Nintendo’s Baseball History: Why Ken Griffey Jr. and the Seattle Mariners Should Be Honorary Smash Bros.

By Marc Normandin | October 8, 2025 | 1:00pm

Images: Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. box art

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Nintendo’s Baseball History: Why Ken Griffey Jr. and the Seattle Mariners Should Be Honorary Smash Bros.

The Seattle Mariners made it to MLB’s postseason in 2025, which, if you aren’t a baseball fan, is not a thing that regularly happens. They had last made it to the playoffs in 2022, which was the first time that the M’s had done so since 2001. Just for a little context: one of the better players on this year’s team, Julio Rodríguez, wasn’t even a year old yet at that point. For further context of what it’s like to be a Mariners fan most years: the 2001 Mariners tied a record with 116 wins, and then lost in the playoffs before they even made it to the World Series. The franchise has existed since 1977, and is the only one to not have even made it to that championship round.

This isn’t supposed to be an exercise in beating up on the Mariners, but simply to provide some background on their whole deal. There was a time when Seattle was in the playoffs pretty regularly: from 1995 through 2001, the Mariners reached the postseason four times. (It used to be much more difficult to make it to the playoffs since there were fewer spots within them; four times in seven tries back then was pretty great.) They were easy to like back then, as they had, at various times during that run, legendary and popular players like Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Ichiro Suzuki on the roster. And who doesn’t love Jay Buhner? (I had a lovely alternate, off-white Mariners hat back in the ‘90s thanks to just how cool that team was to a kid. Mariners appreciation was infectious!) And Griffey had a little something extra going for him, too: his own run of video games.

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Griffey wasn’t the only player to have a video game with his name on it back then. It was fairly common to have popular players grant a license for a sports game back in the ‘90s—Cal Ripken, Roger Clemens, Frank Thomas, and Nolan Ryan all did it, and you even had managers like Tony La Russa and Tommy Lasorda using their names and likenesses to sell video games—but Griffey was a whole other setup for a couple of reasons. For one, this wasn’t just a one-and-done or a known name slapped onto an existing game to sell copies regionally, a la Tommy Lasorda Baseball, but an entire series, spread across multiple systems—the SNES had two, the Nintendo 64 another pair, and the Game Boy Color saw a handheld version of the final game in the Griffey franchise. More on those in a bit.

Second, the reason there was a series to begin with was because of who was releasing those games: Nintendo. At the time that Ken Griffey Jr. was playing for the Mariners and these games were being released, Nintendo of America owned a significant stake in the team, purchased in 1992 when the club was thought to be in danger of relocating out of Seattle. Instead, then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi offered to buy the team for $100 million. As the story goes, it’s not because he cared about baseball so much as that the community enjoyed the Mariners, and Nintendo—which had their American operations based in nearby Redmond, Washington—was part of that community. And he wanted to give something back to the rest of them considering their support of Nintendo over the years. A generous gift, for sure, even if Nintendo and Yamauchi knew they were likely to make their money back on it given that’s the nature of these things. And owning an MLB team would look pretty great for Nintendo, too.

Major League Baseball didn’t mind the Mariners staying in Seattle instead of relocating—they were sued the previous time the team that became the Milwaukee Brewers, the Pilots, left Seattle after one season, which is how the Mariners came to be in the first place—but they did not appreciate that a Japanese businessman and Japanese company were coming to their rescue. Listen, 1992 wasn’t that far removed from a decade in which any Japanese-looking art on video game boxes was replaced by something with more western flavor, in order to hide its origins from a public voting Ronald Reagan into office on purpose not once, but twice. So of course there was pushback to a company from Japan opening their wallets for a piece of America’s pastime. You don’t need me to tell you that there was panic over whether or not Japan was going to buy up everything American and make it theirs because one company wanted to buy an MLB team, unless it’s your first day learning about America.

While Yamauchi had initially offered to put up the entire $100 million necessary to buy the team (even back in 1992 his net worth was thought to be north of $1 billion, and he had plenty of stock in Nintendo to sell, too) he was instead forced to continually drop his stake and add more and more other local business people—more local than he was in MLB’s eyes, if you catch my drift—until the stake that a Japanese company had in the club was under 50 percent. Meaning, not a controlling interest. This despite the fact that Yamauchi was going to have Nintendo of America’s president, Minoru Arakawa, as the point person running the team. Arakawa had lived in Washington for 15 years already at that point, per reporting at the time, and had co-founded Nintendo of America in 1980.

MLB’s original position—straight from then-commissioner Fay Vincent—was that there was basically no chance of the offer being accepted, due to a recent unwritten agreement among the various teams that owners outside of North America were not going to be allowed into their ranks. When it became clear that the league didn’t really have a leg to stand on here—Arakawa had lived in the United States, and the Seattle region specifically, for too long to not be considered local unless you wanted even more editorials about how this was at best xenophobia from MLB, a whole bunch of other local business leaders had joined on to the bidding group, and oh there also wasn’t another ownership bid anywhere near as strong as this one to go to for what was a time-sensitive matter—they relented. Nintendo didn’t own a majority of the Mariners, but they owned more than anyone else did.

