Backyard Baseball 1997 is back in all of its nostalgic glory, sliding onto Steam like Pablo Sanchez when he steals a base. But before Mega Cat Studios could remaster the cult favorite PC game, founder James Deighan had to sift through almost thirty years of detritus.
Playground Productions, a children’s media company, scored the rights to the Backyard Sports games, which were originally put out by Humongous Entertainment for Windows PCs. But the now-defunct video game developer didn’t do a great job at archiving its software when it was bought, sold, and dismantled for parts during the 2000s.
“[Playground] sent us this massive box of Zip disks and files and CD ROMs and just all sorts of things from over the years,” Deighan told TechCrunch. He sifted through the materials with Luke Usher, an engineer who specializes in emulators (programs that allow computers or other devices to imitate video game consoles, like an iPhone app that lets you play Pokémon). But Usher and Deighan discovered a key problem.
“I noticed that the source code was missing for the games that we were trying to work with,” Usher told TechCrunch. “So we got a hold of a copy of the disc of Baseball ‘97, then started from there, and then it became apparent that we’d need to modify the game to get it to run nicely on modern systems. So I started searching the web to see if anybody had worked with that game before.”
That’s how they met John Simon, an engineer who had been modding the Backyard Sports games for fun.
“It’s just something I do from time to time when I really like a game. I play the game, I beat the game, and you know, the replay value is gone, but I haven’t had enough,” Simon told TechCrunch. “So what do you do? For me as a programmer, as a reverse engineer, it’s fun to just go in and dig into the source and see if there are any developer secrets left behind, or incomplete content, the kind stuff you see on the cutting room floor.”
When Deighan leads projects like this, where a retro game is being brought back to life, he tries to hire from within the fan communities of those games.
“One of the first things we do is we extend the Mega Cat team with people that have already been living in that space for some number of years,” Deighan said. This was also true of a project Mega Cat worked on with NES Mike Tyson games. “So as an example, when we worked on Mike Tyson [i.e. Punch-Out! for NES], we were working closely with Mike Tyson ROM hackers, and speedrunners, and people that know every single corner of it, because they often end up being not only 20 times more passionate, but much more knowledgeable.”
Simon’s expertise with the Backyard Sports franchise proved especially useful, since it’s built within SCUMM, an obsolete game engine that LucasArts released in 1987.
“There might be maybe two dozen people globally that are actively contributing to or working in [SCUMM],” Deighan said. “It’s very much like a legacy artifact from a previous era.”
Even at the time of Backyard Baseball’s original release, SCUMM was already phasing out of use.
“Somehow, the Humongous developers back in the 90s, they built a 3D game inside of this 2D game engine,” Simon said. “Somehow they turned it into a sports game – it’s kind of an insane achievement, especially back in 1997.”
Simon was able to modify assets and scripts from Backyard Baseball using ScummVM, an open source interpreter of the game engine (the programmer behind the 2001 software, Ludvig Strigeus, went on to become one of Spotify’s first developers). But Mega Cat still had the problem of getting the retooled Backyard Baseball to run on modern devices. That was Usher’s job.
“That involved basically building a framework that can hijack the game when you try to run it, take over the control, and then run our own code before the game code starts, and use it as an opportunity to apply patches, make changes, fix bugs, hook into Steam, that kind of thing,” he said. “So the game doesn’t really know it’s been modified, but we jump in before it has a chance to start.”
Although Mega Cat’s team spent a lot of time in the weeds on the kinds of niche issues that crop up with retro gaming, they didn’t lose sight of the joy of bringing Backyard Baseball back to life. The game has such an enduring fanbase that even the Kelce brothers looked into buying the rights.
“Some of us were doing these things for free for 10 years, so it’s kind of a dream type of project to be a part of,” Deighan said. “It’s such a fun sleeper hit for fandom, for people to kind of hit that nostalgia button and go back in time.”
The tension with Backyard Baseball, though, is that most of its fans, who played the game when they were young, are now in their 20s and 30s. So, a game with a difficulty level geared toward children using computers for the first time might be too easy. But Mega Cat and Playground decided to keep the game true to its original version, instead adding in Steam achievements for players who want an extra challenge.
“We very much believe in preservation,” Deighan said. “Our emphasis was more around, what can we do that allows that digital preservation to stand alone, while also having all these other replayability and collaborative features added in?”
Now, Backyard Baseball 1997 is available on Steam, but Mega Cat’s work isn’t done. With Playground Productions, they will also be remastering Backyard Soccer ‘98, Backyard Football ‘99, Backyard Basketball ‘01, Backyard Baseball ‘01, and Backyard Hockey ‘02.
“The fans have been showing up like crazy,” Deighan said. “It’s easy to stay excited.”