New RBI Baseball Game Returning in Time for Spring Training

The classic RBI Baseball game series is making an appearance again after almost 20 years absent from video game consoles, with the last release being in 1995, titled RBI ’95. Major League Baseball Advanced Media today announced that RBI Baseball 14 will make its debut in the spring.

MLBAM is a limited partnership of the Major League Baseball owners focusing on the internet and interactive branch of the league. The company is responsible for the web presence for the league as well as the 30 Major League Baseball club websites. News, standings and other related sports news is managed through the company. MLBAM also owns and operates MLB Radio and BaseballChannelTV.

While the company has never developed an interactive game to date, the press release stated the game is being developed by MLBAM for “multi-platform distribution across current and next generation consoles and smartphones and tablets.”

The original series debuted in 1986 in Japan as Family Stadium for the Family Computer (Famicom), the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game was ported by Tengen, the home console division of Atari Corporation, for the NES in 1988.

RBI Baseball was unique in that It featured the first license deal with the Major League Baseball Players Association, allowing for names like Andre Dawson, Mark McGwuire and José Conseco to be used in the game. Each player also had their own strengths such as Nolan Ryan being one of the fastest pitchers in RBI Baseball. The game was not licensed by the MLB itself, so teams were listed simply by the city names such as Detroit, Minnesota and Boston.

The series spawned 8 sequels, 7 of which were released in the United States. The latest game in the series will be titled RBI Baseball 14, and is slated to release in spring 2014. The only other MLB-licensed game series will be developed by Sony as 2K has opted not to renew their contract for the MLB 2K series.