Sports Interactive expands range with Baseball title

Britsoft developer Sports Interactive continues to grow its roster of sports management titles, announcing the addition of Out of the Park Baseball to its line-up this afternoon.

As part of the deal, independent developer Out of the Park Developments has been amalgamated into Sports Interactive, with OOTP's Markus Heinsohn relocating to its Islington, London-based office, where he will contribute to a jointly produced version of the baseball management series slated for release in late 2005.

Previously Markus and his international team have released six versions of Out of the Park Baseball, and fans of such things can download a demo of version six (and buy it, for that matter) via the developer's official website.

In Out of the Park Baseball, fans of the sport can play out seasons in a virtual baseball world populated by players from the present, players from the past (courtesy of a direct link to the Baseball Archive) and even purely fictional characters created by the game, and, much like SI's flagship Football Manager series, budding managers can dabble in baseball's equivalent of the transfer market and even go up against rivals over the internet.

"Over the past couple of years we have carefully monitored and nurtured the best independent game development talent working on sports management simulations; a process which has already led to the successful integration of the Eastside Hockey team into our own," Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson commented.

"While Sports Interactive has traditionally concentrated on football, its games have always represented the state-of-the-art to those of us trying to simulate management of other sports," Heinsohn commented. And with SI expanding its range to include the likes of Eastside Hockey Manager (which Sega will publish), this probably isn't the last time the developer will branch out from its footballing roots.

Out of the Park has also produced a number of other titles in the past, including Inside The Park Baseball (an RPG in which gamers control a professional baseball player), Title Bout Championship Boxing and Title Bout Boxing Quiz, although no decision has been made yet about whether the development partners will collaborate on versions of these other titles.