A star pitcher comes to life from the flames. Hellmouth swallows the state of Utah. The crows descend on Tastykake Stadium and peck the sleazy Jessica Telefon out of the peanut shell. This is Blaseball, an absurdist baseball simulator that captured the funniest corners of the internet when it launched in the summer of 2020.
Developed by indie studio The Game Band, Blaseball arrived at a moment of global isolation and fear. So naturally, many extreme online gamers with a lot of anxiety and too much time welcomed the distraction and developed a large, cooperative fan community. There is an international grunge band with dozens of members; an hour-long original rock opera about sibling sacrifice; Blaseball News Network, which posts in-depth analysis of splorts (yes, Blaseball is a splort); Society for Data Analytics and Research; Houston Spies fans holding seminars on unionism; and of course thousands of fanfics.
Blaseball is inherently cooperative, like a vaguely sports-themed version of Twitch Plays Pokémon or the massively multiplayer asynchronous Dungeons & Dragon Campaign.
Game Band also developed the more “traditional” puzzle game “Where Cards Fall” on PC and Nintendo Switch, but Blaseball is more of a role-playing game with randomized elements than a video game. Online Blaseball League teams such as the Charleston Shoe Thieves, Ohio Worms or Canada Moist Talkers face off in text-based simulated baseball-like games. But passively watching these updates isn’t the fun part—interacting with fans is what affects the course of the season. You participate by betting on games with in-game currency, voting in weekly polls that allow fans to dictate the storyline of the game, or helping your favorite team renovate their stadium (Go Philly Pies!). One stadium mod, for example, is the “Ball Pit”, which declares that “every ball hit in this ball pit is a 5x foul.”
The game racked up 1.75 million plays in August 2020, its first full month online. Web traffic almost doubled in one month. It’s been more than two years since Blaseball’s explosive debut, but inside The Game Band, the game’s immediate success was an insurmountable challenge for the small, under-resourced studio.
“When we started doing Blaseball, there were five or six of us,” said Sam Rosenthal, founder and creative director of The Game Band. “Talk about unsustainable. We made it as a quick and dirty prototype that blew up.
As Blaseball gets closer to its long-awaited return, we spoke to the team behind the game about how they plan to turn the viral hit into a viable business.
Rebuilding Blaseball
After a lot of beta testing and trying to figure out how to keep up with its suddenly popular game, Blaseball went on a long hiatus (“siesta”) in the summer of 2021, with a few short tests remaining. During this time, The Game Band raised $3 million for Blaseball, allowing the project to increase its staff size fivefold. Read also : How to read the Game of Thrones books in order. The now-remote studio finally has a full-fledged technical team, bringing in Jesse Raccio as director of engineering.
“We’re actually writing style sheets now, which is unheard of for Blaseball,” joked Joel Clark, the game’s design lead. “During the day, it was literally just the three of us talking.”
Raccio joined The Game Band in August 2021, just as Blaseball’s second era, known as the Expansion Era, was coming to an end.
“Blaseball was on my radar for a while, but I wouldn’t have considered myself a superfan. I definitely didn’t understand what I was getting myself into,” Raccio told TechCrunch. two weeks when everything was falling apart.” Blaseball ended the expansion era as well as the game’s beta phase, canceling the existing story and sending the league into a black hole. It was a plot-important excuse for the game developers to throw everything away and start from scratch.
The studio then hired a team of four full-time community managers who also handle quality assurance. Many of these new hires—both in fan-facing roles and in engineering—joined The Game Band from Blaseball fans.
Blaseball’s extended team took more than a year to update the game they’ve been building from the ground up.
“We’ve essentially redone everything, from the core game simulation to the entire Blaseball UI,” Rosenthal told TechCrunch. “It’s built in a way that allows us to be as fast as before, but now on three different platforms, with the mobile app coming out for iOS and Android.”
It wouldn’t be Blaseball if the rebuilding of the game didn’t come with its own flavor of chaos.
