BASEBALL HEROES

» see konami.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Konami described BASEBALL HEROES in its own catalogue as a baseball trading-card and online-versus mass video game, which is a mouthful that does describe the thing accurately. A big central cabinet sat in a Japanese arcade with smaller terminals around it. In front of each screen was a reader with ten lanes in it, and you laid physical cards down in those lanes to field your team. Play a game and the machine printed you another card and dropped it out.

The cards were not decoration. They carried players from the twelve Nippon Professional Baseball clubs under a proper license, with official records supplied by a Tokyo statistics firm, and the approval line on every cabinet named thirteen franchise ballparks. The catalogue opened in November 2005 with more than four hundred different players in it, and every edition after that added hundreds more. The team you could field grew too, from twenty-five players to forty-five over the ten years.

It ran on e-AMUSEMENT, Konami's arcade network, and it was the first title there to use the e-AMUSEMENT PASS as the card you tapped to get in. Ten editions shipped between 2005 and 2014, one most years, each one replacing the last on the same hardware. The last was BASEBALL HEROES 2014, which went into arcades on 1 August of that year. No eleventh edition was ever made.

~ the case file ~

~ nothing played after that ~

On 27 February 2015 Konami posted an important notice giving the end as 29 June plus the following 04:59, which is how a Japanese arcade writes the small hours of the next morning. The June notices resolve it to the calendar date most people would use: 30 June 2015, at 4:59 in the morning. Four months and three days of warning.

The notice then said something that almost no arcade shutdown says, and said it twice, in red. After the cut-off none of the games would be playable at all. Not reduced to a local mode, not merely stripped of its rankings. Konami spelled out that it would make no difference whether the cabinet was still connected to e-AMUSEMENT or whether you put a PASS in at all. The machines were built to stop on a date, and on that date they stopped.

That is worth sitting with, because the usual arcade ending is the opposite. A network dies and the cabinet keeps running in some diminished form, surviving as a worse version of itself. This one was not left running in any form.

~ what the machine gave you ~

So the strange residue of BASEBALL HEROES is that the physical half is fine. Ten years of printed cards are sitting in boxes and sleeves all over Japan, in perfect condition, showing real players with real numbers on them. What is gone is the only machine that could read them.

Konami did build a successor eventually. BASEBALL COLLECTION arrived on 25 September 2018, three years later, and your old cards did not work in it and nothing carried over. That one lasted until 28 February 2023.

~ a page still being renewed ~

The companion website outlived the game by a month and was shut on 31 July 2015 at ten in the morning, which Konami also announced in advance. Except that it was not quite shut. The address still answers today, eleven years on, serving a few kilobytes of empty frame with the BASEBALL HEROES 2014 title on it and the baseball league's approval text underneath, and nothing inside it at all. Its copyright notice is dated 2026.

The distance from here is not the usual one about a Japanese store or a region lock. There was no download to miss. The product was a cabinet in a room, fed with a Japan-only arcade currency, and what it sold you was a piece of cardboard with a Japanese baseball player on it that you had to be standing there to receive.

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