In 1979 a group of four Atari programmers left and set up a new company. They felt that they weren’t getting their due for creating the games that made up the majority of Atari’s sales, and their answer was Activision, which would do things differently. Activision highlighted the creators of its games, and had some huge successes of its own. Within five years, though, history repeated for two of its four founders. Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead walked out of Activision for reasons which are less clear, and set up another new company, Accolade. It would focus on home computer games, and one of its first games would be another very American success story in the UK.

When writing about American Football’s time at the top of the UK charts in 1984, I talked about the early days of Channel 4. This new TV channel, launched the same year as the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, found a niche showing glamorous, exciting American Football to a youngish audience. It would go on to keep showing it for sixteen years. Once American Football took off, they started looking for ways to repeat the trick, and commissioned the same company, Cheerleader Productions, to produce shows of baseball highlights for them as well.

Baseball did not hit the same UK ratings heights as American Football, and was a fixture on Channel 4 schedules for a fraction of the time. Nonetheless, it drove some interest which was visible on the UK games charts. Imagine’s World Series Baseball – created before their collapse and made available by their liquidators to new owners Ocean, becoming their first release under the Imagine name – reached #2 for six weeks in early 1985. The limited extent of the British audience’s presumed knowledge of American sport is perhaps reflected by the title of its sequel, a #17 later in the year: World Series Basketball.

  • World Series Baseball (Imagine, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Series Baseball (Imagine, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Series Basketball (Imagine, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • World Series Basketball (Imagine, 1985, ZX Spectrum)

Into this newly welcoming atmosphere for baseball games entered Accolade, who had decided to make a baseball game one of their first releases. Bob Whitehead had a lot of experience of making sports games from his time at Atari and Activision: Football, Home Run, Skiing, Boxing. Technology had moved on a lot in the half decade since, and Accolade would take full advantage of that in their new game HardBall. Part of that would be making it a visual feast, and that meant a specialist artist. The first creative Accolade hired was Mimi Doggett as Lead Visual Designer. She had previously demonstrated her graphic art abilities at Atari, where she worked on games including Mario Bros. and an unreleased baseball game.

HardBall’s visual difference from the likes of World Series Baseball is immediately apparent. Imagine’s game uses a zoomed-out view of the whole diamond, with the pitching and hitting occurring in miniature animations shown diegetically as action on a screen in the stadium. Bob Whitehead told Digital Press that his main inspiration, rather than previous baseball games, was television. HardBall’s main action takes place with view from over the pitcher’s shoulder, a replication of the usual TV standard. With its big player figures and carefully detailed, sunshine-bathed setting, it plays to the strengths of pixel art and looks sumptuous. Accolade put a big screenshot of that view on the box art. 

“Exceptional graphics – both definition and animation are first class” was the verdict of (fictional) Zzap! 64 reviewer Paul Sumner, while (real) colleague Julian Rignall claimed that “from a distance it looks like it could be a televised game!”. As Chris Anderson highlighted in his Commodore User review, it doesn’t just look great but the variety in the animation is key to the game. The pitcher selects a direction and one of four possible types of pitch (which vary according to who is doing the pitching) and the batter needs to figure out what is coming in and react accordingly. It’s a little more on the strategic side than the action-packed side, but works very well. Certainly much better than the fielding, where the thrown ball moves in bizarrely paced arcs and surges in a way “which would make Isaac Newton turn in his grave” as Anderson put it.

The success of HardBall in America was enough for U.S. Gold to sign up to distribute it here and put their consistent marketing muscle to use. It’s again interesting to see the attitudes towards baseball in the British reviews. “I must admit that it [is] the first sport simulation I have played which has taught me anything about sport” wrote Commodore Computing International’s reviewer, alongside praising its “truly American touches”. Computer & Video Games felt the need to explain that the sport is “not unlike cricket — except faster!” before finishing with an instruction to “grab your glove, Charlie Brown”, baseball to some British audiences still being a thing that happened in Peanuts.

That was no barrier to HardBall reaching the top of the charts here in the UK, at a time when having an impressive looking game could get you a long way, especially coupled with a minor assist from Channel 4. More broadly, the game’s success was lasting; by the end of 1987, American magazine Computer Game Forum reported on Bob Whitehead “present[ing] San Francisco Giants outfielder Joel Youngblood with the 200,000th unit of Hardball.” Accolade followed it with a PC sequel in 1989.

  • HardBall II (Accolade, PC, 1989), screenshot from Abandonware
  • HardBall III (Accolade, PC, 1992), screenshot from Abandonware
  • HardBall 4 (Accolade, PC, 1994), screenshot from Abandonware
  • HardBall 4 (Accolade, PC, 1995), screenshot from Abandonware
  • HardBall 6 (Accolade, PC, 1998), screenshot from Abandonware

Artist Mimi Doggett went on to work for companies including Apple, Maxis and Sega, contributing art for a SimCity expansion pack and Jurassic Park on Sega CD, among many others. Bob Whitehead applied the format of HardBall to American Football in the impressive-looking 4th & Inches, which reached #13 on the UK Commodore 64 chart. He then ended up walking away from Accolade after about the same period of time as he spent at Activision. “I’ve never been a sequel guy, I just don’t like looking back much”, he later said of Hardball.

  • 4th & Inches (Accolade, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • 4th & Inches (Accolade, 1987, Commodore 64)

When asked in that Digital Press interview in 2007 about his views on the modern video games industry, Whitehead replied that it was “too dark and derivative” and “too narrowly-defined by the 14-year-old male mentality and all his not-so-honorable fantasies”. Without Doggett or Whitehead, Accolade carried on HardBall as a series and it ran until HardBall 6 on PC and PlayStation in 1999, at least in North America. None of the later games had anything like the UK impact of the original.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 01 March 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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