“Sometimes our techs last 45 minutes because we’re all just tearing up about some beautiful thing that happened on a SIM card that broke so perfectly that we just jump over it,” Raccio said. During recent internal testing, the team ran into a bug that turned games into continuous extra innings with neither team able to get on base or score. “Every day the engineering team got more and more excited about this game never ending. And we started posting logs of what was happening on the sim and it just turned into pure madness for several days.
These simulated games should usually last less than an hour, so a three-day game won’t interrupt it in real-time Blaseball. But it’s not too common in a game where you can perform “unruns” that give you negative points. And let’s not even get started on the fractional runs that can end up with results like 10.7-2.5.
Blaseball is reminiscent of baseball, but with a lot more mayhem and … death (players can burn – believe it or not, Blaseball is actually a horror game). But it’s also just pure fun. At one point, fans were able to transform their favorite team’s stadium by adding a “secret base.” If you can run to first or second base, why not sneak? In practice, this stadium innovation allowed runners on second base to randomly slide into a secret base, then suddenly re-emerge later in the game, putting pressure on the opposing pitcher. Plus, they’ve gone by names like PolkaDot Patterson, Nerd Pacheco, and Jaylen Hotdogfingers, because why not.
“And on the flip side, the games are in triple digits right now — it’s like 126 to 85,” Clark said.
These simulation glitches can be internally funny, but now that Blaseball actually has a tech team, The Game Band hopes fans won’t find too many glitches to exploit like they did when the game started. Some of Blaseball’s most iconic moments came from technical glitches that resulted from the game’s sudden popularity, which were turned into plot points by overzealous fans.
During Blaseball’s first month online, some sneaky fans hacked the game – it was a prototype, remember? – and figured out how to give yourself unlimited peanuts, a form of in-game currency. It was almost like the fans were testing the quality control of the game in real time, only the product had already shipped. This violation could have broken the game, so Blaseball ended the game and threw a giant evil peanut at the site, admonishing the thieves for committing peanut fraud and bad “splotsmanity”.
But Blaseball incorporated the incident into the plot, and from then on, the main antagonist of Blaseball’s first era – the Age of Discipline – was a terrifying peanut known as the shell.
Clark still wants fans to interact with Blaseball as they see fit, ideally without ruining the game and overturning the entire peanut economy. Now that The Game Band is the right size for itself, these hacks should ideally happen less often.
“How can we anticipate how it’s going to break, and how can we plan more for it to be ready to take advantage of things that happen in that direction?” Clark asked. “Now that we have the tech team, we probably won’t have infinite peanuts, but I’m sure [fans] will find something.”
Blaseball moved so fast, even fans got burnt out
By the end of the Discipline era, the great Shelled One had settled down and The Game Band took several months off to regroup and prepare for the next era of their unlikely hit. So many new features were added to the game – weather conditions like Jazz and Glitter, a school of split players into another realm, and a concession stand run by a giant talking squid – that it was hard for fans to keep up. On the same subject : Free video games to download now. In the real world, it was March 2021 and life for fans was getting a little busier than it was at the height of the lockdown.
Even for casual fans, the game became difficult to follow. And for the fan creators who made the game’s community feel so special, Blaseball began to feel more like a devotion than a source of joy.
When Blaseball returned to its expansion era, Beck Barnes created the podcast This Week in Blaseball with gaming journalist Giovanni Colantonio, but found it nearly impossible to recap everything that happened in each season of Blaseball.
“I got burned out really bad. If I wanted to keep my podcast alive with that original gimmick (a one-episode recap of one season of Blaseball), I had to really think about how to scale it back,” Barnes told TechCrunch. “This kind of long-form fan content is a marathon, not a sprint, and it can be important to create momentum.”
The game band quickly realized what a problem they had and hired YouTuber “The Anchor,” who posts comprehensive yet comical season recaps.
But the game still seemed difficult to follow, especially for fans who weren’t connected to the official Blaseball Twitter and Discord.
“I think the reason a lot of people got burned out on Blaseball is because the sport was just so much, so fast, especially in the expansion era,” said Cat, who runs the Blaseball News Network. “Fans get emotionally attached and ready for art and [fanfiction] for a new player within hours of joining the team, but they’re devastated when that player gets burned.”
