For many of the younger folks who will be reading this, the art of roster editing began somewhere within an NCAA Football game released by EA Sports. But for the older guys (like me), it all started with a nifty little baseball title on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

So today, we set the time machine back to 1994. The Buffalo Bills lost their fourth consecutive Super Bowl, the NY Rangers ended a 54-year drought by winning Lord Stanley's Cup, and Ken Griffey Junior of the Seattle Mariners broke Babe Ruth's record for the most home runs before the month of June.

But in '94, Griffey Jr. was perhaps best known by gamers for being the star of Ken Griffey Junior Presents Major League Baseball.

It was probably one of the most hyped sports games of it's time. As a kid, I can remember my Nintendo Power Magazine covering this game months before it was actually released. It was a game that only featured the MLB license, leaving the real life teams named with not so real life players -- with the exception of the coverboy himself, Ken Griffey Junior.

The good news was that while the real player names weren't included, their fake counterparts featured all the correct attributes and stats. So while you wouldn't find George Brett in the Kansas City Royals' lineup, you did have a guy named D. Ike carrying Mr. Pine Tar's pixelated likeness and stats.

This brings us to another of the many fun little quirks about this game. Each team's roster was given a different theme for how they came up with the players' fake names. Some teams carried the names of ex-presidents, some were writers, but perhaps the funniest was the roster of the Boston Red Sox. Fans of the TV show Cheers quickly noticed a roster made up of players named C. Claven, S. Malone, and the ever popular N. Peterson.

The great part about the rosters in this game was that they were totally editable. This was the first game I ever sat down with and took the time to rename all the players. The cartridge's battery memory also allowed you to save these rosters permanently (or as long as the battery lasted) so that you could use them in Exhibition mode or Season mode.

For the first time in videogame baseball, each team's jerseys were actually somewhat distinguishable. The Yankees had their pinstripes and signature "NY" logo. The A's had the cursive "Athletics" across the chest of their jerseys. And you could even almost make out the red and blue tomahawk across the chest of the Atlanta Braves' jerseys.

The realism didn't end there. Griffey Jr. MLB featured many real life stadiums to accompany the teams that played there. Because of the limited space on the cartridge, not all stadiums could be included, but the ones they had were rather well done. Fenway Park had the Green Monster; Dodger Stadium had the familiar roof over the outfield seats; And Camden Yards in Baltimore accurately had the "Hit it Here" bullseye on the right field wall, along with the warehouse behind it.

The place this game really shined though was in Season mode. You had the option of 26, 78, or a full 162 game season, and all 28 teams could be user controlled if you so desired. The divisional structure by default was set to two divisions per league (AL East/West, NL East/West) but if you wanted, you could set up a six division league, more closely replicating what MLB had started discussing around the time this game was released.

Season mode had full stat tracking which was pretty much becoming the norm for sports games in this era. So as you went along, you could keep track of batting average, home runs, runs batted in, and stolen bases. For pitchers, you were limited to wins, losses, saves, and earned run average.

The Season mode never seemed to get old: my younger brother and I played through an entire 162 game season. I used the Indians. a team which featured a handful of players who starred for my hometown Charlotte Knights, the Tribe's Triple-A affiliate at the time. My brother went with the Braves, the team nobody could beat back then unless it was in the World Series.

The Braves probably had the most dominant pitching staff in the game, with Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Steve Avery all still in their prime. Couple that with a lineup that featured a deadly core of Ron Gant, Fred McGriff, and David Justice; leadoff man Otis Nixon was also a terror on the base paths.

Another thing that made this game memorable was the newspaper headlines that accompanied each postgame report. The headline would usually just be about the game you just played, but to the right of that, a list of humorous headlines would rotate through as the season went on. Things like, "Expos mascot injured by runaway fastball" or "umpire caught playing Game Boy during 7th inning stretch" would appear, giving you an additional little chuckle as you moved through your season.

Looking back, Ken Griffey Junior wasn't the prettiest baseball game of its time; it wasn't the most sim-like; it wasn't even the best. But nonetheless, it was memorable for all the reasons previously mentioned. It's another title just dying for an appearance on the Wii's Virtual Console, but because of licensing issues, it's doubtful that will happen anytime soon.

It was, for many of us, the first baseball game featuring real life teams and for that, we'll always remember it fondly.