We have a private investigator to thank for the revival of the Backyard Sports franchise.
This year, Humongous Entertainment’s classic series of all-ages sports games for PC came back under the new ownership of Playground Productions. The return kicked off in October with the rerelease of Backyard Baseball ‘97 on Steam, and today we learned more is coming. Playground Productions has confirmed that a brand new Backyard Sports game is in development, that Backyard Soccer ‘98 will come to Steam on November 27, and that it’s working to bring the retro titles to more platforms, including mobile.
Now that the comeback is in full swing, I spoke to the people at Playground Productions responsible for its return: CEO Lindsay Barnett and Chief Product Officer Chris Waters. They revealed more about what it takes to bring a franchise back — including the hiring of a private investigator — and their ambition to make Backyard Sports into a multimedia franchise.
Barnett played the Backyard Sports games as a kid, starting with the first Backyard Baseball. Barnett was a sporty kid who loved feeling represented in these Humongous Entertainment games, and she has continued to love them her whole life. During an eight-year stint as a teacher in Chicago Public Schools, she took a closer look at the kinds of content her second-grade students were watching and wondered what she could create for them. That’s when the Backyard Sports series came to mind, as she believes it felt “authentic to who my students are.” That kicked off Barnett’s quest to obtain the rights to this series she loved playing as a kid, which turned out to be a much more complex process than expected.
“I thought it was going to be a Google search, and I’d find the person. It was not an easy process,” Barnett tells Digital Trends. “I wound up hiring a private investigator to track the rights down, and six months later, the PI came back and said they found the rights. I started a really nice relationship with the rights holders at the time and wound up getting the rights two-and-a-half years after that point. It was a three-year journey to ultimately get the IP, but it has been so worth it.”
Barnett also lucked out in that the previous owners had consolidated ownership of all parts of Backyard Sports into one place, so Playground Productions has full ownership of the whole franchise. That’s the point where she brought in Waters, who previously worked at Seth Green’s Stoopid Buddy Studios. Waters wasn’t familiar with the franchise beforehand, but says that as he learned more about it, he came to appreciate its passionate fandom.
Waters tells Digital Trends that bringing the series up to people of a certain generation causes a “Ratatouille moment where you can see them travel back to their eight-year-old self,” and that he saw the multimedia potential of its diverse crew of characters. Now that the rights were all in one place under Barnett and Waters’ control, it was time to bring the series back.
Although Barnett and Waters had massive ambitions for their franchise, they understood that returning to the classic games was an important first step. “We wanted to go back and see the hallmarks of what made Backyard Sports special,” Waters says. “It’s the comedy, it’s the tone, it’s the look, it’s the attention to detail and love for all of these characters. That’s going to be our true north for everything we do going forward. Let’s make sure we archive these games that everyone grew up loving so that everyone has a chance to play them again while we’re working on what we’re making next.”
The biggest challenge in doing this was that the source code to these classic Backyard Sports games was lost. Playground Productions partnered with Mega Cat Studios to ROM-hack old CD-ROMs and create working versions of these classics that they could sell on Steam. Backyard Baseball ‘97 kicked things off on October 10, and we’ve now learned that Backyard Soccer ‘98 is coming out on November 27.
The rerelease of Backyard Baseball ‘97 was successful for Playground Productions, which Waters says “gives us so much confidence in everything we’re doing for the future.” And while Mega Cat Studios previously told Digital Trends that bringing these rereleases to other platforms was a difficult process, Barnett said in this interview that “we are working on making all of these games available on more platforms, and we are deep in production to make the retro games playable on mobile.”
All of this groundwork laid by Barnett and Waters has been focused on the series’ past, but they’ve been doing that so they can bring the series somewhere in the future. The marquee part of that process will be a brand new Backyard Sports game slated for release. Mega Cat Studios, who is working on the retro re-releases of the series’ classic games, will also develop this new entry.
Details are vague, although a press release teases that the game will feature original characters and “embrace the comedy, diversity, accessibility, and fun that made the original titles timeless classics.” Barnett said she wants it to be accessible for young players and engaging for adults who grew up playing the games as a kid, like herself.
“We need to make sure that these next generation of games service the original fans and have a difficulty that is challenging enough for somebody who grew up playing the games and are now an adult,” Barnett says. “We also want to make sure that we keep the integrity of the original games, which taught kids about how to play sports and were very simple and accessible for all.”
We’re not making coming-of-age content; we’re making being-of-age content.
While it took childhood adoration, the help of a private investigator, and years of negotiations to get to this point, Playground Production can now make Backyard Sports a revelant franchise once again. Ultimately, Playground Productions aims to bring Backyard Sports back in a way that equally appeals to both the child and adult versions of a fan like Barnett.
“We’re not making coming-of-age content; we’re making being-of-age content,” Barnett said. “We want people to be really happy and joyful at whatever stage of life they are. If they’re a kid, there should be no greater thing to be than a kid. If you’re an adult or parent, there should be no greater thing. That is what we’re doing, not just with our video games, but with all the content we create.”
Backyard Soccer ‘98 launches on Steam on November 27.
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