Playground Productions
If you grew up in the 1990s and had access to a computer, there’s a pretty good chance you spent countless hours playing the beloved video game that was Backyard Baseball. Earlier this year, we learned the franchise was being rebooted, and we now have a release date that’s on the very near horizon.
There was nothing particularly revolutionary about Backyard Baseball, which was originally released by the folks at Humongous Games (a studio that largely specialized in point-and-click adventures) in 1997.
However, it was brilliant in its simplicity, and there’s an entire generation of people who devoted a solid chunk of their childhood to playing virtual baseball games at venues like Sandy Flats and Steele Stadium while managing teams that likely included speed demon Pete Wheeler, wheelchair-bound ace Kenny Kawaguchi, and the G.O.A.T who was Pablo Sanchez.
Backyard Baseball inspired a number of spinoffs featuring football, basketball, and hockey as well as a string of sequels featuring juvenille versions of real MLB players, but it’s hard to top the magic of the O.G.
Earlier this year, Jason Kelce hinted he was doing what he could to bring the series back, but it would appear he was beaten to the punch by Playground Productions, which worked with a team of programmers at Mega Cat Studios who hacked into the Backyard Baseball CD-ROM (remember those?) to rebuild the code from the ground up.
According to a press release, the studio is on the verge of releasing the rebooted version of what has officially been dubbed Backyard Baseball ’97, which will be available for $9.99 on Steam on October 10th (the date the game came out close to 30 years ago).
The release cites the “intricacies” of the rebuild to justify the decision to only release the game on PC at this point, but it appears there are plans to bring it to other platforms in the future.
I’m not really sure how well it would translate to a console when you consider a mouse was the primary method of control, but it does seem like it would be a pretty natural fit for mobile platforms.