The gang’s all back together
Tell your mom to fire up some pizza rolls, grab your favorite soda of choice, and come back in time with me to the early 2000s because the Backyard Baseball games are back!
If you’re a child of the ‘90s like me and you grew up loving both sports and video games, you almost definitely played the Backyard Sports games. Originally developed by Humongous Entertainment, the original game, Backyard Baseball, released in 1997 as a PC game for Windows and Macintosh.
Humongous then expanded its horizons and released games for other sports. First up was Backyard Soccer in 1998, followed by Backyard Football in 1999; a few years later, Humongous released Backyard Basketball in October of 2001 and Backyard Hockey the following October.
The original baseball game was made up of about 30 kids in the neighborhood, and they would compete against each other in the Backyard Baseball League. You picked your team, set the lineup, and tried to win the prestigious Ultra Grand Championship of the Universe Series which kinda makes the “World Series” seem small by comparison, huh???
The original game had some icons like Pablo Sanchez aka “Secret Weapon”, Pete Wheeler, Kiesha Phillips, and the Khan brothers Achmed and Amir. In the 1997 game, the roster of neighborhood kids had four ratings (batting, running fielding and pitching) on a scale of 1-4, with four being the highest, and before there was Shohei Ohtani, there was Pablo Sanchez.
Sanchez is the most five-tools baseball player in history. He was a 4 in batting, fielding, and running, and “only” a 3 in pitching. Pete Wheeler is the fastest kid in the game, Kiesha Phillips is easily the best girl in the neighborhood, and the Khan brothers were, quite literally, the Bash Brothers of the PC world.
It wasn’t that these kids were good baseball players, either; these kids felt real. They had their own personalities and their own theme songs.
Just like an MLB roster, the Backyard Baseball roster had kids from all different walks of life. Pablo Sanchez doesn’t speak English; Kenny Kawaguchi, aka the K-Man, is in a wheelchair, and the ratio of white to non-white characters and male to female characters is perfectly balanced. Believe it or not, but the Backyard Baseball franchise was a trailblazer for representation and diversity.
The Backyard franchise’s popularity hit new levels when Backyard Baseball 2001 combined the original 30 neighborhood kids, with youthful versions of MLB players. The 2001 game had all 30 MLB teams represented with one player and it included some future Hall of Famers like Randy Johnson, Derek Jeter, and Chipper Jones. Cal Ripken Jr. was the cover athlete of the 2001 game, while the 2002 edition, which I had, had Mike Piazza gracing the cover.
That leads us to today, when the Backyard franchise was rereleased for modern consoles. Is it a cheap play on our nostalgia? Probably. But we’re also living in a world where we just got our seventh Jurassic Park movie, our ninth Superman movie is releasing this week, and King of the Hill, my favorite show ever, is getting revived for a 14th season in August.
Anyway the original game, which was being advertised as Backyard Baseball ‘97, was rereleased for Windows last October, moved to iOS and Android in March, before ultimately landing on the Nintendo Switch and PS5 in June. A remastered version of Backyard Baseball 2001, developed by Mega Cat Studios, came out Tuesday for Windows and mobile. I of course, bought both and the gameplay is exactly how my 8-year-old self remembers it…warts and all.
Fielding any kind of ball in the air is dicy at best, and maddening at worst. Unless your outfielder is in the exact coordinate location of where the fly ball is tracking, the ball will more often than not drop right in front of them. Hitting also seems to be more finicky than the original PC version, so be prepared to say “that’s baseball!” after weak pop outs to second.
All those frustrations, however, as evened out by the positively Looney Tunes-esque power ups you can unlock after striking out a batter or pulling off a double play. The Aluminum Power power up allows you to mash balls to the next Zip code, while the Fireball pitch makes a Paul Skenes 101 fastball look like it’s on a tee.
Forget your Diamond Dynasty on The Show, you can really stack your team in the 2001 remaster. Want to have Randy Johnson throwing nothing but heaters? Go right ahead. Want to have a middle infield tandem of Jeter and A-Rod, with Chipper Jones and Jeff Bagwell at the corners? You can do it. Want child Mark McGwire and his suspiciously powerful bat to launch nuke after nuke? You can! And you don’t have to toil away with the micro transactions that bog down today’s games to build a stacked team, you can have an All-Star lineup 1-9 from game one of your season.
The players to choose from range from Hall of Famers (Tony Gwynn! Larry Walker!) to perennial All-Stars (Nomar! Kenny Lofton) to Remember Some Guys™ (Marty Cordova!!! Jeremy Burnitz!!!)
Not only can you use MLB players on the 2001 game, but you can use the logos from the teams of that year. That’s right folks, the Montreal Expos are alive and well, the AL West is back to four teams, and the Astros are back in the NL Central. You also get some kinda sorta vintage logos like the Padres white and orange SD, the old Florida Marlins look, and, my favorite, the Angels’ red A with the white angel wings.
As it stands right now, Backyard Baseball 2001 is only out for PC, iOS, and Android. I’m playing it only iPhone and I don’t like the gameplay as much as I do playing the ‘97 game on my Switch. It’s all touchscreen on iOS, and things get a little cramped.
Still, the Backyard franchise being revived is a delight and I can’t recommend getting the game enough. Whether you grew up with them like me, or it’s your first time ever playing it, Backyard Baseball serves as a reminder about how we came love baseball: by playing in the yard with the other neighborhood kids.