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 will be released for consoles in 2025, 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.
BACKYARD IS BACK!
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.
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Getting the rights to Backyard Sports
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.
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- Backyard Baseball ’97 brings Backyard Sports back next month
“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
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