How MVP 2005 revolutionized baseball video games

There are lots of things you could've been doing during the summer of 2005.

Maybe you were lazing the days away at the beach. Maybe you were blasting the Black Eyed Peas' "Don't Phunk with My Heart" at a party off your iPod mini. Maybe you were scrolling through video after video on a new social media platform called YouTube.

But for one segment of the population -- you're likely in it if you're reading this article -- you were seated at your TV screen for many of those long sunny days and deep into those warm nights. You were in your friend's basement. In your brother's bedroom. In your family den.

You had a franchise to build. You had teams and players to manage -- entire Minor League affiliates to oversee. You were in your 26th season as a Create-A-Player and you had 800 home runs. What is this "You Owe Me an IOU" song and why can't I get it out of my head? Who is Jon Dowd?

Good lord, Jon Dowd.

"People who were playing the game at the time, especially if you were in your teens, those are such impactful years when you're growing up," "MVP Baseball 2005" game producer Pete Trenouth told me over Zoom. "You remember those times with your buddies in the summer playing those games together. You probably remember some of the scores, some of the at-bats."

"It wasn't just the quality of the game, it was a great group of people," producer Jon Dowd (yes, the namesake for the Jon Dowd), said in a call. "Producers, animators, programmers -- everyone got along. We were all friends. We'd go out to drinks together. I think that was a big help. It was the culmination of finally making the game we always wanted to make."

"MVP Baseball 2005" came out back in, well, 2005. Yes, the video game that -- in nearly every corner of the Internet, among any reviewer who reviewed it -- ranks as one of the greatest ever. A classic that became the foundation for current hit baseball game "MLB The Show."

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But what are its origins? How was it produced? Did the EA artists and developers know they were creating an all-time game while they were creating it?

Well, yes, kind of.

Cue up "Tessie" and let's get into it.

The Creation

The game's development, the planning, the innovation all began in the EA Sports studios in Vancouver, Canada, a city where the closest MLB team was in a different country, but where there were still some very hardcore MLB fans. Especially among the team members at MVP Baseball.

Many had worked on the Triple Play franchise that ran from 1996 through 2002. MVP 2003 built on that success and MVP 2004 was a big-time hit. It was the first baseball game to be licensed by both Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball -- including components of Double- and Triple-A. There was an expansive Dynasty Mode for users to draft prospects and make trades. There were hitting and pitching tips. Cover athlete Albert Pujols was basically a cheat code. Gamespot named it the best traditional sports game of the year.

But 2005 was everything EA had been building toward. The experience was there. The chains were off. This would be the "crowning achievement."

"It was like everyone, just, we knew we were making something special," lead producer Brent Nielsen told me. "That motivated people to say, 'Hey, let's just go for this. Let's work hard. Let's do whatever we need to do.'"

"We wanted to make the best sports game at EA," Trenouth said. "It wasn't even the best baseball game, it was the best sports game."

And after the triumphs of MVP '03 and especially '04, the executives gave their creators even more room to create. The full trust was there.

"In a lot of ways, we did it by doing less," Dowd said. "In the gaming industry, a lot of the time, you had to design stuff that marketing liked. And that wouldn't always be something we wanted to do. We really concentrated this time on putting less time into those big futures, and more time into polishing. Fixing bugs. Refining gameplay animations. Not some big feature for the back of the box, but something that just felt better now."

Still, they definitely, also, had some of their own features they could finally show off to the world.

The Features

MVP '05 had the new Owner Mode, an improvement on Franchise Mode. Fans could really nerd out and experience all the aspects and pressures of owning a big league franchise -- setting ticket prices, establishing employee salaries, even calculating the prices of beer or hot dogs.

"That was something that was on our roadmap to get to," Nielsen said. "Finally, after the first two iterations, we felt like we had the guts of the game in a really good spot that we could focus on things like Owner Mode. It was fun, it was well-balanced, it gave people a chance to play on the other side of the ball."

"Just seeing how extensive that was, it just fascinates me to this day," Kofie Yeboah, sports and gaming content creator, told me over Zoom. "I know that some baseball games have that now, but seeing that in a game in 2005 -- having that much depth to it? I look back at it and I think, 'This game was made with a lot of care.' I really appreciate that."

There were time-consuming Mini Games, where you could crush baseballs off ramps and moving tractors and broken-down school buses. It was even fun to watch somebody else play.

It still is.

