Hilarious Unused Audio From 2003 Baseball Game Rediscovered by Video Game History Foundation

After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise "MLB Slugfest" for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the long hours of airtime with bizarre, rambling conversations. ("I read today that kitchen utensils are gonna hurt more people tonight than lifting heavy objects during the day...")

Now former Midway Games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Major League Baseball. ("Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there anything better? We've been talking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I guess that is...") The nonprofit Video Game History Foundation published the text in their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that were actually recorded but never used in the final game. ("Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today...")

Their BlueSky post with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and 2,400 reposts, with one commenter wondering if the bizarre (and unapproved) conversations were "part of the tactic where you include overtly inappropriate content to make the stuff you actually want to keep seem more appropriate." But the Foundation's library director thinks the voice actors were just going wild. "We talked with Mark on our podcast and it sounds like they just did a lot of improv and got carried away." He added later that the game's producer "would give them prompts and they'd run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports radio and comedy, so they came up with wild nonsense like this."

The gaming site Aftermath notes the Foundation also has an archive page for all the other sound files on the CD. Maybe it's the ultimate tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years ago some fans of the game shared their memories on Reddit...

• "The first time my friend tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we were freaking out. Every game quickly evolved into trying to get our hitters to charge the mound."

• "I just remembered you could also kick the shit out of the fielder near your base if he got too close. Man that game was awesome."

• "You could do jump kicks into the catcher like Richie from The Benchwarmers."

• "Every time someone got on base we would run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good times."

Six years after the launch of the franchise, Midway Games declared bankruptcy.

The game is actually completely finished

[rsilvergun]

And you can play it on mame. It didn't get released because they couldn't figure out a way to make baseball profitable in the arcade.

The problem was baseball doesn't break up into easily monetizable chunks like football and especially basketball. So it's hard to get the pacing right where you're getting a user is done before ordering every few minutes. I think older arcade baseball games could be profitable because they were much simpler, usually just boiling down the home run fests. But by the 90s people expected to play a full game.

It's also possible that those older games weren't profitable but operators didn't really notice as much. I won't say that I didn't see the ball games on the floor back in the daydidn't didn't go to arcades very often. Still it was usually football in the '80s and basketball in the 90s

Re:The game is actually completely finished

[dbialac]

Check out the announcer's voice on EA sports NHL, especially at or before 2003. After 2003, EA started making it more and more serious. One was "To the spy in the audience, 'Do not trust the smiling penguin. I repeat, do not trust the smiling penguin. Good luck Mr Spy.'" Another had to do with a missing and found $1000.

Re:

[rsilvergun]

That's funny I thought they only did that in there Arcady games like NHL hits.

Baseball a boring game

[Growlley]

whose onlyfunction is to give americans an excuse for public drunkeness , as thats isthe only state it can be tolerated in.

Why do I hear....

[SirTreveyan]

Bob Uecher's voice when I read these in-game comments???

Tim Kitzrow?

[Megane]

Tim Kitzrow? Mister "Boom Shaka-Laka" from NBA Jam? Yeah, I've seen him a couple of times at classic video game events in recent years, he's quite the wild card. I can believe that there would be some crazy improv in there.