A star pitcher is resurrected from the Hall of Flame. A Hell mouth swallows the state of Utah. Crows descend on Tastemaker Stadium, pecking slugger Jessica Telephone out of a peanut shell. This is Baseball, the absurdist baseball simulator that captured the most delightfully wacky corners of the internet when it launched in summer 2020.
Developed by indie studio The Game Band, Baseball arrived at a moment of global isolation and fear. So, naturally, swaths of extremely online gamers with lots of anxiety and too much time on their hands welcomed the distraction and developed an expansive, collaborative fan community. There’s an international grunge band with dozens of members; an hour-long, original rock opera about sibling sacrifice; a Baseball News Network posting in-depth sports analysis (yes, Baseball is a sport); a data analytics and research society; Houston Spies fans hosting workshops about unions; and of course, thousands of fanfics.
Baseball is inherently a collaborative game, like a vaguely sports-themed version of Twitch Plays Pokémon, or a massive multiplayer asynchronous Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
The Game Band also developed Where Cards Fall, a more “traditional” puzzle game on PC and Nintendo Switch, but Baseball is more of a role-playing game with randomized elements than a video game. The Internet Baseball League’s teams, like the Charleston Shoe Thieves, Ohio Worms or Canada Moist Talkers, face off against each other in text-based, simulated baseball-like games. But passively watching these updates isn’t the fun part — it's communing with fans to impact the course of the season. You participate by betting on games, with in-game currency, voting in weekly elections that allow fans to dictate the plot of the game or helping your favorite team renovate their stadium (Go Philly Pies!). One stadium modification, for example, is “Ball Pit,” which declares that “Every Foul Ball hit in this Ballpark will be 5 times as Foul.”
The game garnered 1.75 million hits in August 2020, its first full month online. Within a month, web traffic nearly doubled. It’s been more than two years since Baseball’s explosive debut, but inside The Game Band, the game’s instant success posed an insurmountable challenge to the small, under-resourced studio.
“We were like five or six people when we first started making Baseball,” said Sam Rosenthal, founder and creative director of The Game Band. “Talk about unsustainable. We made this as a quick and dirty prototype that blew up.”
As Baseball inches closer to its long-awaited return, we talked to the team behind the game about how they plan to turn a viral hit into a viable business.
After ample beta testing and experiments to figure out how to keep up with their unexpectedly popular game, Baseball went on a long hiatus (a “siesta”) in summer 2021, spare for some short tests. In the time since, The Game Band raised a $3 million seed round for Baseball, allowing the project to increase its staff size five times over. The studio, now remote, finally has a fully built-out tech team, bringing in Jesse Rocco as director of engineering.
“Now, we’re actually writing style documents, which is unheard of for Baseball,” joked game design lead Joel Clark. “Back in the day, it was literally just three of us in a call.”
Rocco joined The Game Band in August 2021, just as the second era of Baseball, known as the Expansion Era, was ending.
“Baseball was on my radar for a while, but I wouldn’t have considered myself a super fan. I definitely didn’t understand what I was getting into,” Rocco told TechCrunch. “Onboarding was like… that was quite the experience, with my first two weeks being the last two weeks of the Expansion Era, when everything was imploding.” Baseball concluded the Expansion Era, as well as the game’s beta phase, by nullifying the existing story line and absorbing the league into a Black Hole. It was a plot-relevant excuse for the game developers to scrap everything and start from scratch.
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