Choose one among the many neighborhood kids and compete on an all-out local baseball tournament. Backyard Baseball is a series of baseball video games for.
Nick Mirkovich and Erik Haldi spent the 2001 baseball season dealing with biting trash talk. The two computer game designers were co-owners in an industry fantasy league in which every team owner came from gaming studios that had licenses with Major League Baseball, and all the big names were represented. Microsoft and 2K and EA had rosters, and so did a relative minnow amid those giants: Humongous Entertainment, Mirkovich and Haldi’s employer, and a company that had produced educational computer games for children for five years before branching out into sports. “There were plenty of other sports games where the characters or players had no personality. We didn’t want that. We wanted personality.”—Programmer Richard MoeCompeting in a standard fantasy baseball league against opponents with “big staffs and these big data analytics,” Haldi says, the Humongous Melonheads were the underdog. But Haldi and Mirkovich knew the sport, and the two Mariners fans shrewdly drafted Seattle second baseman Bret Boone, who wound up finishing his career year with 37 home runs and a league-leading 141 RBI, and added middle relievers to shore up their team’s late-season ratio stats on their way to the title.
“Everybody talked trash all year until we won, and then no one said anything,” Humongous animator Haldi says. “It was really kind of funny. The little guy, the little cartoon game, won the fantasy league.”Maybe their competition shouldn’t have been so surprised. With Backyard Baseball, that initial sports project in 1997, Humongous had already exhibited a mastery of one kind of fictional baseball, and with Pablo Sanchez, that project’s greatest star, it had already proved that the little guy was actually the best bet to win.Twenty years ago this October 10, the first Backyard Baseball game hit shelves.
Over the next few years, Humongous turned one game into a franchise, adding soccer, football, and basketball titles at the property’s peak popularity and placing atop the sales charts for all computer games, not just sports titles, in the early 2000s.Cast against 2017’s complex and gritty gaming landscape, Backyard Baseball may seem anachronistic. The original game is point and click, requiring only the left half of a computer mouse, and consists only of bright colors, sporting a palette of pinks and yellows, as the sun always shines; even its buoyant background music evokes a stroll to the ballfield on a sunny day. “It’s a little bit old-fashion-y,” composer Rhett Mathis says. “I wanted to capture a little sense of the nostalgia of baseball. That’s why there’s brush drums and finger snaps and an upright bass. It’s kind of classic.”. Twenty years later, the title is a classic, too.
The original allowed players to build a roster from a cast of 30 fictional child athletes, while a baseball sequel more than doubled the player pool with young versions of MLB stars. Amid the broader series’ success, the 1997 and 2001 Baseball games still resonate particularly strongly and inspire passion, loyalty, and boundless nostalgia from the now–young adults who played as children.
August’s MLB Players Weekend, in which players could customize their uniforms with nicknames and creative cleats, recalled Backyard Baseball, leading a pair of official team Twitter accounts to take advantage of the comparison. The Phillies narrated a win over the Cubs from the Backyard color commentator, while the Athletics displayed their lineup card on a familiar clipboard. We are PUMPED for. — Oakland A's ⚾️ (@Athletics)That lasting cultural impact wasn’t preordained, with the game coming from a studio new to sports creations and embodying neither the hyperrealistic trend of modern sports titles nor the complete zaniness of classic arcade machines.
The original wasn’t a commercial success, and the franchise survived thanks only to conviction and an optimistic outlook from a studio head. And within a too-short period, the franchise peaked before its quality cratered, as later entries and expansions into consoles moved away from the loving qualities that helped the first games pop. Those initial titles were simple, accessible, and incredibly fun, and two decades later, fans uphold them as a cult phenomenon. The PitchMirkovich is an illustrator and animator by trade and a sports obsessive and gamer by blood. As the oldest of five boys, he grew up playing all manner of literal backyard sports, as well as sports games in arcades, and while spending part of his childhood on a military base in Korea, he came to see sports as a fount of interpersonal connection that drew together kids of various backgrounds.Similar to the game itself, the underlying motive behind Backyard Baseball’s creation was simple. “That’s a thing, kids playing sports,” Mirkovich remembers thinking.
