World Championship Baseball

Intellivision vs Atari

In the early 1980's, before the video game crash, Intellivision invested alot of marketing money in attacking the Atari 2600. They used the superior graphics as the foundation of these attacks. During this time Intellivision was in second place in terms of market share. They continued to internally push the limits of their cartridges and managed to double the memory size of their carts, from 4k to 8k. Intellivision developers felt the Atari pressure and begin to look at their catalog of games and determined they can improve their exisiting games and release them faster then they could develop new games that leveraged this new memory size. It was a no brainer to begin work on their most popular game, Major League Baseball.

Improvements

One of the first games to be a modified version of a previous released game. The basics of the game remains largely the same. The gameplay has been improved greatly with some minor graphical improvements.

Gameplay

• New one player mode. The previous game was only two players
• Base runners slide into base
• When running to first after a base hit, you overrun first base just like they do in the big leagues
• Balls can now be hit in the air and the fielder can catch them for outs. Previous game all the batted balls were grounders

Graphics

• The infield is a little more rounder.
• The infield dirt is brown and not grey
• When the runner is sliding into base a small dust cloud is displayed
• When the ball is in the air the shadow of the ball is displayed.