If you ask numerous millennials what they thought of the Backyard Sports series, they’d probably praise it to no end. Everyone had their favorite sports game that always felt like it held up to the test of time. Maybe because it was the first I played, but Backyard Baseball was always my favorite. Regardless, Backyard Sports had a sports game for anyone. And its back with Backyard Baseball ’97.
The series felt fresh and chill, and it was a great introduction to gaming, covering all the major US sports you’d find kids playing in their free time, like basketball, football, soccer, and even hockey. Best of all, it was for literally everyone. And now its original release is available again as Backyard Baseball ’97. But most importantly, it’s targeting the nostalgia right in ways many other gaming companies seem to miss when it comes to bringing a classic game to modern audiences.
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But before covering why Mega Cat Studios is doing nostalgia right, we should consider why these sports games always seemed so appealing, even beyond Backyard Baseball. The most key part was the series’ roster. The roster had the same kids appearing in about every iteration, but they did something major with it that wasn’t seen much back then.
The cast was diverse, with kids of different genders, races, backgrounds, and disabilities playing together on a playground, especially as a large kid who regularly got bullied on the playground in elementary school, seeing even large kids playing a fun sport with their friends a fun aspiration to play, even digitally.
Booting Backyard Baseball ’97 for the first time brought back all those feelings. I felt that happiness when I was younger, playing this game all the time after school. Of trying to pick the best team imaginable (which, of course, Pablo Sanchez was on). And of what the game initially taught me about baseball. Growing up in Cincinnati, I went to many Cincinnati Reds games. Going to the games wasn’t enough to have me understand the sport, especially as a kid who definitely had undiagnosed ADHD.
Yet Backyard Sports was also one of those games in the back of one’s mind. I know I didn’t think about it first when asked, “What’s your favorite childhood game?” But if someone mentions ANY Backyard Sports game, that conversation will quickly evolve and stay on why whoever was a part of that discussion loved those games. And why is that? First, they were playable on so many different PCs that if your family didn’t have a good or modern computer, it couldn’t run many recently released games. It also made every sport simplistic so that you could pick up and have fun no matter what.
Plus, it made the game understandable for kids. The mechanics could be in-depth if you wanted more out of it. For Backyard Baseball ’97, pitch types, batting power, direction, stealing, who and how you passed the ball, and player statistics are all within your control. But you could get by throwing fastballs down the middle or swinging with what you have and who you have at bat.
There is one downside to technology evolving as quickly as it did. Programs and games from a bygone era quickly become obsolete, making them tough to run on modern hardware. With this new release, there was a lot of potential to shake things up by adding lots of new or updated graphics or images. But Mega Cat Studios didn’t. They simply made the game accessible on Steam and playable on modern computers. That’s it. And after playing several matches, that was precisely the right call.
At first, it was odd that the game was not completely full-screen or had no complete options menu. But who knows how that would have affected the original game in and of itself. For a game as simple as Backyard Baseball ’97, changing a lot more than how you could access it could have broken the game, and reading the current patch notes shows that that was probably the case.
Regardless, in an era where game preservation continues to be an ongoing important topic, especially as we approach a more digital future, just releasing a classic game to be available again, even more so at a price as low as $10, feels rare but great when it does happen.
Especially as newer games fall to obsoletion almost at a faster rate than older games used to, with online games losing servers, games, and their DLC getting pulled from digital storefronts with no physical alternative, and store servers going offline, pulling digital-only games down forever, the future of gaming feels depressing. We need more games to release to keep those relics available as an option, not only for game preservation but also to let developers’ hard work continue to be played no matter when you want to boot it up.
If you want that nostalgic feeling again, having that game just be there to remind you of why you enjoyed playing that game. Scratch that nostalgia itch. Backyard Baseball ’97 does just that with its release on Steam. All the classic sounds, the characters and their intros, and the announcers shot me back to a more innocent time in my life. And with it, it made me remember so much about my younger years that I thought I had forgotten about.
Those games from our youth end up meaning more to us than we ever realize. They have so many latent memories tied to them, like a smell or returning to a location we haven’t been to in years. And I hope that more games and studios follow Mega Cat Studios’ lead and make those old games accessible again. Maybe people just want to own those games again; perhaps they want to replay them for the first time in who knows how many years. Or perhaps they want to show their child or young relative where they started their favorite hobby. In any case, there will most likely be an audience for it, no matter the reason.
Backyard Baseball ’97 is available on PC.
