In February, March and April, ‘MLB The Show 23’ rolled out an animated video series called ‘Storylines’ to tease the latest iteration of the game and to celebrate and educate fans about the history of the Negro Leagues by introducing a playable new mode allowing gamers to step into the cleats of some of the biggest Negro League stars like Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige.
Launched to leverage the 2023 MLB season and developed via a new multi-year partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (based in Kansas City, Missouri), the initiative invited gamers and fans to celebrate the Negro Leagues, play as some of their legendary stars and learn about racism in sport.
The goals of the museum tie-up is to align the gaming title’s values to those of the museum in order to ‘educate, enlighten and inspire by celebrating the rich history of the Negro Leagues’.
The launch content rolled out in the first week of February with creative building awareness that the new ‘MLB The Show 23’ includes Negro League stars and gameplay options. The digital video series, which told the stories of eight Negro League heroes, mixed animation with real footage of campaign narrator and museum President Bob Kendrick who delivers video vignettes with historical background.
The software developer team recreated six Negro League stadiums – including Kansas City’s Muehlebach Field and Chicago’s South Side Park – and the fans in the stands reflect the spectators as they were – unsegregated.
While each player segment is paired with a short film and the new mode will remain as a permanent game feature and will incorporate additional athletes and history in forthcoming game iterations.
Films included ‘The First Night Baseball Games’ and ‘Who Are The Kansas City All Nations?’
Like the MLB’s own animated series about the Negro Leagues – which ran from the 1920s through to the early 1950s – the video game experience is educational as well as entertaining and presented in documentary style.
After each player watches a short video about one of the eight players, they dive into the game and play as them: complete with wearing Negro League uniforms, playing in Negro League stadiums in front of period-specific crowds (including many wearing their church-going best clothes on Sundays).
“The Negro Leagues are an important part of not only baseball and Black history, but American history. So, it’s a no-brainer that they should be included in an officially licensed MLB video game,” said Sony Interactive Entertainment Product Development Communications and Brand Strategist Ramone Russell. “The tricky part was how we introduce Negro League baseball and its stories of triumph over adversity in an appropriate celebratory manner.”
Russell also commented that music helped set the foundation for the project and Marvin Gaye’s ‘Inner City Blues’ set the project’s tone and gave it a soul.
Comment
It’s enough of a challenge to emulate real life in sports video gameplay and combining that with thoughtful, engaging race-related history lessons is surely even tougher.
But MLB The Show has embraced the brief, balanced the two parts of the challenge and produced something powerful that is both entertaining and inspiring as well as educational and enlightening.
The project uses the new MLB season and the latest iteration of MLB The Show as a gateway for a younger generation to learn about a partly forgotten strand of US history.
‘MLB The Show’ is MLB’s official video game series created and produced by San Diego Studio (a development team that is part of PlayStation Studios).
The official trailer for the latest iteration of the game dropped on 28 March.
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