Intellivision World Series Baseball
Cover art
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| Developer(s) | Mattel |
|---|---|
| Publisher(s) | Mattel |
| Designer(s) |
Don Daglow Eddie Dombrower |
| Engine | Proprietary |
| Platform(s) | Intellivision |
| Release date(s) |
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| Genre(s) | Sports (Baseball) |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball is a baseball sports game (1983), designed by Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower and published by Mattel for the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System. IWSB was one of the first sports games to use multiple camera angles and present a three-dimensional (as opposed to two-dimensional) perspective. The title marked the beginning of the end of board game style single-screen or scrolling playfield games. It was also the first statistics-based baseball simulation game on a video game console; all prior console baseball games were arcade-style recreations of the sport.
The game's full formal title (due to licensing requirements) was Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball. It was typically shortened to World Series Baseball in use to differentiate it from the prior Mattel baseball game.
Although IWSB was the first home sports game that showed the action in three dimensions, the underlying mathematical models were not three-dimensional due to the very restricted available RAM on Intellivision.
Replacing a fixed top-down camera with multiple field-level cameras also allowed the game to show fly balls for the first time in a console baseball game, with a ball-sized shadow tracing the ball's path when it was off-screen above the field of view. All prior console games showed only ground balls, since the baseball field was laid out to fit the TV screen, much like a pinball game.
In the early 1980s, video games were based on models established either by coin-op games' scrolling playfields, or board games' static background images. The screen was either a stable field on which characters moved, or a top-down (sometimes angled) display that scrolled horizontally, vertically or both ways across a larger virtual image. These restrictions were created by the limited memory size of early video game consoles, where a single screen would use up much of the RAM storage space available in a machine, and small video game cartridges that held only 4K (later 8K or 16K) of ROM memory.
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