It serves to be selective in the games one plays. If you don’t choose your game, one will be chosen for you, you will never figure out the rules and then wonder why you’ve been scared of everything your entire life.

Today’s topic is a small gray brick of injection-molded plastic from 1991 called “Base Wars” (full name, “Cyber Stadium Series — Base Wars”). Konami made it. Ultra Games pushed it out. It was to be the first of a “Series.” The second installment has yet to appear.

First off, let me put you in the game, because the game is the body and everything else I’m going to say is, at best, the undercarriage.

It’s the 24th century. The team owners did the math on a .250 hitter and decided that the most expensive part of baseball was, predictably, the people. So the owners replaced the players with robots and called it the Cyber League – the 24th Century, it turns out, is in many ways reminiscent of the early 1990s – and now here you are, holding the controller.

You’re pitching. Except you’re not throwing a ball, you’re firing one from a cannon where the arm used to be. Tap the button and you will likely get a soft, slow, contemptible little floater. But hold the phone! In the 21st Century version of the grand old game, to hit the ball is to surrender control of its fate. But here, that floater is yours. You can steer it. You can curl it around the strike zone like smoke off a cigarette, walk it right up to the plate and then yank it off the table, spiral it clean off the screen if you want to be an asshole. Or you hold the button down, and the robot starts to flash, and you let go, and the ball whips past the batter so fast that if it connects with him it can put a large dent in his hit points. 

You can injure a man with a pitch. You can, if you’re patient and unkind, kill him with one.

Then you’re fielding, and this is where the game first lies to you, and I respect it for this. Fielding is semi-automatic. The machine moves your fielder toward the ball for you, like a good employee, like a guardian angel, right up until it doesn’t, at which all presumed contracts become null and void. The game stops your guy three steps short of a catchable line drive and lets it drop, and you feel that specific betrayal of a system that was supposed to have you and then, at the moment that mattered, simply declined. Didn’t even try to lie about it.

And then, there’s a close play at second.

In baseball as we understand it, a close play at second is resolved by a man in black who has appointed himself the keymaster and gatekeeper of objective reality. The umpire. The neutral third party and ordained arbiter of justice. The little vortex local god who sees what you cannot and pronounces. Safe. Out. And you accept it, because to not accept it is to admit the whole thing is held together by nothing.

In “Base Wars,” there is no man in black. The screen lurches, the crowd noise drops away, and the runner and the fielder are alone together in a combat arena, and they settle it. With swords. With laser swords, because lasers are the future. The strongest weapon in the game is a laser gun so goddamn powerful that the recoil costs you your own hit points every time you fire it. You pay for the violence with yourself.

Whoever’s still standing is safe. That’s the call. That was always the call. Might.

Everyone who writes about this game calls it a dystopia. Robots, greed, blood sport, the death of the pastime – the laziest possible take. I want to gently take the dystopia away from you because it’s a comforting fantasy, and you have yet to earn the blanket today. 

“Base Wars” is the only honest baseball simulator game ever made.

Because the umpire was always the lie. The neutral, chimerical third party who sees the truth and hands it down has never been real. Every institution you’ve ever submitted a close call to was, underneath the costume, two parties, a few arcane rituals, and the question of who’s still standing. The umpire is the polite fiction we drape over the cockfight so we can keep eating peanuts. 

“Base Wars” just takes off the Groucho glasses. It looks at the national pastime, the pastoral, the field of dreams, your dead father playing catch in the corn, and says, No, you’ll fight for the base like you’ve always actually been fighting, and we will let the children watch.

That’s less the future getting worse than the present getting honest.

To paraphrase Bataille (and to a lesser extent Shel Silverstein), the sun gives and gives and asks for nothing back. The fatal error of an economy is to believe accumulation is rational, much less the whole point. There is always a surplus. The surplus has to go somewhere. It gets gloriously set on fire or it gets spent catastrophically, but spent it gets. The accursed share.

Watch what you do with money in “Base Wars.” You win games. Winning gives you funds. And what do the funds buy? Not security. Not even a pension and a Ring camera. Surely not an adorable little bungalow off the orbital stadium for your robot to retire to. The funds buy more weapons. Cooler ones. You accumulate, between games, in the shop, purely so you can transmute your arsenal back into spectacular destruction at the next contested base. The internal economic engine serves naught but a more lavish, more sold-out, more violent finale. You bank to burn. The closer is packed because it’s where the most expensive deaths happen, and who wants to miss that?

That’s not a glitch in the worldbuilding. That’s the truest thing the game knows.

This piece is in Recommend If You Like The Baseball Issue Summer 2026. You can find physical copies in bars, cafes and stores in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The newspaper is available for purchase here. 

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