Out of the Park Baseball, abbreviated as OOTP, is a text-based baseball simulation for career, historical, and fictional play. OOTP was originally written in 1998, when lead developer Markus Heinsohn sought to combine realistic replay baseball simulation with career play to satisfy hardcore fans and casual gamers alike. "A friend of mine brought home a bat and a glove from a trip to Miami, so we started hitting tennis balls into the neighbor’s gardens. That was in 1991," Heinsohn told Inside Mac Games in a July 2012 interview. "We then formed a baseball club and started playing in organized baseball leagues in 1994. In the meantime I played all sorts of baseball computer games, but there was no management-related game that I liked, so in 1998 I decided to simply develop my own game, just for fun. When it was done in 1999, I figured it was probably good enough to earn some money with it, and that’s when it all started."