“I’ve seen movies about it, so it’s got to be a genre. Why isn’t there a game in that genre?” Youth sports movies had experienced a renaissance in the early ’90s—including The Sandlot, Rookie of the Year, and Little Big League—though Mirkovich’s greatest influence was an older film. His initial idea resembled a story line from the 1976 film Bad News Bears, as it would involve controlling a team of characters from the neighborhood over a full season and thereby traversing a preplanned, antics-filled journey.Mirkovich consulted with others at the company to sharpen his idea before formally pitching it, and it shifted to the typical sports-game structure, with options for single-game and season play and a more concentrated focus on the actual baseball. Even though the updated idea moved away from Humongous’s standard slate of adventure stories with an educational goal, it still catered to the same young audience the studio targeted with its Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam franchises. “Other sports games were kind of moving past kids, getting more buttons, more everything, you know?” Mirkovich says. “Bigger and bigger, and harder and harder for a kid to play.”. “There’s a relatability that comes from saying, ‘Hey, that kid’s kind of like me,’ or ‘Hey, I know someone who’s like that.’ I think especially for the kids market, we wanted to make a game that made them feel, ‘Hey, we can play sports, too.’”—Richard MoeWhile not as as her announcing partner, Sunny still recited a host of memorable catchphrases, from her chipper “hi ho!” greeting at the start of a broadcast to her ecstatic “” home run call.
True to Backyard form, even the announcers evinced distinct personalities: Vinnie was supposed to be a young Howard Cosell, voice actor Dolores Rogers recalls, while Sunny was a know-it-all ahead of her years.“My idea was that she was a huge sports fan and it was not cool,” says Jen Taylor, the voice of video game heroines Cortana ( Halo) and Princess Peach ( Mario), who received her start by voicing Sunny in Baseball. “This was the one place where it was cool for her to be a sports fan. She’s a really fun, precocious kid. She organized those games. She put them all together. It was all on her. And her little blazer?
I mean, come on.” The StarWhile the cast at large was the star of the Backyard series, the true standout—the Polaris amid the fictional cosmos—was, the greatest player and the most beloved, both at the time and two decades later. Recently, Paganini says, her local barista learned she had worked on the Backyard games and announced, “I love Pablo”—which is representative of the kind of encounter Paganini experiences regarding the character. “Everybody’s like, ‘Pablo Pablo Pablo,’” she says. “They always bring him up. I mean, they’ll remember some of the other players, sometimes, but when they talk about the heart and soul of it, they’re talking about Pablo.”. One of the most memorable aspects of the Backyard universe’s most memorable character is his theme song, whose background sparks its own tale of poetry and cultural fusion. Like with the other characters, Mathis’s approach began with a consideration of Pablo’s personality.
“He’s sort of unassuming. But he's kind of regal, you know?” the composer says. “He’s above smack-talking and stuff, right? He's just having a good time and playing a great game, and I was like, man, he should have something really majestic.” Mathis started with a, but just lifting that sound was “too direct, too uninspired,” and also too traditional for a modern player. So he added an R&B-driven bassline and blended in a flamenco’s guitar, and he hit a musical home run as towering as a typical Pablo blast.
“The elements all just seemed to really cascade and support each other,” Mathis says. “What can I say—I mean, it’s one of my favorite pieces from the title.”The developers’ largest misstep came when lending their star a voice. Although a revealed that Pablo speaks English, he was written to communicate almost exclusively in Spanish. But the casting call in Woodinville didn’t turn up any Latino voice actors, so the part went to an auditioner who had taken language classes in school and sounded authentic to the non-Spanish-speaking casting crew.
As the game was being finalized, a Colombian programmer working on the game heard Pablo’s dialogue and exclaimed, “Oh my God, that’s a white dude who’s trying to speak Spanish,” Moe remembers, but by then, it was too late in the production process to change.Like with all the best athletic legends, parts of Pablo’s backstory are shrouded in mystery. None of his creators remember how he received his name, for instance, and they’re split in their memory of how the Secret Weapon became not just the best baseball player, but the best all-around athlete in the neighborhood.
Moe, for one, remembers an indirect approach. “It wasn’t the intent to make Pablo be the dominant character across everything, that’s for sure,” he says. “We didn’t think he’d turn into the phenomenon that he did.”. “The idea of the wannabe newscaster, wannabe TV personality character, I mean, why couldn’t that be a little girl?”—Richard MoeAlternately, in Mirkovich’s telling, Pablo emerged naturally as the destroyer of Backyard worlds once the series expanded past the diamond. The same 30 characters appeared in each game to further the friendly neighborhood vibe, and while the lowly baseball players were granted skills in other sports, the characters’ base attributes couldn’t change: A fast player stayed fast, for instance, and a strong pitcher translated as a capable quarterback.
Because Pablo already had such multifarious talents, he had to dominate everywhere. “We just said, ‘We like how Pablo is, we’re going to keep him that way,’ and it kind of filtered through the rest of the games,” Mirkovich says. “He is that guy. There was always that guy in your neighborhood that was amazing. So why not have that?”So Pablo became the best soccer striker in the neighborhood, and later the best quarterback and point guard. In the two decades that followed, he also expanded his cultural impact: The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective (and also speculated on his potential steroid use), and the Cespedes Family BBQ duo—the internet’s foremost Backyard hype men—created in his honor. In a 2016 game, Twins minor leaguer Daniel Palka for his own walk-up music.
