Restoring a missing piece of history with MLB: The Show's Negro Leagues

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This year's iteration of Sony's MLB: The Show will be the first time the baseball title features the Negro Leagues.

Created due to racial segregation within the MLB (and America as a whole), the Negro Leagues were home for Black and Latin American professionals to play from 1920 until 1950.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, San Diego Studio's product development communications and MLB: The Show's brand strategist Ramone Russell talks us through the journey to bring this missing piece of baseball history to the game.

"Whenever we would start doing press [for MLB: The Show], I would always get the question, when are we going to do Negro Leagues?" he explains. "Somebody would ask, and the answer would always be, 'It's something that we think about all the time [but need to] figure out the right way to do it'."

Russell notes that including the Negro Leagues wouldn't have been possible with technology from previous console generations, due to the need to present historical context and information in the right way, as well as authentically recreating the players, stadiums and crowds.

So the first question wasn't for lack of trying but for how to approach the project.

"If you wait for perfect conditions, you can't get anything done," he adds.

Telling the stories for these players presented multiple challenges for San Diego Studio.

"There's agency in video games where you can make choices," Russell explains. "But if you're telling historical stories about underrepresented communities and Jim Crow or the Civil Rights Movement, it gets real dicey, real quick. There's a reason why you haven't seen any video games made about [that era]."

Russell