Gamers could build their own ballparks -- constructing waterfalls in center field or skyscrapers in right. The Minor League system was fleshed out to include Class A teams, something Dowd worked a lot on.

"I think what the hardcore guys really appreciated was that everything was pretty editable," Dowd said. "I was pretty much guessing what pitch types were [in the Minors]. I would go by scouting reports, but there were definitely people out there who knew individual teams and farm systems better than I did. So, let them go to it. Let them make improvements."

There was The Hitter's Eye, a revolutionary hitting tool that appeared in many baseball games afterward. The '04 version had a Hitter's Circle, but the team wanted to make this new version seem more realistic. To do that, they went and talked to a real-life baseball team.

"Yeah, we would meet with ballplayers," Nielsen laughed. "A lot of guys that played for the Vancouver Canadians. ... We just kind of picked their brain, like 'What are you looking for at the plate?' They would talk about the laces, what type of spin it was. How could we replicate that aspect of it?"

Laces would be tough to make come across in a video game, so instead they used colors. Users could recognize what pitch was coming based on colors. It worked really well.

"It was really interesting," Yeboah said. "It made every pitcher seem like they had their own arsenal. You were looking for colors to read, but even if you knew what pitch was coming, you still had to have your own skill hitting the ball."

Yes, there were pitchers that were still extremely hard to hit: Tim Wakefield's dancing knuckleballs, Barry Zito and his mythical curve, Orlando Hernández and his funky windup. There are entire forums dedicated to trying to make hard contact against some of these MVP pitching masters.

But a couple guys, well, mostly one, could hit just about anything that came anywhere near home plate.

The legend of Jon Dowd, cover star Manny Ramirez and Katie Roy

"I thought it was funny, but I didn't think anybody would be talking about it even two years later," Dowd said.

Yes, Jon Dowd -- perhaps the best video game athlete of all time -- was named after a real person. A game producer. The Dowd character entered the MVP world in 2004, once Barry Bonds decided to pursue licensing opportunities on his own and not allow the game to use his likeness. The player in the game, of course, had to look nothing like the seven-time MVP. Dowd was great in the '04 game, but after Bonds had an even more ridiculous season, he was even better in '05. As the game got more popular, so did Dowd.

"We didn't realize what a cultural phenomenon it would be," Trenouth, who oversaw player/stadium characteristics, told me. "He's gotta be white, but his power zone is going to be the width of the entire strike zone. He was lights out. Jon had a goatee back then and strawberry blonde hair. Face-wise, yes, body type-wise, no, we didn't make him look like Jon at all."

"Yeah, wait until they see me in real life," Dowd laughed. "Might be better to maintain the mystique there."

Still, whenever the game is brought up these days, it's generally followed by some joke about Jon Dowd being the greatest slugger in history. Although he's pretty quiet about his bizarre video-game fame, here's Dowd wearing a Dowd jersey years ago during a night out with other producers back in the day.

"Maybe I should contact the Giants and see if I could throw out a first pitch or something," Dowd joked.

Like Pujols in '04, cover star Manny Ramirez was a threat in the 2005 iteration. His presence and skillsets were boosted coming off the Red Sox's curse-breaking World Series title -- a theme apparent in other parts of the game (see: Dropkick Murphys' "Tessie" on the soundtrack; we'll talk about that a bit later). Although his power and average ratings were easy to calculate, Trenouth said Manny's hair nearly broke the game.

"How do we do this?" Trenouth, who used game recordings and Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary to help draw players, said. "We didn't have hair physics [back then] in a video game. The dreads were literally frozen icicles. His dreads would be clipping through the helmet. We're like cutting his hair to make sure it's coming out of the bottom part, but not sticking out like some sort of alien."

Yeboah, who plays video games for a living, ranks MVP '05 Manny way up on his top player list.

"Manny Ramirez is one of the best video game cover athletes of all time," Yeboah said. "'MVP Baseball 2005' is about hitting balls as far as you can and you want to have Manny Ramirez on your team."

And Katie Roy. Remember Katie Roy? If you created a player and named them Katie Roy, every unlockable feature -- legends, ballparks, jerseys -- would be unlocked. But, just who was Katie Roy?

"She was the daughter of one of our programmers," Dowd told me. "Tim Roy."

Tim also got in the game, as a Minor League pitcher in the Rockies system.

How about that soundtrack?

Like Dowd, like the game itself, the soundtrack for MVP 2005 was a classic. You sang along while playing, the tracks would linger in your head hours and months after a session. Put on any of the nine songs now and you'll likely be transported to your days of dominating with Pedro Martinez on the mound or hitting a walk-off home run against your friend on a late, far too late, summer night.

"Being a part of, having anything to do with even a minute snippet of the evolution of pop culture, that feels so fun," Steve Bays, former lead singer of Hot Hot Heat, told me. "It adds to the mystique and whimsy of life."

Hot Hot Heat's "You Owe Me an IOU" was one of the more popular tunes off the set. Bays, who recently launched his solo career after the band broke up, told me having a song in a video game was kind of a faux pas back then. But one night, not being able to go to sleep in the midst of a long tour, he was playing Tiger Woods '04 on X-Box. There was a song by Billy Talent called "Try Honesty" on there that he loved, and it made him and his band rethink the idea of selling their songs to a place like EA.

"At that point, we were starting to open up to the idea of not being so precious about song placements," Bays recalled.

The song was a hit off the soundtrack, along with the Dropkick Murphys' "Tessie," Donots' "We got the Noise" and the Rock n' Roll Soldiers' "Funny Little Feeling." Dropkicks lead singer/founder Ken Casey said he doesn't recall how the band got connected with MVP, but he's glad they did.

"I did notice it gaining us some new younger fans around the country that may not have been previously aware of its connection to baseball and the Red Sox," Casey said in an email. "Video game placements have really helped us through the years whether it’s MLB, NHL games, or even Tony Hawk video games."

There are endless Reddit threads waxing nostalgia about the song list, and there's a dedicated Spotify page. Mostly, though, it helped introduce new music to a different crowd and fully implant the notes and lyrics into the heads of gamers for the rest of their lives.

"Just from talking to people and seeing YouTube comments and stuff, it definitely opened up our music to a different, more broad demographic, which is super cool," Bays recalled. "Starting out as a band, it's tempting to always kinda wanna play to people who know and love your stuff. That was one of the handful of ways in which we got out to a more diverse audience."

An Ongoing Legacy

It's good that MVP 2005 was so good, because, well, that's where MLB’s connection with the MVP Series would end.

After signing an exclusive deal with the NFL to produce Madden games, EA lost its licensing rights with Major League Baseball (MVP ’06 and ’07 focused on NCAA baseball). MLB went ahead with 2K sports and has since used "MLB The Show" as its lone licensed game.

Dowd wonders if that's also a reason why the 2005 game is remembered so fondly.

"I think part of it is that, you know, it's romantic," he said. "That was the last one. If we hadn't lost the license and done 2006, would '05 still be considered the high point? We kind of went out on top."

"MLB The Show" has built on features MVP first put forward: Road to the Show -- where you can create yourself as player, get drafted, play in the Minors, and get to the Majors -- is an even more detailed, more personal version of Owner Mode. The Show '17 and '21 have been considered classics and The Show '25, coming out this month, looks like another great one. It even has a new unlockable legend that MVP '05ers will remember ...

Still, many gamers continue to flock to MVP '05 -- playing it in modified forms. They update the rosters, the uniforms, even core components of the actual gameplay.

"Yeah, the engineers specifically set up the code so that it could be easily modified by people," Nielsen said. "It's cool. That allowed for it to live on years after the last one was officially put out and released."

All the producers had fun, creating a fun game. They still keep in touch. Nielsen says he's never made a more impactful game after decades in the business. Dowd says a bunch of them are still in a fantasy baseball league that started back in 2000.

"It was wonderful to be a part of," Trenouth said. "Nobody fully realized it, but, man, were we lucky to be where we were, when we were."

Yeboah, who has played the game recently for his YouTube followers (that's where I found him), was pretty astonished at how well it's held up. But his affection for the game is less about it being a piece of pop cultural ephemera or how stylistically excellent it was.

"Baseball was my first sport, the sport I was most interested in," Yeboah said. "As a kid who didn't have cable, being able to use 'MVP Baseball' to learn more about the landscape of the league, the league where I wasn't able to see all these teams all the time -- it was really cool. I was expanding my horizons and seeing, 'Oh, this is what that team looks like.' MLB on FOX would come on the weekends, and in between that, I could just play MVP Baseball and make my own stuff up."

MVP '05 introduced Yeboah to the world of Major League Baseball. And like many video games do -- it allowed him, and probably millions of other kids, to enter into that world as the sports superstar they'd always dreamed they could be.