed easy team and season creation. I wanted to recreate current Japanese League seasons and used that game to do so for the 1994–1999 seasons.
Back then, there was a little rivalry on the online forums between Diamond Mind, Strat-O-Matic, and BBW over which was the best. I also remember buying the Bill James Encyclopedia they sold—it was the closest thing we had to Baseball Reference at the time.