Mickey Mantle. Prince Fielder. Buster Posey. Mookie Betts. You know a baseball name when you see one, and the Super Mega Baseball (SMB) series feasts on them. Its names are deterministic quips—Hammer Longballo, Bubba Blastman, Joanna Heater—or else they tumble from your mouth like a spinning slider, swishing and landing, snap, in a catcher's mitt.
Leyla Buckberger (what a joy to say!). Huffly Buffler. Clifford Kane. Tucker Turlington. Tarzan Woodburn.
Scott Drader and Christian Zuger were, in a way, baseball names too. In 2009 they founded Metalhead Software in Victoria, the city of roughly 94,000 people on Vancouver Island, and over the next 15 years they perfected the best baseball series of all time.
Their four games, like the studio, grew with each iteration, evermore ideas clinging to a brilliant core concept: baseball, as described by awe-struck eight-year-olds on the playground the day after a big game. Back-breaking curve-balls that loop and dip like rollercoasters; 105mph fastballs that splinter bats, the shards raining over the diamond; home runs that boom like cannonballs; shortstops who leap as if from trampolines; bulbous-headed batters who sweat rivers in close games and cry when they strike out.
It is more than a caricature. Its theatrics dance upon a solid, detailed recreation of the sport and its oddities. Pitcher-batter duels are tense and unpredictable, swing timing and pitch sequences matter. Balls slice foul off the end of your bat, grounders up the middle ricochet off the pitcher's mound, wrongfooting second baseman, and sprinting fielders are more likely to drop catches than those already set up, waiting, glove outstretched. Without the need for MLB roster updates, its combination of sturdy and silly feels timeless.
And now it's all over.
Super Mega Baseball 4, the best and most complete version, launched in 2023, and fans assume it'll be the last. Drader and Zuger have left their studio and a Reddit post from the Metalhead team in 2024 said, somewhat cryptically, that the studio would "transition to something new and exciting".
Many blame EA, which bought Metalhead in 2021 for an undisclosed sum.
"EA's the worst, but it was an inevitability as soon as the contract was signed," reads one reply to that Reddit post. The most upvoted post this year on the series' subreddit simply begins: "Fuck you EA."
The truth, as I've discovered from speaking to two developers who worked on SMB, is slightly more complicated.
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