Tell us about your first

[Andy]

Originally Posted by NoOne

HA! i remember the graphics being better.. maybe it was a different release

Yeah, I think it went up to 5. Looks like that was the first version.

[Westheim]

Uhm, OOTP?

Because it took all the frustration out of PureSim Baseball, which kept eating my leagues.

[Jerry Helper]

Originally Posted by BusterKing

Hardball

http://www.mobygames.com/game/hardball


Also played ALL the other games, but now only playing OOTP for hours every day. Nice to be retired.

I loved playing hardball 5 as a kid. They had a league of legendary teams complete with old stadiums. Getting to see the old stadiums is so much fun for me, I think the 3D models have added so much to the experience!

[MizzouRah]

Originally Posted by canaveral

Negamco. Took it on a family trip to Alaska where I set up an entire replay of an NL season. Had my friends vote for MVP and Cy Young.

Hardball on the C64... I still remember a few of the players names.. Bautista, Lefty something.. haha..

[Jerry Helper]

Anyone else ever play this parker brothers game? It wasn't really a complex sim, but you could play modern (80s guys haha) or hall of famers and could manage the game via buttons. I used to keep stats of my games on paper

[Eugene Church]

Got started way back in the 50s... board game by APBA... you had to create your own scorecards and keep you own statistics by hand.

On rainy days in our neighborhood, all the ballplayers would head over to Buddy Dansey's house... he had the APBA board game.

However, In good weather, we were always at the playground playing ball... sunup to sundown.

Life was really nifty in the 50s.

[Beechnut]

This was probably the first baseball toy I owned, a very different Computer Baseball than noted earlier in the thread. It was a fun upright pinball version.



My first baseball sim/video game was RBI '93 for Sega Genesis. You could play as any team with 1992 rosters and it had real player names. You could also play as any division winner going back to (I think) 1984 as well as the all-star teams. It had a feature where you could create a team from any available player in the game, but you couldn't save the team for future plays. I did slugger teams, speed teams, highest average teams, but my favorite was creating a team of anyone who had ever played for the Red Sox using their best career season in the game. I remember being elated when Kevin Mitchell joined Boston and I could put him and his 47 HR from the 1989 All-Star team on my Red Sox!

[BaseballMan]

I think the Lance Haffner baseball game on C-64 was my first computer baseball sim game.
Then i went to Earl Weaver II, Pro League Baseball, APBA Baseball for Windows, Old Time baseball, High Heat and then i found ootp 2.
I liked them all but ootp would be my favorite. Followed by Baseball for Windows.
Earl Weaver II was fun because i was basically buying my first computer to get it to run.
I like MLB the show but i don't have a PS4 right now and im not sure that would count.

[The_Offspring187]

I played Earl Weaver briefly on my uncle's computer back in the early 90s but never got to play it much. The first "sim" I could say I got hooked on was Hardball 6, simming seasons until years in the future the guys who retired reentered the draft as younger versions of themselves. I still can't remember if this was on like PlayStation 1 or SNES.

My first true sim experience was with Baseball Mogul. Seeing OOTP get compared to Mogul in a review back when the old Season Ticket Baseball came out in EBGames is what got me into the OOTP series (was that 2001 or 2002?) and I never looked back.

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[The_Offspring187]

My first true baseball game though was the original RBI Baseball on the NES.

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[zappa1]

My first? Well, she was only 16, only 16 and I loved her so........... Oh, wait. sorry. I got carried away. Um, It would be Strat-O-Matic. Loved everything about it. The cards, the charts, all of it. The best was when they went to the computer. No more tracking stats the old way. Still have those cards, today.

I liked Micro League a lot, also. That was a fun one.

[zappa1]

I'm also kind of surprised no has said High Heat. And Hardball 5 was another one I played a lot.

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by zappa1

I'm also kind of surprised no has said High Heat. And Hardball 5 was another one I played a lot.

Check my post above.

[actionjackson]

During the 1981 strike, 11 year old me found Strat-O-Matic in a local toy store. The salesman happened to be a Strat-O-Matic fanatic who was in a league with friends, and raved about having 1980 Britt Burns in his rotation. The rest as they say is history. I think I'd been messing around trying to figure out how one could create such a game, but Strat definitely hit the spot...For quite a while.

I played it into the ground, both solo and with my best friend, who was every bit the baseball nut that I was. I remember there being tantrums and tears over things being unrealistic if the dice happened to go against one or the other of us. We played long series of games (36 games for some reason), and updated the stats every three games. So much fun.

I remember my shipment of 1982 cards being picked off by Canada Customs, and having to go downtown to get them. "What's in the package son?" (Shy, stammering thirteen year old me): "It's uh...a baseball game that you play with cards and dice"..."Oh yeah!" RIP! Out come all the cards from their brown paper casing. Ugh. I was so relieved to get out of there and spent my trip home checking out that year's cards, and seeing if there were any that I thought were either too good (the rest of the league) or not good enough (my Blue Jays).

