The Backyard Sports series’ resurgence began a few years ago with a re-release of the classic 1997 game Backyard Baseball, but this month’s launch of Backyard Baseball–an all-new entry–is a monumental step for a franchise that had been on ice for years. But getting there wasn’t easy, requiring years of work (and the help of a private investigator) to even acquire the rights, let alone find a development partner who could revive such a legendary franchise.
Playground Productions CEO Lindsay Barnett was up to the challenge, ultimately pivoting from her job as an elementary-school teacher when it became clear she was capable of bringing Backyard Baseball to a new generation of baseball fans. And now, the time has come for those kids (and their parents, if we’re being honest) to see just what Barnett and her team have been cooking up.
Making the best of a bad situation
While the Backyard Sports franchise is a pop-culture staple for many Millennial sports fans, it was essentially dead prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Barnett was teaching second grade in Chicago at the time, and as her students shifted to remote-learning setups and she had a chance to ask them about what kinds of activities they were doing at home, it became clear that many were playing violent video games. She wanted to find something more age-appropriate for them to spend their time playing outside of class.
“I said, ‘Well, what about sports games?”‘ Barnett told GameSpot. “And they said, ‘Well, sports games are too hard for us to play. We can’t play them. We can’t master the controls.’ And so I had suggested the Backyard Sports games [to them], and that’s when I determined that they were nowhere to be found. And as any bored teacher would do during a pandemic in which they are stuck at home, I went and searched for the rights for the brand, and it was a very difficult search to find it. I wound up hiring a private investigator to track the rights down.”
It took more than two years, but Barnett was eventually able to acquire the rights to the Backyard Sports franchise, partnering with the Pittsburgh-based Mega Cat Studios to develop new games. Initially, the plan was to make a new game that was very similar to Backyard Baseball ’97, but Mega Cat had another idea.
“They said, ‘Well, we could actually bring back Backyard Baseball ’97.’ And I said, ‘No way. No you can’t. We don’t have any source code.’ And they were like, ‘No, we’ll reverse-engineer and CD-ROM hack it and we can do it.'”
That led to a number of re-releases of classic Backyard Sports games to test the waters, including the original Backyard Baseball ’97 and its follow-up, Backyard Baseball 2001. Then it was time to make something a bit riskier: an entirely new game. The 2D style had been perfected, but Barnett wanted something that could merge that classic style and charm with a more modern look.
“When I was thinking about what hadn’t been done with this brand, there was no faithful representation of the 2D game that people like me loved when they were kids in the 3D world,” Barnett said. “And so that became our mission from day one: How can we expand the Backyard universe, as we like to call it, into this 3D world?”
