It was the great singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell who once said, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” I think she was talking about trees or something, but I’m sure even she would agree that one of the world’s greatest tragedies was when the Backyard Sports video game franchise disappeared roughly a decade ago.
After an outstanding, almost 20-year run from 1997 all the way through 2015, the series seemingly vanished into thin air. The beloved games featured a diverse and quirky cast of cartoon kids with big personalities playing sports like baseball and soccer in the “backyards” or parking lots of their neighborhoods. Complete with thematic rules, power-ups that played on childlike imagination, and scenery fitting the Sandlot vibe, there wasn’t anything on the market that compared to these approachable and creative sports games for kids.
Unfortunately, as former Beatles member George Harrison once said, “All Things Must Pass,” and Backyard Sports was no exception. After changing hands behind the scenes multiple times between 2005 and 2015, the then-current owner of the franchise ultimately went bankrupt around 2020, putting the future of the games in peril. It was around that time that I tried to pay tribute to my favorite childhood pastime by using Pablo Sanchez’s likeness on a custom t-shirt I was making for a softball league I was in. I should’ve expected to get shut down on copyright infringement, but when I couldn’t figure out who owned the rights to Pablo in order to get permission, I gave up and went in a different direction. Luckily, someone else tried a little bit harder to get to the bottom of what was happening.
Batter Up!
Enter Lindsay Barnett, current CEO of Playground Productions and my personal hero. At the same time I was creating bootleg uniforms, Lindsay literally was hiring a private investigator to track down the rights to Backyard Sports to see if she could revive the series. Lindsay loved the franchise as a kid, and as an elementary school teacher, she longed for kid-friendly computer games her students could play during the COVID-19 pandemic. After years of working on a full reboot, the time is nearly here, and a new Backyard Baseball is set for release on July 9, 2026!
I had the opportunity to demo the all-new Backyard Derby mode at PAX East 2026, as well as chat with Lindsay herself! While I loved getting back to the backyard, the real highlight was our conversation. As a lifelong fan myself, all I wanted to know was that my old friends were being taken care of. When Lindsay offered to show me a picture of her son on her phone background, only to reveal an image of Pablo Sanchez, I knew these characters couldn’t possibly be in better hands. I have no doubt she and the entire team at Playground Productions are going to knock it out of the park. Or as the great Pablo Sanchez once said, “Adios, beisbol!”
Here’s my interview with Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Playground Productions (edited for clarity):
The History of Backyard Baseball
Zack Gulinello: You’re a hero to so many people who hold the franchise near and dear to their hearts. What makes Backyard Baseball so special to you that you put in all this work to bring it back?
Lindsay Barnett: People talk about nostalgia a lot in the sense of it being a dopamine hit where you say, “Oh, that reminds me of something.” I actually think that’s only a very, very small part of Backyard Sports. To me, Backyard Sports represents a time in a lot of millennials’ lives where the greatest thing you could be was a kid. Today, I think what kids need more than ever is a true joy of play. If you talk about Backyard Baseball, no one says, “Oh, I was the greatest,” or “I won this many games.” They talk about the characters or the comedy, or they’ll start reciting lines and taunts. We’ve now gotten the experience of bringing this back, seeing families come together from it, and to me, if our legacy can be that families are getting together, kids are happy going outside and playing, and they’re not growing up too fast, that’s all I want.
If our legacy can be that families are getting together, kids are happy going outside and playing, and they’re not growing up too fast, that’s all I want.
Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Playground Productions
ZG: Tell me about it. I can’t wait to share it with my kids. My two-and-a-half-year-old daughter is just starting to play some games with me, and this is the perfect thing to get her into. I remember when I was younger, I would bring Backyard Baseball with me when I would visit my dad’s office, and his co-workers would always play with me and get a kick out of it, so I let them know it’s coming back and everyone is excited. All these memories are very meaningful!
LB: Obviously, my background is as a teacher, and people have been asking me what this has to do with education, but the original publisher, Humongous Entertainment, had several educational games! You might say, “What’s educational about Backyard Baseball?” but it taught the rules of sports, and it taught an entire generation how to play. Now when we talk to professional athletes about their experiences with these games, they tell us they learned how to play because of Backyard Sports. We just did a line of Wilson products, and they said it was one of their best-selling Little League equipment lines. So a bunch of kids must’ve been out there playing our remasters of the old games and then decided to go out and play!
ZG: That’s a perfect segue! I was going to ask you about that because obviously it is a nostalgia trip, but I’m seeing on social media that it seems like young kids are excited for these games too. Are you finding a mix of fans from old to young?