[stl jason]

micro league

started off using the teams included with the disc... then picked up the GM and stat compiler discs and really played the crap out of it... GM disc let you construct your own teams, and the stat compiler tracked their stats after each game... made it super quick and easy to make a league/run through a season (and saved a lot of paper not having to keep track of stats/etc with a pencil/notebook)....

[frankgatti23]

Hardball!. Not sure what version, but it only had 2 teams. I would keep stats in a score book and act like i was playing the entire season. I spent hours on it. I was so happy when Hardball! 5 came and had all of the teams.

Also the Classic board game in the late 80s.

[Greenbay]

The first I played (which was way before computers) was Sherco baseball. What I liked about it was the dice roll determined the location of the ball on the field. Depending on what ball park you were playing in and the wind determined whether it was a homerun. It was a little awkward to play and took longer to complete a game. Once I discovered Strat-O-Matic that became my go to game. It played much quicker, but you didn't get the quirks of different ballparks or the wind.
Once I got a computer I played Micro League until Tony LaRussa came along. My favorite of all time was High Heat.

[OmahaBaseball]

Played many different baseball games during the 80's, but it really was not until High Heat that got me hooked on baseball sims/games. This led to OOTP 4...

[jeffw3000]

My first exposure to a game with actual players was the table-top game Sports Illustrated Baseball. A friend of mine had it, and I loved it so much I went and bought it myself. Then in 1977 I discovered APBA and fell in love.

On computer, I started with APBA baseball when they came out with their computer version. I thought it was the greatest thing to be able to track stats automatically on the computer. In the 80s and 90s I tried a lot of different games on computers. My favorites consisted of APBA, Earl Weaver Baseball I and II, the Tony LaRussa games, High Heat, Sierra's FPS Baseball games and Pursue the Pennant.

In the 2000s I discovered OOTP2, and have bought every version since.

[Izz]

Hardball 6 was my first baseball game but it wasn't really what got me interested in the idea of baseball sims.

As a teenager I loved all things cricket (only natural, being born and bred in New Zealand). A friend down the road came across a game called Card Cricket. It wasn't a particularly complex game, basically needing only the board below and a deck of cards (in fact, I quickly discovered that if I copied the board to a piece of paper I just needed that and a deck of cards - in time I needed only the cards and can still recite from memory the entire board and most of the attached commentary).



So, not a complex game but we loved it, and regularly got together to play out games with teams featuring us and our friends. In time we both got our own solo leagues going, though I was way more serious about it than he was, dedicating whole exercise books to match stats and career stats. I also created rules to make it more realistic (for hitting and bowling as well as adding contracts - based on performance - salary caps, pitch conditions, etc).

This kept me going for years and I still go back to it occasionally for nostalgia's sake - though sadly I've lost the notebook with all my extra rules. I came across the game recently in a second-hand shop, actually, and quickly bought it. Now I own the game but rarely play it whereas when I was younger I played it obsessively without ever owning it.

Anyhoo, I got into that before owning a computer and before I had much of an interest in baseball (my father came from the US, so I had some exposure to the game via my grandmother who was a lifelong Dodgers fan).

Sometime later, now with computer, I discovered Hardball 6 and loved, as The_Offspring187 did, "simming seasons until years in the future the guys who retired reentered the draft as younger versions of themselves." I also found a cheat with a couple amazingly-rated free agent pitchers who had zero stamina. Quick edit of the stamina rating and suddenly, voila, instant aces.

Time passed. New computer. Hardball 6 lost to the ethers.

But I found I wanted a sports sim that combined what I had in Card Cricket (ability to create fictional teams, etc, realism) with what I'd enjoyed in Hardball 6 (baseball, managing a team over the course of many seasons). None of the newer arcade-style games could scratch that itch. My research led me to the Strat-o-matic card game. Sadly it wasn't available in New Zealand. I saved up, sent the money to my grandparents in the US and asked them to buy and post to me.

The excitement when it arrived! The excitement which dimmed when I read through the rulebook and tried to sort out all the cards and figure out weather conditions and, well, just about everything else. It was just too complicated for a guy who'd gotten used to a computer organizing things in the background. Plus, I didn't follow baseball closely so I didn't know all the players. I played perhaps 2 games - each of which took me a couple hours - before I put it up on the shelf and left it to gather dust.

For quite some time after that I didn't try to scratch that baseball itch. Until one day I thought I'd see if the Hardball series had been updated. It hadn't been. Nothing great looked available for PC so I tried some of the console baseball games but didn't enjoy them and found their career modes lacking.

Then I discovered OOTP11. It looked absolutely amazing! I bought it. And quickly found myself struggling to understand how everything worked. I could tell it was the game I was looking for but I just couldn't get my head around it. Frustrated, I deleted it.

But over the following months my mind kept going back to OOTP. Oh, the possibilities! By the time I seriously considered the game again OOTP13 was out. This time I did things sensibly. I read the manual and took my time learning the game. A little while later I joined these forums, read some dynasty reports and lurked a lot.

Now OOTP is about the only game I play. I've logged thousands of hours so far and will log thousands more. It's everything I want in a sports sim and more, and every version just gets better and better. And the approachability of the development team is just amazing.

Bring on OOTP19!