Major League Baseball (1980 & 1983)
Developed at APh during 1979, Major League Baseball came out in 1980 and went on to become the best selling Intellivision cartridge, with 1,085,700 shipped as of June 4, 1983.
After Mattel Electronics went out of business, INTV Corp. dropped the name “Major League” and the MLB logo rather than pay licensing, and just went with the name “Baseball.” Then, they changed the name of the game to “Super Series Big League Baseball.” The crowd roars as the nine man home team sprints out onto the field. Then you and your opponent use all the tricks in the book to score the winning run. You control all the action – balls and strikes, hit and run, double plays and stolen bases. And it’s not over until the last out of the ninth inning!
World Series Major League Baseball followed in 1983, published by Mattel for the Intellivision Entertainment Computer System. IWSB was the first video game of any kind to use multiple camera angles, and the first sports game presented in a 3D display. 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. Replacing a fixed top-down camera with multiple field-level cameras also allowed the game to show fly balls for the first time in any baseball game, with a ball-sized shadow tracing the ball’s path when it was off-screen above the field of view. All prior games showed only ground balls, since the baseball field was laid out to fit the TV screen.
All the iterations of APH baseball had a similar look. Watch the gameplay: