 In 1988 Atlus signed on to develop an " official " Major League Baseball game for the Nintendo Entertainment System , which would be a first for that particular console . In 1987 Tengen had released R.B.I. Baseball for the NES , which contained a Major League Baseball Players Association license , but no endorsement from Major League Baseball itself . This meant that , while the players were named in this version , the team names and logos were absent and replaced by generic place references such as Boston or St. Louis . An earlier version for the console , entitled Baseball was released in 1985 and contained no endorsement from either organization . American company LJN agreed to be the publisher and David Rolfe was brought on board as the game 's programmer . Rolfe had previously been a publisher with Activision and had been a chief contributor to the foundations of the Intellivision . 
