The 8 Bit World Series of Retro Videogames
For your entertainment I’ve stitched together three commercials from the early 80s for Intellivision Major League Baseball. The first spot features none other than sports writer George Plimpton giving a comparison between Intellivision and Atari. What then follows is a spot which show rabid fans in the bleachers who feel the same way, and that’s followed by a French translation!
Shown above is a sample of the game play, now I realize what you’re seeing looks primitive but what made this game a breakthrough was that it shows faux 3D angles of a game as opposed to the flat 2D view the Atari game featured. This was a result of game designer Don Daglow being inspired by watching a real ball game on television — and this became the first game to break that 2D look and soon everyone else followed.
It’s interesting to note that Daglow was actually an old hand at designing baseball games even back in the early days of the business in the 80s as he got his start writing his first baseball game on a PDP-10 mainframe computer when he was still in college in 1971!