LB: So first of all, we did learn that millennials are our core consumer, and for this new Backyard Baseball game, we made sure to have a level and a mode that all of the original fans who are true gamers now can play up to their preferred difficulty. But we are having tons of kids now who are interested in the games, and it’s really because they’re watching their favorite streamers and athletes talk about it, and they love it. That’s the greatest endorsement — if someone that these kids think is really cool is playing a good, wholesome, fun sports game — and now everyone’s learning that Pablo Sanchez is the greatest athlete of all time.
(A father and son walk by, and the dad says, “Tell your mother this is what I want for my birthday, Backyard Baseball!”)
LB: That’s awesome; that’s what we’re talking about! But anyways, we also just released an animated special, and that was a huge boost in our kid audience. We got to grow up in the prime era of Nickelodeon, Disney, PBS, and Cartoon Network, and there was so much great content, but no one makes the same kind of content anymore. We had a writer who worked on Hey, Arnold! come write for our animated special, and we took the animation team from Rick and Morty and Bob’s Burgers. We feel very grateful that we were able to deliver a piece that kids responded to.
Staying True to the Original Characters
ZG: Well, I also responded to it! I was going to ask you about it because I was so struck by how fleshed out the characters were, and I don’t have any recollection of there being that sort of media presence with the kids back in the day. The characters always had so much flair and felt real, but how did you write them so organically [for 2026], given they never had more than a walk-up song and a few lines of dialogue?
LB: Well, shout out to the original creators [at Humongous] to be able to tell a story with just those clips, like you said. You get so much about who the character is in such a small snippet. That way of thinking about everything made the storytelling so easy to be like, “Of course, that’s exactly what Pete Wheeler would say!” As a producer, I can confidently say that’s what a character would or wouldn’t do, and it’s all a testament to the original creators and the creativity they showed with the characters. They had such a rich environment that we can continue to hopefully create more stories in.
ZG: As corny as it sounds, it means a lot to me as someone who grew up with these characters to know you have such an appreciation for them and deeply understand who they are and what they represent. I can tell this isn’t just something like a money grab.
LB: Absolutely, we felt like it really was just a bunch of old friends who came back to hang out and didn’t miss a beat. We are an indie studio, and we’ve had a lot of offers to work with bigger companies or investors, but we have remained 100% independent because we get to make choices that are important to us. Some things might not be the biggest money-making opportunities in year one, but being able to take good care of a brand for the longevity of it is important. We’re not going away anytime soon. We’re back, and we’re here to stay.
We’re not going away anytime soon. We’re back, and we’re here to stay.
Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Playground Productions
ZG: Well, I truly have to thank you!
LB: Well, as important as it was to get the rights to the brand, it’s the original fans that have brought it back. We have this crazy situation where we didn’t have the original source code, so the team at Mega Cat Studios [who is developing the new game] went and cracked the code. But only because they were kids that loved this game and grew up to be software engineers. Time and time again, I’ve heard how much this brand has inspired people. It’s so cool to see the reporters and the athletes and the Kelce brothers go on their podcast and say this was their favorite game when they grew up. That helps!
Major League Star Power
ZG: That’s a great point. I’ve been impressed with the big names that are associated with it, and I noticed there’s some major celebrities in the animated special voice cast. When you were working on that, how did you get such an impressive cast, and did they know anything about the games? How do you coach someone on just like, “Hey here’s this two-second clip of Pablo Sanchez walking to the plate. Do that”?
LB: Well, as the voice of Vinnie the Gooch, I’ve been training my whole life for this…
ZG: Are you kidding? You’re Vinnie the Gooch?!
LB: [In Vinnie’s voice:] “I wouldn’t want to see that kid in a dark alley. I wouldn’t want to see him in a light alley, either. Alleys are scary.”
ZG: Are you kidding me?!
LB: I am Vinnie the Gooch; I’ve been waiting for this moment.
The guy who played Tony Delvecchio (Michael Vlamis) used to play college baseball, and this was his favorite game, so he said he would just walk around pretending to be Tony in his house. The voice of Dimitri Petrovich, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, played the games growing up. Arturo Castro, who played Pablo, did not play the game, but he has a cousin named Pablo Sanchez, and for his whole life people were like, “Oh, Pablo, he’s the G.O.A.T.,” so he said of all the parts he’s ever had, this is the one he got the most comments about.
Some of the people, like Tiffany Haddish, I never expected to get, and she didn’t grow up with the games, but she read about Kiesha Phillips and learned about her and decided that she was interested.
