In MLB: The Show 25, your created player is faced with a choice. Do you go directly to the league after high school? Or, do you enroll in college?

College offers you perks - like a powerful bat or glove - and some extra skill development. It is the more traditional path, after all. Heading straight to the league might make you progress more quickly, but the gameplay will be much more difficult since you’re going from homeroom to home runs by Shohei Ohtani.

No matter what you decide, the option to play college ball is a fresh addition to The Show, which released in March on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch. Though college teams aren’t the central focus of The Show, it’s hard to ignore that baseball’s only major video game is continuing the trend of bringing college athletics into the fold.

The change comes less than a year after EA Sports dominated the sports gaming field with College Football 25 - a reboot of the company’s adored NCAA Football franchise. CFB 25 brought the audience for college sports games, dormant for more than a decade, roaring back to life.

The game drew 5 million players through its first week, according to EA, and according to the analytics firm Circana, broke sales records for sports games in the United States. A new version of the game is set to release this summer.

CFB 25 was such a success that it immediately raised questions about whether this marked a revival for the college sports genre. Reports surfaced that 2K and EA are both eyeing a potential college hoops game, but nothing concrete has surfaced. (2K Games, which runs the NBA 2K franchise, declined to comment on any future college sports game or the company’s history with the genre. EA has also declined to comment on the potential for a college basketball game.)

In The Show, college teams only appear in a single mode - “Road to the Show,” a role-playing mode where you create a custom player to rise up the ranks of MLB. Gamers start in high school, where they’re recruited by dudes with mustaches to attend one of eight schools - Texas Christian University, University of South Carolina, Louisiana State University, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Texas, University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt and Cal State Fullerton.

After you select your college, time jumps forward three years, to the middle of the “College Baseball Championship” (the knockoff version of the real-life College World Series), where you’re looking to impress MLB recruiters and, you know, win a title.

Steve Merka, game director for MLB The Show at San Diego Studios, said the eight schools were picked because of their historic or modern connection to the college baseball. LSU, for example, was fiery star pitcher Paul Skenes’ alma mater. Cal State Fullerton, meanwhile, has made more than a dozen appearances at the College World Series and won four of them.

“We wanted this nice spectrum,” Merka said. “And those teams represented a good swath of schools that have done well or are doing well or continue to be more historic.”

Eight teams might not seem like a lot when games such as College Football 25 have more than 100 schools. “But it’s easier to grow than it is to try to change and reduce,” Merka said.

So will the game expand for next year? “Let’s dip our toe in, see how we can perform,” Merka said. “Let’s see if the user base likes it, if community likes it or not.”

Merka said bringing colleges into the game was an ask from the Show community for a while, and that the rise of EA’s College Football series didn’t play a significant factor in the addition of college teams. Gamers, he said, hoped to use the metal bats that are so common in college baseball. And baseball fans, in general, love the nostalgia and romanticism of college and high school ball. So it wasn’t a foreign concept to the developers, Merka said, they just had to implement it.

So far, players seem to be enjoying the college experience. Some have announced where their players will enroll. One TikTok user decided to make himself a quarterback for LSU in CFB 25 and a shortstop for the school in The Show.

The excitement over college ball’s return to games followed a long pause in releases, driven in part by the long-running conflict over how athletes get paid for the use of their personal brands.

College sports made up a healthy portion of the sports video game genre throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Both Bill Walsh College Football and Coach K College Basketball in the mid-’90s were early adapters before NCAA Final Four, NCAA Basketball and NCAA March Madness franchises dominated the field with yearly releases. 2K Games got in on the action with its College Hoops and college football titles. EA rebranded its MVP Baseball games into MVP: NCAA Baseball games before dropping the series altogether.

EA’s NCAA Football franchise, which ran from 1997 to 2013, was a flagship of the genre. But the series came to a halt over legal issues surrounding name, image and likeness deals with college players. In 2019, the NCAA opened the way for players to profit off NIL deals, which paved the path for the return of college sports with CFB 25.

The game not only featured most major universities, but it also included actual college athletes through a licensing deal that gave students a $600 payment and a free copy of the game to use their name and image.

Those deals are still changing. EA Sports said it would increase players’ NIL payments to $1,500 for CFB 26, the Athletic reported last month. And it’s unclear what might happen next with the subgenre, at home in yearly sports releases otherwise dominated by live service models and microtransactions.

Maybe titles for college hockey and basketball next? Fans can hope.

Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

Online: theshow.com