Baseball (Intellivision video game)
1980 multiplayer sports video game from Mattel

Baseball (originally released as Major League Baseball) is a baseball video game produced by Mattel and released for its Intellivision console in 1980. As the best-selling game in the console's history, with more than a million copies sold, Baseball put players in control of a nine-man baseball team competing in a standard nine-inning game. When first released, Mattel obtained a license from Major League Baseball, though the only trademarked item used is the MLB logo on the box art. No official team names or player names are in the game. It was later released by the INTV Corporation as Big League Baseball.
Gameplay
The game consists of nine innings on a simplified baseball diamond. The team that scores the most runs wins.
Player 1 is always the visiting team and bats at the top of the innings, with Player 2 as the home team and batting at the bottom of the innings. The pitching player selects a pitch by pushing the controller in one of eight cardinal directions, each representing a different speed and direction. The batting player then attempts to hit the ball into play and reach the base, so that subsequent batters can move to home plate and thus score a run.
“Baseball (Intellivision video game)” enters the record as 1980 multiplayer sports video game from Mattel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Baseball, Intellivision and video can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4866420. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baseball (Intellivision video game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.