On the one hand, it speaks to Blaseball’s influence that the fans care so much about it that they got burned out on making fan content. But fandom shouldn’t be stressful either. So The Game Band has made it a priority to make the game more manageable for casual fans.
“One of the main things we’re trying to do is bring a lot of conversation into the game that happens outside of the game,” Rosenthal said. “We don’t want you to have to follow us on Twitter to figure out how you can influence the game or join Discord and stuff like that.”
Again, Rosenthal didn’t want to share more details about these updates, but he did say the app won’t have a live chat feature.
“We saw that the vast majority of our fans who really loved the game and stuck with it were people who joined Discord and are active in the community in some way,” he added. “But when we looked at the number of people who signed up to play the game and the people who actually joined Discord, there was a very small number of people who were on Discord and saw what was really so special about the game. The community nature of Blaseball.
At the time of writing, Blaseball’s Discord server has over 28,000 members.
“We felt that if we didn’t take a step back and make it a lot better, Blaseball would continue on his current trajectory, which could be really exciting for his existing fan base, but he’s never going to get out of it, and we don’t want that to happen.” would be,” said Rosenthal.
My big project over the Blaseball break has been to pull all the players who have been on the Mints roster (and one player who could have been). Please click on the picture, it’s pretty big and Twitter doesn’t show it all! #blaseball #kcbm pic.twitter.com/phA0f8J38E
— Numbersninja – COMMISSIONS CLOSED (@Nestlenightmare) May 5, 2022
The Internet League is kind of sort of almost back
Blaseball aren’t quite ready to reveal when they’ll be making their grand comeback. See the article : 10 Most Expensive Video Games Ever Sold. But they’re close enough to being ready that they’ve decided to talk to the press about what they’ve been up to over the past year.
“The same teams that we were left with that we knew from our previous league will carry over into the future,” Clark said. “And story-wise, we’re picking up where we left off, but we did it so we could start a little fresh. So we’re taking a new direction, but most of it will still feel very familiar to existing fans.
“I imagine what a lot of fans are probably expecting is something more in line with the early days of Blaseball, but a little bit better,” added Rosenthal. “But I think it’s more of a reboot than a direct sequel.”
Game Band is deliberately taking its time with new additions to Blaseball to avoid the “crunch,” a stressful period in game creation when developers pull unsustainable hours to meet a deadline. But as an indie studio, developers can choose their own deadlines. Fans are eager to return to Blaseball, but mostly they realize that the longer they wait, the better the game will be.
“I’m excited to see how the developers are going to fix some of the issues with the Blaseball beta, especially the crazy speed that was so characteristic of the game,” Cat told TechCrunch. Still, fans feel nostalgic for Blaseball’s glorious first era.
“I miss interacting with people and seeing all the wonderful and silly ways it brings people together,” Barnes told TechCrunch. “One of the great things about Blasball is that you get so many ways to do it. It really is one of those things that has something for everyone.
Blaseball will also be fundamentally different in its upcoming iteration as it will be accessible via iOS and Android mobile apps. Rosenthal said the apps are designed to allow for passive play — you get push notifications for key events — but as always, Blaseball isn’t designed to be addictive. He envisions users logging in for a few minutes at a time, interacting with games, and moving on.
For the first time, fans can make in-game purchases, helping The Game Band make a profit.
“One hard line we take is that nothing you can pay for can affect the actual game,” Rosenthal said. “If you happen to be wealthy, you can’t spend money to make sure the Kansas City Breath Mints win a championship.” And of course, in typical, secretive Blaseball fashion, Rosenthal declined to elaborate on those monetization plans.
Despite spending a year completely overhauling the game, The Game Band wants Blaseball to retain the same feel it’s always had – a simple yet deeply clever game full of surprising yet rewarding twists and turns. And most importantly, it conjured up a goofy, enthusiastic fan community at a time when blissful silliness seemed so elusive.
“It’s a game that came out during a pandemic when we were all separated from each other. And I think the game design itself is very reflective of that,” Rosenthal said. “The game is about bringing people together through chaos and absurdity and a lot of laughter.”
