The Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance

So, outside of baseball, I am a bit of a retro gaming enthusiast. I don't own tons of hardware, but I like anything from the Atari/Coleco/Intellivision/original NES era of the late-70s to early-90s... and Youtube is great for having a bunch of channels, podcasts and news shows on the subject.

One guy that I follow on there is "The Gaming Historian". He is a young video creator and history buff who self-funds, self-produces and self-narrates a string of half-hour videos about the history of video gaming.

To my surprise, he made a feature on Nintendo's complicated attempt to buy the Seattle Mariners! You guys should really check it out!

Considering this was made by one guy, alone, at home, and with no funding, it is an incredibly high quality production!

Foreign Owned : Nintendo & The Seattle Mariners

Thanks Reg!

I moved out to Seattle around the time that Hiroshi Yamauchi passed away and this was all over the news at the time. The ownership group has kept the roots of the team in Seattle despite the lack of recent success.

Here's some interesting articles about the ownership transfer:
http://m.mariners.mlb.com/news/article/ ... ty-owners/
http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mari ... ries-goal/

If not for Griffey Jr., Big Unit, and Edgar Martinez, the Mariners might have been forced to move again since the King Dome was falling apart in the 90s. Beautiful Safeco Field was built and financing put together in and around the time series that they defeated the Yankees in the 1995 NLDS. This helped public perception such that the people of Seattle and the surrounding County voted for a sales tax raise to build the new stadium. The fact that they barely ever sell out makes it a great place to see a game if you like the opposing team!

Great video. Thanks for posting.

I still have my Atari 2600, but sadly sold my original NES. My favorite gaming system of the 80's was my Commodore 64, though.

fhomess wrote:I still have my Atari 2600, but sadly sold my original NES. My favorite gaming system of the 80's was my Commodore 64, though.

That is super cool! I grew up with a Commodore 64 too, actually. I remember as a kid trying to figure out the programming language and fiddled for hours to make a game or an image (or, well, anything) work .... then saving the data on that goofy cassette player.

Did you have any games for it? We didn't have the floppy drive add-on so sadly I missed all that fun.

Trendsetters wrote:

fhomess wrote:I still have my Atari 2600, but sadly sold my original NES. My favorite gaming system of the 80's was my Commodore 64, though.

That is super cool! I grew up with a Commodore 64 too, actually. I remember as a kid trying to figure out the programming language and fiddled for hours to make a game or an image (or, well, anything) work .... then saving the data on that goofy cassette player.

Did you have any games for it? We didn't have the floppy drive add-on so sadly I missed all that fun.

We had tons of games for the Commodore. On the order of 200+, all on floppies. There wasn't much in the way of piracy prevention in those days, although I was young enough that I can honestly say I don't actually know where they came from. A few were original versions, but I don't have any idea if we bought them or they were given to us. My favorite was Impossible Mission, where you had to explore an underground complex owned by a super villain to find puzzle pieces of a password to enter his secret lair before a time limit expired. The complex rooms were guarded by robots who had varying levels of AI. Touch any and they'd electrocute you. Some would just stand there while others would hunt you down and/or try to zap you. There was a sequel to this where the puzzle pieces were music files and the guards were even more varied. The emulators I tried to play on later couldn't handle the music right.

I tried to write some stuff in BASIC, too, but programming held little interest to me then.