The original Backyard Baseball is returning in the form of a new remaster that will launch in early October. A little more than a month ago, Playground Productions announced that it was working on a revival of the Backyard Sports franchise. The series, which was hugely popular for kids in the 90s and early 2000s, was comprised of a litany of titles that included Backyard Baseball, Backyard Football, Backyard Soccer, and numerous others. Now, the game that started it all, Backyard Baseball, is set to make a comeback and pave the way for the future of the franchise.
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Detailed in a press release, Playground Productions revealed that it has partnered with Mega Cat Studios for Backyard Baseball ’97. This new version of the first Backyard Baseball game has been fully remastered and will come to PC via Steam next month on October 10th at a cost of $9.99. In tandem with this announcement, an initial reveal trailer of Backyard Baseball ’97 has been released and can be viewed below.
What’s surprising about this re-release of Backyard Baseball is that the game’s original source code was lost after its launch in 1997. As a result, the prospect of simply re-releasing or remastering the title has proven to be very difficult over the years. Playground Productions says that the team at Mega Cat “accomplished a near-impossible feat by hacking the original CD-ROM and developing new game builds to be compatible with current generation PCs.” Because of this, Backyard Baseball ’97 is currently only going to come to PC, but a release on other platforms down the road hasn’t been ruled out.
Moving forward, Playground Productions has stressed that it’s still focused on the future of the Backyard Sports franchise, which suggests that completely new games are in the works. Other than this, though, Playground CEO Lindsay Barnett says that the company wants to still “honor the past by restoring the games that started it all”. With this in mind, it seems quite likely that remasters for Backyard Football, Backyard Soccer, Backyard Basketball, and others could also arrive in the months or years ahead.
