Final inning

The life and death of Blaseball, one of gaming's strangest experiments

On June 2, 2023, the Immaterial Plane ceased to exist. This wasn’t overly unusual by Blaseball standards: it had already been sucked into a black hole once. Yet this time was different, with the disappearance accompanied by a blunt message from its creators: “The cost, literally and metaphorically, is too high”. Blaseball was shutting down.

This mashup of videogame, spectator sport and collective storytelling project is so unusual that it could only have been created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having released its debut, Where Cards Fall, in 2019, The Game Band was working on what studio founder Sam Rosenthal describes as an “atmospheric, singleplayer narrative game” before the onset of COVID led to that project’s cancellation. After downsizing and pivoting to contract work, they went all-in on Rosenthal’s idea for a Web-based idle game built around horse racing, intended in part as an alternative to the boardgaming meetups that were now impossible.

The horses were quickly traded for a baseball league, and just four months into lockdown, Blaseball entered the world as a free-to-play browser game. Matches were simulated every hour, with entire seasons taking place across a single week, while its cosmic horror elements – which Rosenthal credits to writer and narrative designer Stephen Bell – were built out through cryptic messages on the game’s website and via social media accounts. Although it was originally a sideproject for The Game Band, it quickly became the studio’s primary focus, as a community formed around teams such as the Baltimore Crabs and Kansas City Breath Mints, voting on in-game events and rule changes as well as generating vast quantities of fan artwork and lore.