Baseball Stars NES

Baseball Stars is SNK’s 1989 baseball game for the NES, notable as the first sports game on the console to let players create and customize their own players and teams from scratch, naming them and assigning stats rather than choosing only from licensed real-world rosters.

It was also the first NES baseball title to support battery save backup, letting players carry a created team and its statistics across a full season rather than losing progress between sessions — a feature that quickly became standard across the genre. Its deep customization and season-long play structure made it widely regarded as the best baseball game on the NES, launching a long-running SNK series with five further sequels.