Balancing the Past and Present of Backyard Baseball
ZG: Amazing! And I saw that you were updating some characters like Kenny Kawaguchi to give him hair now, but how are you toeing that line between keeping the original characters the way they were and updating for a more modern audience?
LB: Almost every character is an exact design match of the original, but the few we changed were very intentional. Kenny is one of the few we changed, and a huge part of that was that I did not want people to think that he was sick. Kenny represents for the wheelchair community a strong athlete, and that was something that a lot of people thought about him, but making that change was as simple as hair and well thought out. We changed some small colors and textures, but for the most part, it’s pretty faithful.
Almost every character is an exact design match of the original, but the few we changed were very intentional.
Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Playground Productions
ZG: I think that’s great, because one of the best things about the original game is just the diversity of the cast and what an amazing group of characters they are. You always felt like they were inhabiting this real world, and all these best friends were just out on the sandlot having a good time.
ZG: But I’m curious too, because the coolest part in my opinion was that they all were very different gameplay-wise. Each one had their own skills, strengths, and weaknesses, and you could really feel that when you were playing. How did you bring that to the new kind of modern systems?
LB: One of the best things about Backyard is the comedy aspect of it, and part of that comedy is the falls, the bloopers, and the errors. In a hardcore simulation game, you might get frustrated when your second baseman falls down, but in our game, that’s like the special sauce that makes it fun. If anybody has kids around this age and you watch them play sports, it looks a lot like this. There are kids in the outfield picking flowers or sitting down and doing somersaults.
For us, some of our harder modes actually integrate more of that randomness and add to the comedy to make things funnier and harder. We’re also now integrating a global leaderboard so people can really compete in the Derby Mode and keep score, and now, going forward, we’re going to have multiplayer so you can play against your friends.
ZG: I can’t wait! Just wrapping up here with a couple more questions: I feel like everyone asks you the “Mount Rushmore” character question, but I’m curious which team name you usually pick. Are you a Wombat or a Melonhead? What’s your go-to?
LB: That’s a great question! I’m usually the Little Giants. You can see in real life that I’m huge: 5 feet tall or 5’1” on a great day. But my Little League team was the Giants, and it was also my high school mascot. They have to be blue because all the teams I grew up with were blue. But then, when I pick Maria Luna, I have to go pink so she gets a stat boost!
ZG: I didn’t realize there was a stat boost function. Is that new?
LB: No, that was in the old games! In the 2001 version, you could see when your players would get a little stat boost with the baseball chart, but in the 1997 version, it was all behind the scenes. There were things like the Khan brothers would get a boost when they were on the same team. It was really cool to see, and I have an older brother, so I know I’d play better if he was on my team too. We’ve added and made sure to keep some of the stuff like that for a great experience.
ZG: I can’t believe I didn’t realize that. I think people are going to eat that up, trying to figure out all the different combinations in these new games. That’s super cool.
The Future of Backyard Baseball
ZG: Speaking of the different versions, I was pretty loyal to the first one, but I know that they started adding real MLB players into these games. Is that something you’re looking into?
LB: I’ll say that this version of Backyard Baseball doesn’t have a date attached to it, and that’s intentional because year after year, sports games usually require fans buy a new game, but we’re not going to do that. We are going to have new DLC, updates, expansions, and exciting things so that if there’s anything that you have in your mind that you want to see, it can maybe come to fruition down the line. There might even be a movie and a TV show at some point. If we keep up the success and the fans show up, I think all of that will be very possible.
This version of Backyard Baseball doesn’t have a date attached to it, and that’s intentional.
Lindsay Barnett, CEO of Playground Productions
ZG: As long as I get a Vinnie the Gooch spin-off, I’m happy!
LB: I’m ready!!
Backyard Baseball, developed by Mega Cat Studios and published by Playground Productions, releases on July 9, 2026, for PC and Mac (via Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. A Steam demo is available now.
Zack has been hooked on games ever since his older brother taught him where to find the secret warp whistles in Mario Bros. 3. He has never felt more joy than when Yoshi congratulated him on getting 120 stars in Mario 64 or more sadness than when he played Kingdom Hearts 3 after waiting 14 years for it. Zack mails a letter to Nintendo every day asking them to bring back Chibi Robo and will gladly tell you all about why it’s one of the greatest games of all time. He was hoping that writing for the site would help him get through his backlog, but it actually just made it worse now that he’s hearing about so many more great hidden gems. Oops…
