Available Platform: Windows

Backyard Baseball is a baseball game created by Humongous Entertainment and released for Windows and Macintosh in 1997.

Play in 3 modes: single game, season play and batting practice. From the Manufacturer. In Backyard Baseball 2005 you get to play with pro hero’s-when they were kids! In this all 3D, baseball experience, enjoy the thrill of controlling your own Backyard Sports team! Features: All 30 MLB team logos and colors.

Game Review

Backyard Baseball is a baseball game created by Humongous Entertainment and released for Windows and Macintosh in 1997.

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It's the first of a long series of successful titles, the last one of which was released in 2015.

The idea of a videogame about kids playing baseball was developed by Nick Mirkovich, illustrator and animator. He presented the concept to the legendary Ron Gilbert (not only the creator of Maniac Mansion but also the founder of Humongous), and after a while, he approved. The design team was made of Mirkovich, Richard Moe (a programmer), and Mark Peyser (a graphic designer).

The game created by the trio was brilliant and totally unique. High-quality hand-drawn cartoon graphics, fluid animations, excellent gameplay, and, most importantly, a fantastic character design. The baseball players, 30 kids, were designed with their own look&feel and personality. Vaguely inspired to the Peanuts, they are also a great example of diversity: 15 boys, 15 girls, all in different sizes, colors, and races.

Somehow the kids remind me of movies such as The Bad News Bears (an amazing 1976 movie with Walter Matthau), and 'The sandlot', except that in the game, there are many more girls :)

Anyway, the kids in Backyard Baseball are so cute it's impossible not to fall in love with them. For each one of them, composer Rhett Mathis created a specific theme song. This was probably one of the most memorable elements of this game.

As you could expect from a sports sim, there are also top players. In this case, the real star is a short kid called Pablo Sanchez. Even if he looks like the worst player, he is the greatest one, and everybody loved him. Believe it or not, Pablo Sanchez is one of the most beloved videogames characters ever created.

Curiously, Backyard Baseball was developed using the SCUMM game engine, the same used in many graphics adventure. It's a great example of the flexibility of the engine invented by Ron Gilbert. Apparently, creating a sports sim was totally possible. The basic mechanic is indeed quite simple. Still, the game supports different fields, tournaments, different stats for the players, and even a sort of Mario Kart-style power-ups.

Backyard Baseball is simply one of the most popular videogames ever created. So what are you waiting for? Download and play it!

Review by: Manu
Published: 3 November 2019, 5:13 pm

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Baseball is a hugely popular sport in many countries, including the USA and Japan. Here in the UK however, it never really caught on. In school, we play a similar game called “Rounders”, which is frankly a stupid name well worthy of ridicule. There have been lots of computer simulations of Baseball, but Backyard Baseball is specifically aimed at children. In the game, the player will need to pick and manage his or her team of neighborhood kids and take them up all the way to the Backyard Baseball World Series. The original game (which we’re covering here) was released in 1997 and went on to launch a successful series that’s still going strong today.

Installing and playing

The original Backyard Baseball is a 16 bit game which means it cannot run natively on more modern versions of Windows. You could install a Windows XP virtual machine and play the game there. Rather than doing that however, you may wish to use ScummVM instead. ScummVM is a special program that helps older adventure games to run. Now, you’re probably thinking “a baseball simulator doesn’t sound much like an adventure game”, but remember this is a children’s baseball game and so has a few similarities to a point and click adventure game. Because of this, it’s supported by ScummVM and easy to run on modern machines.

To run the game with ScummVM, simply copy the entire contents of the games CD-ROM to a convenient location on your PC, then point ScummVM to the folder. There’s a comprehensive tutorial here that takes you through all the steps in detail.

There are no CD audio tracks to copy, so once the CD is copied and ScummVM is configured and options set to taste, you’re good to go.