Five years ago, at E3, Nintendo had Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball in their booth. Before the company’s president dissolved the company and joined BioWare, Exile Interactive was creating a Nintendo published baseball sim for Gamecube.
What happened to it? According to Steve Snake, Senior Engineer, Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball was done. “The game was completed and passed submission but was not released,” Snake articulated on his LinkedIn profile.
Snake also elaborated on the game’s development.
Getting the game to fit in retail memory when it was taking twice that meant anything that could be done must be done – implementing on-the-fly texture compression for textures generated in game, offline texture compression/conversion to more suitable formats for other textures, rewriting any parts of code that required large tables or data structures to use less memory, optimising string storage, modifying the memory manager to attempt to create less fragmentation, and other things. As well as general bug fixing I also implemented the movie player, and wrote a streaming audio driver to simultaneously stream music/crowd noises/commentary from the game disc.
All of those fixes never saw the light of day since Nintendo delayed Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball “indefinitely” in 2005. Here’s a look at the lost Gamecube game.
