The remastered edition of Backyard Baseball ’97 was more than a test case for Playground Productions and their development partners, MegaCat Studios.
It came out in October as a premium iOS game -- a daunting proposition on a platform dominated by free-to-play and gacha games (where you open some sort of pack for a chance to gain rare characters, items, etc., often paying for these), with business models that can prey on kids. And its debut was a success, as it became the top paid sports game on the App Store. And last week, it hit PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.
“Fans have really responded positively toward the fact that you get that original experience, and it’s a one-time fee, and then you get to just enjoy the game and continue to play it,” Chief Product Officer Chris Waters said.
Playground is also bringing back other games from the original Backyard Sports franchise -- Soccer ’98, Football ’99, Basketball ’01, Baseball ’01 and Hockey ’02 -- and is also working on a new game. These will all be paid games for mobile and consoles, with no in-game purchases. The family-friendly Backyard Sports series is more like a point-and-click game, not a sports sim, so it’s easier for children to play than the far more daunting Madden NFL or MLB: The Show. Part of this comes from the company’s respect for the original, along with Playground founder Lindsay Barnett’s background as a teacher.
“Media is the biggest classroom in the world. We want to create great content that really encourages and inspires kids to play. Backyard Sports, being a game that Lindsay loved growing up, was really the perfect product for us to launch the company with and the perfect universe for us to launch the company with,” Waters said. “Broadly speaking, everything we’re doing is in service of the overall mission, which is really to make great content for kids, and then the business mission, which is where to the extent possible for us to be in control of that content creatively and how we get it to market and to do that independently.”
But Backyard Baseball and the series’ return was a bumpy road.
Missing pieces
The biggest issue? The source code was missing.
“In the years since the games were first developed, the source code was lost somewhere around the time of probably the second sale of the franchise. And so, we had really limited capabilities to re-engineer those games. Just getting them back on modern devices was a challenge,” Waters said.
Barnett said when Playground acquired Backyard Baseball, “we didn’t even know that that was possible” to bring the game back. MegaCat has “been able to reverse engineer and CD-ROM hack” as they planned a PC release. But the studio was able to “exceed our expectations,” Barnett said, “making it playable on mobile, making it playable on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5. It really has been amazing.”
Emulation turned out to be the solution.
Waters also said that the community, such as the one on Discord, has helped keep the games alive and playable in some form over the years, using tools such as ScummVM (an emulator that helps run old point-and-click adventure games). MegaCat has hired some of these to help with the remaster. “All of that work has really helped lay the groundwork for what we’ve been able to do with these retro titles,” he said.
Emulation is another reason that prevented Playground from adding features such as in-game transactions. But Playground was never interested in adding that.
“My background is as an elementary school teacher. I spent eight years teaching in Chicago public schools, and it was one of the things that I noticed and observed from my own students when they played games, they would spend so much money to actually have to win the game,” Barnett said.
But predatory practices in mobile gaming go beyond just in-game spending. Free games with ads can be an issue, as they can sometimes serve up inappropriate material for children or malware.
“They’d also be hit with lots of ads and microtransactions that might not have been appropriate for where they were at developmentally. Things that were just too mature of content or inappropriate in some nature. And it just felt like for us, it’s a nice way for us to signal the safety that we have as a brand, that it’s a one-time purchase and then you can play within a contained universe that has offline mode, no ads, no microtransactions, and really is safe for kids and families,” Barnett said.
The missing source code has also played a role in why the remastered Backyard Baseball has been a digital-only product so far, though Waters said “there has been a lot of interest” on releasing discs and carts. “I wouldn’t be surprised at some point in the future if we did that just because it taps into the nostalgia of the brand overall.”
License to play
Another issue was rights and licensing. The Backyard series debuted in 1997 from Humongous Entertainment, with Atari as its publisher. But it had been dormant for years thanks to Atari’s bankruptcy, with the rights split among multiple parties. Once Playground got the rights, it found several problems involving licensing and other matters.
Barnett needed a private investigator to help track down who held the rights, eventually landing on Ari Pinchot and Avi Savitski of Crystal City Entertainment. The process to purchase the rights took two-and-a-half years.
Since all of the players in the old games were retired, Playground couldn’t just deal with player associations such as the MLBPA or the NFLPA and call it a day. It had to do some digging. They turned to Zach Oliver, a friend of Waters who had sold his NIL firm, Matchpoint. He helped track down some of the retired players.
“One of my favorite stories is Randall Cunningham,” Waters said. “He was in Backyard Football ’99. He is now a pastor at a church, and Zach called the church, and that’s how he got him back.”
