World Stadium
World Stadium is a series of baseball arcade games that were released by Namco in the late 1980s and 1990s; they were spin-offs of the Family Stadium franchise, inspired by the 1986 Famicom game Pro Yakyū Family Stadium, and its sequel Pro Yakyū Family Stadium '87. Except for Great Sluggers '94, which was also released in America, all of the games were exclusive to Japan.The first three titles in the series, , , and all ran on Namco System 1 hardware, and featured twelve teams from the "Urban League", and "Country League" ; they also featured three stadiums for matches to take place in. The first two of these stadiums' scoreboards had clocks which started at 6:00 and advanced as the matches progressed, and the third stadium's scoreboard also featured the logo of Atari, Inc., then Namco's distributor in the United States.
World Stadium was Japan's second highest-grossing arcade game of 1988. It went on to be Japan's seventh highest-grossing arcade conversion kit of 1991.The next four titles in the series, , , , and all ran on Namco System 2 hardware; the first of these featured sixteen teams, but the other three featured the twelve teams from the Japanese Central and Pacific Baseball Leagues. They also featured four stadiums for matches to take place in - again, the first three stadiums' scoreboards had clocks upon them, but they were broken. SWS '92 G also introduced a "FAVOR" setting in its options menu.The next arcade baseball game Namco released was Great Sluggers: New World Stadium in 1993. It was the first to run on Namco NB-1 hardware, and featured the 12 teams from Nippon Professional Baseball. A sequel was also released in 1994, titled Great Sluggers '94 in Japan and Great Sluggers: Featuring 1994 Team Rosters in America. The Japanese version featured Nippon Professional Baseball teams, and the American version featured Major League Baseball teams. The next three titles in the series, and and featured the twelve real-life teams from the three previous games; they also featured six stadiums for their matches to take place in. SWS '96 also introduced five "optional ball clubs" - the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and USA, while the Urban Stadium was merely the Kōshien Stadium from the previous games renamed.The last four titles in the series, and all ran on Namco System 12 hardware, and featured eighteen teams. It also featured twelve stadiums for its matches to take place in. The Namco All-Stars and Nikotama Gals feature twenty-three of Namco's most famous characters, but the pitchers of the former team are merely named after five others.