Hardball marks a new high water mark for the UK’s sports game obsession – people were so into sports they would even play an American one! The review in Computer & Video Games neatly illustrates the expected level of familiarity there, by describing baseball as “not unlike cricket – except faster!” and then ending on the line “Grab your glove, Charlie Brown, and head for the pitcher’s mound this instant!”. To British people, baseball was a thing that happens in Peanuts.
So how was Hardball the best selling game in the country? I have a theory. The Commodore 64 was American and so were Hardball’s developer Accolade (founded by the same people as the more enduring Activision). Sometimes a game gets a budget and level of work appropriate to the country it is made for and will be popular in, and that overflows into giving it a big ad spend elsewhere to go with its technical impressiveness, and it works there too despite not having such receptive starting conditions. An unearned confidence can still do a lot of convincing. This theory also applies to some of the most famous and loved games of all time, as we’ll come back to in the late ‘90s.
It helps that Hardball is a pretty good introduction. I am in a similar position to the Computer & Video Games reviewer in having been to one baseball game – it was between the San Francisco Giants and LA Dodgers; the game was alright and the garlic fries were better. It doesn’t make me much of an expert. But Hardball gets to the point and helps out a bit. There isn’t much faffing around before the action if you don’t want it, it presents you on screen with a set of options to chose as pitcher/batter for each pitch, and you just have to decide which direction to press, with the bat/mitt moving indicatively on screen along with it.
You don’t need to know exactly what a hardball or a curveball is to make some choices and see visually what is happening. And the fact that it’s really difficult to score points in baseball (the fact that leads to ludicrously long matches) works in its favour. The pitching side, the prevention of scoring, has such an advantage that matches can be close even before you get very good. There is an appeal to the attritional accumulation of small moments. The first time I managed to even hit ball was super satisfying, even before it secured a home run.
Beyond its functionality, and presumably a big part of Hardball’s appeal, is that it looks great. This will be something that we’ll keep coming back to, but “good graphics” (which packs in a lot of different qualities) are always a strong selling point. Admittedly, part of why Hardball looks fantastic is because it’s on the Commodore 64 and I’ve mainly been playing less detailed and less colourful Spectrum games, but that also went for Way of the Exploding Fist and there’s something a bit deeper to Hardball’s visual appeal, at least when it’s showing batter facing pitcher. Its big player figures and carefully detailed, sunshine-bathed setting play to the strengths of pixel art and present a kind of realism through an optimistic abstract lens, a world where things are just as they need to be. You don’t have to know baseball beyond Peanuts to see the beauty in that.
