Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: The best thing on the internet (sort of hyperbole, but not really) is soon to return to a web browser and/or mobile app near you!
An absurdist baseball simulator with an explosively creative fan base, Blaseball has been on hiatus for over a year. The team behind Blaseball, The Game Band, told TechCrunch last month that they have been completely overhauling the game, which they initially launched as a bare bones pandemic project in summer 2020.
Now, we finally have some concrete news: Blaseball will return for what it’s calling “Fall Ball” this Friday, October 28 at 3 p.m. EDT.
“Moments Ago … the universe ended. A god is dead. A Black Hole swallowed the League. Play was Stopped,” the website landing page reads. “Now … a New Beginning. Officials gather. Challengers orbit. Will you help Them? Can our heroes escape the gravity of their situation?”
This won’t yet be the return of actual Blaseball games. Instead, Blaseball players from the previous era will “fall” out of the Black Hole and back onto teams. Based on how many sign-ups the game gets, users will be able to unlock rewards. We don’t know what they are yet, but they are probably full of chaos, and the first one will be revealed Friday.
This is all probably confusing if you have not played Blaseball before. After its initial moment of virality, Blaseball’s developers have been hard at work thinking about how to make the game more accessible, since the concept of “absurdist horror baseball web simulator” is not exactly the most intuitive. Now, it’s the perfect time to get way too emotionally invested in the fate of chaotic baseball-esque gameplay.
“We were like five or six people when we first started making Blaseball,” said Sam Rosenthal, founder and creative director of The Game Band. “Talk about unsustainable. We made this as a quick and dirty prototype that blew up.”
Now, with $3 million in seed funding and an expanded team of 25 people, the team behind Blaseball is well refreshed from a long seventh-inning stretch.
“We felt like if we don’t take a step back and and make this a lot better, Blaseball is going to continue on its current trajectory, which can be really exciting for its existing fan base but it will never get outside of that, and we don’t want that to be the case,” Rosenthal told TechCrunch last month. “We’ve redone everything essentially, from the core simulation that powers the game to the entire user interface of Blaseball. It is built in a way that allows us to be as fast as we were previously, but now on three different platforms, since the mobile app is coming out on iOS and Android.”
If you’re a fan of Dungeons & Dragons, weird internet fandoms, or — yes — baseball, then why not give Blaseball a whirl? But first, check out our deep dive into the team behind Blaseball, and how they’re turning a viral hit into a sustainable game.