During its panel at New York Comic Con, Playground Productions not only reminisced about the return and re-release of the beloved Backyard Sports video games, but also announced that it will be adding Backyard Basketball ’01 and Backyard Hockey ’02 to its retro Backyard Sports collection in mid-November, as well as Backyard Baseball ’97 good results and events will be announced, and she also shared some recent details about the upcoming animated special of the series.
To learn more, IGN had the opportunity to talk with Playground Productions CEO Lindsay Barnett and Chief Product Officer Chris Waters about the past and future of this fan-favorite series. We started by talking about what makes these games so special.
“We think it works because games have always been character-driven, comedic and accessible,” Waters said. “These games weren’t about, ‘Hey, let’s do the most incredibly realistic simulation,’ but ‘let’s recreate the experience of what it feels like to go outside and pick up a bat and a ball, grab the friends you have nearby, whether they’re athletic or not, and go out and play some baseball and see what madness comes out of it. This madness transcends time and technology.”
The Backyard Sports retro library will be completed in mid-November, with new features coming to Backyard Baseball ’97
Whether you’re new to the series or returning to it, you’ll be happy to know that the Backyard Sports retro library will be complete when Backyard Basketball ’01 and Backyard Hockey ’02 release on Steam in mid-November. Oh, and did we mention that both will be free to download and keep?
These games, along with Baseball ’97, Baseball ’01, Football ’99, and Soccer ’98, will also be part of the Backyard Sports Retro bundle, which will be available for $36, which is a 40% savings when purchasing all games individually. Players will even be able to “complete the bundle” and pay only for games you don’t already own at a lower price.
Additionally, the mobile versions of Backyard Soccer ’98 and Backyard Basketball ’01 will be free on iOS and Android when the Steam Retro Bundle becomes available late next month.
Speaking of mobile devices, Backyard Baseball ’97 is getting a new gamification feature in partnership with Lucra. Fans can now compete against each other in weekly and monthly events such as the Home Run and Most Strikeouts competitions.
Global high scores will be tracked in real time, and the new feature will be free for fans, with even opportunities to win 2025 World Series tickets, a Pablo Sanchez trading card and more. The feature will launch on iOS, and players will be required to opt-in and provide some personal information.
“We want to enable this community to grow and allow players to interact with each other,” Waters said of the new gamification features. “Again, without the source code we can’t make these games, but by adding a tournament layer to them, we’re kind of creating a backdoor co-op mode.”
An interesting fact is that Playground Productions did not receive the source code for most of these games when they acquired the rights, so the team had to hack old CD-ROMs and rebuild the games themselves.
“We thought these games were just dead,” Barrett told us. “And that was an amazing feat that Mega Cat Studios pulled off, which was to reverse engineer and hack the CD-ROMs to make them playable. What we didn’t know in all of this was that we would be able to make the games even better and we could fix some bugs that existed in the original games, add leaderboards and competitions, and just make them playable on systems that even then didn’t exist like the Nintendo Switch.”
The future of backyard sports includes an animated special that just wrapped production
We then moved our conversation to the future. While the team wasn’t ready to reveal anything about future games just yet, they did confirm that Backyard Sports has officially completed work on a recent animated special that builds on the franchise’s beloved IP and characters.
The special is produced by Lighthouse Studios, known for its work on Bob’s Burgers and Rick & Morty, and will feature an “all-star cast” to be announced in early November. As for the release date, the special will be released at Dave & Buster’s in early 2026 and will hit consumers shortly thereafter.
“What makes Backyard Sports special are the heroes,” Waters said. “For us, the opportunity to take our favorite characters and bring them to life in a new way was a no-brainer because we had already said that this was a cross-platform franchise that we wanted to take beyond games. We all loved how beautiful the animation was in the games and how much love and care they put into it, which made you love and understand the characters and made you want to choose a specific character. So we are really, really honored, that we can extend this to more animations.
“With this special, we wanted to establish the tone, the look, and really put our flag out there to say that Backyard is a cross-platform franchise. You’ll be able to experience it in many different ways. I can’t wait until we can say more, but I can promise you that I have 20 years of experience in animation and we’ve gone to great lengths to create something that captures the tone, magic, and comedy of this world.”
The Backyard Sports team wants these games and multimedia projects to show how interesting sports can be, and for a new generation to enjoy them alongside those who grew up with them.
“Streamers picked up these games, and people don’t watch them because they’re amazing video game players,” Waters said. “They watch them because they bring these kids to life through their own lens. It reminds you of what it’s like to play baseball when you first pick up a glove, a bat and a ball and just play for fun. I think that’s what has had the biggest impact on why it’s truly a timeless and classic brand.”
“It’s a celebration of all the different characters in your backyard and all of their strengths and maybe even some of their weaknesses,” Barnett added. “You laugh and you go through everything together. You play together and you may win, you may lose, but you always had a good time doing it. And unfortunately a lot of sports, not just sports video games but sports in general, aren’t like that anymore.”
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, AND Tiktok, and listen to his program, Talking about the magic of Disney.
