Getty Image/Humongous Entertainment
If you grew up in the 1990s, there’s a very good chance you devoted plenty of hours of your childhood to the classic computer game known as Backyard Baseball. Jason Kelce was apparently a big fan of that title and its spinoffs, and he might be gearing up to resurrect it.
Humongous Entertainment carved out a pretty solid niche in the 1990s thanks to point-and-click computer game franchises like Spy Fox and Pajama Sam, titles that didn’t exactly push the limits of technology but still provided plenty of entertainment for the first generation of kids to really grow up with PCs.
In 1997, the company truly outdid itself when it unleashed Backyard Baseball on an unsuspecting world, a game that featured the legendary Pablo Sanchez and the many other quirky characters who could take advantage of the cartoonish powerups during games hosted at virtual stadiums like Sandy Flats and Playground Commons.
Backyard Baseball spawned some sequels that featured real, actual MLB players as kids as well as a number of spinoffs that comprised the “Backyard Sports” universe, including Backyard Football (which also boasted a sequel with real, actual NFL players as kids), Backyard Basketball, and Backyard Hockey.
The developer behind the games was initially sold to GT Interactive (a subsidiary of Atari) in 1996 before embarking on a wild roller coaster ride of corporate mergers and sell-offs, and as things currently stand, it appears an obscure private equity firm known as The Evergreen Group currently holds the rights to Backyard Baseball and its associated titles.
It’s unclear if the company is looking to offload those assets, but if it is, it may have a potential buyer in the form of Jason Kelce based on what he had to say during a recent episode of the New Heights podcast (the segment in question kicks off around the 36:50 mark).
Only time will tell if Kelce decides to return for another season, but it appears he has a passion project lined up if he does end up having some free time on his hands based on what he had to say:
“I don’t even know if I want to mention this. I’ve secretly been looking into seeing if anybody holds the rights to Backyard Baseball and Backyard Football because I want to buy it and get this thing going again.
That was the best thing ever! It was so electric. Can you imagine playing Backyard Football right now on your phone? You could do that whole thing on your phone. It wasn’t that complicated of a game.”
It might be a bit of a pipe dream, but here’s to hoping Kelce decides to follow through.