(An underrated reason for the Nintendo purchase going through being a good thing? George F. Will was vehemently against it, to the point he’s casually cited in piece after piece from the era explaining the situation. And, to be fair, not everyone in MLB was automatically against Nintendo coming on board. As one anonymous club official told Sports Illustrated when the sale was still in question: “…would we rather have the Japanese or Marge Schott?” In case you don’t know of her, Schott has a section on her Wikipedia page titled “Racism and white nationalist views,” and the sentence “Schott explained that the swastika armband had been a gift from a former employee,” which was not cherrypicked here to put her in a negative light, but because it’s one of the few sentences in that section that’s printable without the need to censor any of it in these digital pages.)

While Yamauchi specifically didn’t have an interest in baseball, Nintendo as a company certainly did well before Nintendo of America ended up as the largest shareholder of the Mariners. Baseball was released in 1983 on the Famicom, and as a launch game for the NES in 1985. It was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto—“I personally really wanted there to be a Baseball game, and so I was working on that” he told Wired in 2016—and they didn’t stop there supporting the sport on the console, either. It was Nintendo that published SNK’s Baseball Stars in arcades through their PlayChoice-10 cabinets that featured NES games, and it didn’t take long for them to get to work on leveraging the Mariners purchase for the benefit of the SNES, either. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball didn’t include an MLB Players Association license—meaning, the players union—but Griffey Jr. granted his own license and likeness to Nintendo for the 1994 game, and MLB granted their own, too, hence the game’s title and its use of real stadiums, team logos, events like the Home Run Derby and World Series, and team names. If you’ve ever played something like MLBPA Baseball, then you have just the player names, only cities for teams, and generic uniforms and stadiums that the games are played in. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents managed to actually include all of the players, but with fake names—check their stats and numbers against their real-life counterparts, though, and you’ll realize that hey, Edgar Martinez and Tino Martinez and Randy Johnson and so on are teammates with Griffey in this game, but you have to edit their names to say as much. Which you can do, of course.

Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run was the first sequel, also on the SNES, and the name was a reference to the run that Griffey had scored in the American League Division Series in 1995 that let the Mariners advance past the Yankees. That 1996 title would be followed by Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. on the N64 in 1998, and then Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest in 1999, on both the N64 and Game Boy Color. That would actually be the end of this partnership between Griffey and Nintendo, as Griffey would leave Seattle to join his hometown Cincinnati Reds as a free agent after the ‘99 season. Griffey was the star in baseball at the time, so this was not an insignificant loss. Nintendo backed out of the game for a bit after losing Griffey—maybe they could have followed up with an Ichiro-led series afterward, given he had a national presence as well, but instead returned in 2005 with the only game mascot who could possibly rival 1990s Junior: Mario.

Nintendo Seattle Mariners baseball

Mario Superstar Baseball would launch on the GameCube in 2005, and that series—Mario Super Sluggers on the Wii and Mario Sports Superstars on the 3DS were its official and unofficial followups—is where most of Nintendo’s baseball-related energy has gone since, given that they don’t require the kind of licensing deals that have, as you can imagine, kept Nintendo from bringing back any of their Griffey titles. In 2006, there was also Wii Sports, of which baseball was a true highlight. And the 3DS featured a true underrated classic in Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, featuring the saddest dad in video games, and also baseball. There is an even deeper cut, as well, which is from the Satellaview-only Kirby’s Toy Box: one of the games included in that collection is a virtual version of an arcade-style baseball game, but not “arcade” as in “Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is more arcade than simulation-style baseball,” but as in “electro-mechanical arcade game.” Similarly, 2018 Switch title Super Mario Party includes the minigame “Mini Baseball League,” which is also based off of that style of baseball game.

Nintendo still owns a small stake in the Mariners—in 2016 they sold the controlling interest that they eventually acquired after years of not ruining Major League Baseball despite the warnings of the George F. Wills of the world, but retained 10 percent of the club. They don’t have quite the baseball presence that they did 30 years ago, given they don’t own as much of the team and said team does not have Ken Griffey Jr. on it any longer, but the sport is still something that Nintendo has made room for to a degree since they first went into the console space. It would be something if a deal could be worked out to get the various Ken Griffey Jr. games rereleased in the present, to bring back this fascinating era of Nintendo’s history, but chances are good that we will instead have to settle for “just” Mario Superstar Baseball showing up on the GameCube portion of Nintendo Switch Online at some point.

Ah, well. Do you think adding Ken Griffey Jr. to the next Smash Bros. installment is in the cards, at least?

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin