Ever-increasing development costs for major game studios and the rise of the mobile gaming market have meant there are fewer entertaining sports games to play these days.

One indie game developer based on Broad Street in Victoria aims to change that.

“There was once an era when a variety of new sports games came out every year,” says Scott Drader, co-founder of Metalhead Software.

Metalhead is part of Victoria’s rapidly-growing indie game cluster that includes startups like TinyMob Games, which just TinyMob Games which just launched Tiny Realms to a global audience.

“We once had titles ranging from casual, to ridiculous, to arcade, all the way up to simulation. A lot of these games lived at this nice overall level of complexity where you could plop yourself on the couch with friends, even if they weren’t huge sports fans, and go from having no idea what you’re doing to having a blast in just an hour or two. It was a very cool era for the genre.”

Thanks to technological leaps and bounds over the past decade, there are now more expectations about what game should be able to do. While for gamers the results are fantastic, these high expectations, Drader says, has meant that it has become more difficult to produce games, and now there are fewer of them each year.

So Drader decided to do something about it.

The ShipConstructor alumnus combined his software engineering, rendering and graphics, game development, and content creation creation chops with a seemingly latent ability to successfully launch and start and build a small business to create Metalhead Software.

The result?  Super Mega Baseball.

With its retro name, Super Mega Baseball harkens back to the 1990s golden era of arcade sports titles. It’s meant to be a fun, accessible baseball game that still hefts enough weight so that more experienced players will still be engaged. Read an advance review here.

The game is due to be released on PS4 and PS3 this fall.

Check out the Metalhead Twitter feed to stay up to date.

Don’t crowd the plate. http://t.co/ZYbtzMrIAy

— Super Mega Baseball (@SupMegBaseball) October 9, 2014

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