After well-liked arcade video games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Halfway Video games jumped into the house console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball recreation franchise “MLB Slugfest” for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. However at instances it was nearly a parody of baseball, together with announcers filling the lengthy hours of airtime with weird, rambling conversations. (“I learn right this moment that kitchen utensils are gonna harm extra folks tonight than lifting heavy objects in the course of the day…”)
Now former Halfway Video games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Main League Baseball. (“Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there something higher? We have been speaking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I suppose that’s…”) The nonprofit Video Sport Historical past Basis revealed the textual content of their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that had been really recorded however by no means used within the ultimate recreation. (“Having fun with some smoked whale meat up right here within the sales space right this moment…”)
Their BlueSky submit with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and a pair of,400 reposts, with one commenter questioning if the weird (and unapproved) conversations had been “a part of the tactic the place you embody overtly inappropriate content material to make the stuff you really need to hold appear extra acceptable.” However the Basis’s library director thinks the voice actors had been simply going wild. “We talked with Mark on our podcast and it seems like they simply did quite a lot of improv and bought carried away.” He added later that the sport’s producer “would give them prompts and so they’d run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports activities radio and comedy, so that they got here up with wild nonsense like this.”
The gaming web site Aftermath notes the Basis additionally has an archive web page for all the opposite sound information on the CD. Possibly it is the final word tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years in the past some followers of the sport shared their recollections on Reddit…
“The primary time my buddy tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we had been freaking out. Each recreation shortly advanced into making an attempt to get our hitters to cost the mound.”
“I simply remembered you could possibly additionally kick the shit out of the fielder close to your base if he bought too shut. Man that recreation was superior.”
“Each time somebody bought on base we’d run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good instances.”
Six years after the launch of the franchise, Halfway Video games declared chapter.
