Backyard Baseball 1997 is back in all its nostalgic glory as it slides onto Steam like Pablo Sanchez stole a base. But before Mega Cat Studios could remaster the popular PC game, founder James Deighan had to sift through nearly three decades’ worth of debris.
Children’s media company Playground Productions has acquired the rights to the Backyard Sports game, originally published by Humongous Entertainment for Windows PC. But the now-defunct video game developer didn’t do a great job archiving its software as it was purchased, sold, and taken apart for parts in the 2000s.
“(Playground) sent us a huge box of Zip disks, files, CD ROMs, all kinds of stuff they’d collected over the years,” Deighan told TechCrunch. He looked at the material with Luke Usher, an engineer who specializes in emulators (programs that allow a computer or other device to imitate a video game console, such as an iPhone app that lets you play Pokemon). But Usher and Dayhan discovered an important problem.
“We discovered that the source code for the game we were trying to work on was missing,” Usher told TechCrunch. “So we got a copy of the Baseball ’97 disc and went from there. It then became clear that the game needed to be modified to run smoothly on modern systems. So I started looking on the web to see if anyone had worked on that game before.”
That’s how they met John Simon, an engineer who was modding Backyard Sports games for fun.
“This is something I do sometimes when I really like the game. I played the game, I beat the game, and you know, the replay value was gone, but it wasn’t enough,” Simon told TechCrunch. “So what do you do? As a programmer and reverse engineer, it’s fun to go into the source and see if there are developer secrets left behind or incomplete content that can be seen in the editing room.”
When Deighan leads projects like this, where retro games are brought back to life, he tries to recruit from within the game’s fan community.
“One of the first things we’re doing is expanding the Mega Cat team with people who have already been living in the space for a few years,” Deighan said. This was also the case with the project Mega Cat worked on with the NES Mike Tyson game. “For example, when we were working on Mike Tyson (i.e. Punch-Out! for the NES), we worked closely with Mike Tyson ROM hackers, speedrunners, and all-around know-it-alls. Not only are they 20 times more passionate, but they are also much more knowledgeable.”
Simon’s expertise in the Backyard Sports franchise proved particularly useful as it was built within SCUMM, an old-school game engine released by LucasArts in 1987.
“There are probably two dozen people around the world who actively contribute or work for (SCUMM),” Deighan said. “It’s very similar to a heritage relic from an earlier era.”
Even when Backyard Baseball was first released, SCUMM was already being phased out.
“Anyway, in the ’90s, the Humongous developers created a 3D game inside this 2D game engine,” Simon said. “Somehow they made it into a sports game. It was a crazy achievement, especially in 1997.”
Simon was able to modify Backyard Baseball’s assets and scripts using ScummVM, an open-source interpreter of the game engine (in 2001, software developer Ludvig Strigeus would later become one of Spotify’s first developers). However, Mega Cat still had issues getting the revamped Backyard Baseball to run on newer devices. That was Usher’s job.
“It basically involved building a framework that could hijack the game and take over control when it tried to run, then execute its own code before the game code started and use that as an opportunity to patch, change, and modify. Bugs, things like connecting to Steam,” he said. “So the game doesn’t really know if it’s been modified, but it jumps in before it even starts.”
The team at Mega Cat has spent a lot of time solving niche problems that arise in retro games, but they haven’t missed the joy of bringing Backyard Baseball back to life. The game has such an enduring fan base that even the Kelce brothers considered purchasing the rights.
“Some of us have been doing this for free for 10 years. So this is kind of a dream project to be part of,” Deighan said. “It’s a really fun sleeper hit for the fandom. It lets people hit their nostalgia button and take them back in time.”
However, the tension in backyard baseball is that most of the fans who enjoyed baseball as children are now in their 20s and 30s. So games with a level of difficulty aimed at children who are using a computer for the first time may be too easy. However, rather than keeping the game faithful to the original version, Mega Cat and Playground decided to add Steam achievements for players looking for an extra challenge.
“We believe very much in conservation,” Deighan said. “The question we’re emphasizing is, how do we keep digital preservation independent while adding all the other regenerative and collaborative capabilities?”
Backyard Baseball 1997 is now available on Steam, but Mega Cat’s work isn’t done yet. Additionally, Playground Productions will be remastering Backyard Soccer ’98, Backyard Football ’99, Backyard Basketball ’01, Backyard Baseball ’01, and Backyard Hockey ’02.
“The fans turned out like crazy,” Deighan said. “It’s easy to stay excited.”
