Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run Review (SNES) (Retro WedNESday #8)
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 10, 1996
Baseball games live and die by two things: how good the batting feels and how good the pitching feels. Everything else is window dressing. Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run on the SNES gets both of those things right, and that’s really all you need to know to understand why my dad, my brother, and I logged so many hours on this cartridge.
Ken Griffey Jr. was the guy in the mid-90s. The sweet left-handed swing, the backwards cap, the Kid smile. He was must-watch baseball at a time when the sport was still recovering from the 1994 strike, and the year before this game came out he delivered one of the most iconic moments in baseball history. The game’s title comes directly from the final play of the 1995 American League Division Series between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees, when Griffey scored the winning run all the way from first base in the bottom of the 11th inning. A moment so big it’s credited with saving baseball in Seattle. Naming a video game after it was the right call.
Rare developed this one, which explains why it plays as well as it does. Rare was at the peak of their powers on the SNES in the mid-90s, and while Winning Run isn’t as flashy as Donkey Kong Country or as ambitious as their other work from the period, the craft is there. The gameplay is arcade-leaning without being arcade-shallow. You’re making real decisions on both sides of the ball, and the controls are responsive enough that when something goes wrong you know it was you and not the game.
The batting has that satisfying crack when you make solid contact, and learning the timing of different pitchers is one of those things that rewards the hours you put in. The pitching side is where the game’s best moment lives, and if you know, you know. If you stood on the mound without throwing a pitch for a little while, the umpire would stand up, pull off his mask, tap a baseball against the screen and tell you to play the game. It’s the kind of Easter egg that only a development team having fun with their work would put in, and it absolutely cracked us up every time someone discovered it or triggered it deliberately just to see it again. Small moment, but it’s the kind of thing that sticks with you for thirty years.
The game features all 28 MLB teams that existed at the time, and includes a franchise mode, MLB Challenge mode, exhibition play, and an All-Star Game mode with a home run derby. For a SNES game released in 1996 that’s a solid content offering, and the home run derby alone could eat up an entire afternoon. Griffey is the only real player in the game, with the rest of the rosters filled by fictional players modeled after their real-world counterparts, which was a licensing reality of the era that everyone just accepted and moved on from.
The graphics hold up well. The sprite work is clean, the stadiums have distinct looks, and the animation on the swing and fielding is smooth enough that the game still feels polished by any standard. The sound is good without being memorable, which is basically the baseline for sports games. You’re not playing a baseball game for the soundtrack.
This held the top spot in my personal baseball game rankings until the N64 follow-up came along. Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. on Nintendo 64 raised the bar enough to knock it down, but Winning Run spent several years as the definitive baseball game in our house and earned every bit of that reputation. It’s a game that did exactly what it set out to do without overcomplicating itself, and in a genre where teams sometimes forget that fun is the whole point, that’s worth more than people give it credit for.
Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.
This one trigger some nostalgia for ya? Check out my reviews of Top Gear on SNES and Super Mario Bros. on NES, or browse the full Retro WedNESday archive.
