Story of Broken Bat Baseball
Table of Contents
In the Olden Days
The Genesis of a Baseball Simulation
The Rise of the Online Game
Broken Bat Today
In the Olden Days
Before computers were even common place, people strived for a baseball games that allowed them to manage their own teams and provided them with the thrill of competing against friends and advisories. People created games with cards and dice and Strat-O-Matic baseball was invented and entertain children and adults for generations. Later in 1980, in La Rotisserie Française restaurant in New York City, Daniel Okrent created a fantasy game based on 8 simple baseball statistics. He called the game Rotisserie Baseball and it became wildly popular, because it allowed people to draft real Major League players and operated their very own baseball franchise.
The Genesis of a Baseball Simulation
The story of Broken Bat goes a long way back. Before the internet was popular, when the computer revolution was in still young, the original Broken Bat game was a simple baseball simulation running on an IBM XT. In 1984 and relatively simple game called Turbo Baseball was coded in Pascal and ran on a computer that would be considered an antique by today's standards. The game pitted two fantasy baseball teams against each other and logged season statistics for each team and player.
Eventually, Pascal became passé and the program migrated to C and eventually C++. With each iteration, it became a little more sophisticated and a little more realistic. However, it always remained a PC based two person game.
The Rise of the Online Game
In 2009, the internet had matured and given rise to MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) like Hattrick and others. Turbo Baseball was transformed from a two person game a single computer, to an internet based game with hundreds of team managers. In addition, managers now acquired new players, trained them and held them for more than a single season. Graphics were introduced and the creation of the Casey mascot was introduced.
Broken Bat Today
Today, Broken Bat has successfully completed over twenty full length seasons and has over 650 active users. We have a very involved community of users, with the site receiving over 25,000 visits per month and in excess of 35,000 forum posts. And Broken Bat remains both free to play and free of advertising!