The Acclaimed SuccessorAt his technological birth, Pablo was the best player in his town. Many of the pros were obvious selections: Derek Jeter got the nod for the Yankees, Randy Johnson for the Diamondbacks, and cover athlete Cal Ripken Jr. For the Orioles. For other teams, though, the choices weren’t as easy. Lacking a true standout, the Twins were represented by, who hit just 14 homers in the height of the steroid era in 1999 and never made an All-Star team, and was selected only as a well-rounded complement to the sluggers who were locks to appear in the game. The MLBPA didn’t object to any of the picks. “They had really good taste in the players they chose,” Olshan says.
“They chose guys who were wholesome and kind of represented the game in a great way at the time.” For some of the pros, “at the time” is the operative phrase; since the game’s release, around a third have been implicated in the sport’s various steroid scandals. Asked about that dissonance from a 2017 vantage point, Paganini protests with a laugh, “We didn’t know that then!”. “It was instantaneously obvious that Pablo was the superstar. Just automatic.”—Mark PeyserAfter the player selection came the design and animation phase, during which the Humongous artists enjoyed more creative freedom than their counterparts at traditional sports game studios. “If you were designing the characters for Madden, you’d have to pretty much make them look the way they do in real life,” artist Tom Verre says. With the Backyard game, though, it was “all about taking something that was identifiable about the major league players and just bringing it into that Backyard Baseball style.” That meant emphasizing the gap in Ken Griffey Jr.’s front teeth, Randy Johnson’s beanstalk legs,.
It also meant ensuring that the characters looked like smaller versions of their adult selves, rather than just how they looked as kids. “I had pictures of young Derek Jeter wearing full baseball gear, taking swings, and then when I drew that real-life-kid version of Jeter, nobody recognized him,” Verre says.Difficulties arose when players didn’t exhibit a particularly identifiable trait.
“I think Shawn Green was the one I had trouble with because he’s just sort of this guy,” Verre says. Even though they could experiment more than designers at other studios, they still had to create realistic depictions of those players. “With the Backyard kids, you’d just be goofy with them,” animator Michael Baran says. “When swings the bat, he spins 360 before he stops.” That kind of animation wasn’t feasible with, say, Cordova or Green, who already had established, if staid, mannerisms. When drawing the stylized versions of professional players, the Humongous artists emphasized specific identifiable traits, like Ken Griffey Jr.'
S backward hat, smile, and swagger. Courtesy Tom VerreThe design team succeeded in creating a set of player renderings that both meshed with the Backyard ethos and didn’t stray so far from reality that the MLBPA would be irritated.
None of the designers from the 2001 edition remember much interference, which wasn’t a given, Olshan says, as the MLBPA had disapproved of player designs in other companies’ games when they looked physically inaccurate. Verre remembers receiving only one complaint from the players association about a character portrayal—that of then-Angels slugger Mo Vaughn, who in initial drawings was too “round.”When translating the pro kids’ skills to the Backyard ballfields, the hope was to “not make them feel too overwhelmingly popular against the Backyard kids,” Haldi says. “We wanted to keep the Backyard kids relevant and desirable in the middle of a bunch of pros.” They accomplished this goal partly by exaggerating the pros’ deficiencies, which explains why Mark McGwire is so slow and Randy Johnson is such a poor hitter in the game.
But largely, they didn’t need to take extraordinary measures to keep the fictional characters relevant. “Kids had their favorites already,” Haldi says. “They weren’t going to let go of their favorites, the Pablos and the Achmeds and the Kieshas that were really good players. Kids still played with them all the time.” Indeed, even in a clubhouse full of future Hall of Famers, Pablo existed at the far end of the bell curve.
Home Run ParkImagine a game where the players play for the love of the game, not the money. A game where multi-million dollar contracts are unknown. A game where everyone gets to play. Imagine a game just like it was with the youthful innocence of a child. This, my friends, is Backyard Baseball. Backyard Baseballtakes you back to when you were a kid, when baseball was a game, and the team was hastily put together among the kids in the neighborhood.
Playing for RealHumongous Entertainment reached back into the past and captured all those childhood memories of baseball and digitally assembled them into this game. All the details that make the memories real are here - from the kids taunting the pitcher to the child with the asthma inhaler. Do you remember picking teams, taking turns picking from the best players until only the bad players were left? Do you remember picking someone's little brother because his big brother was a good player?
It's all here. Nothing was left out.Players choose from fields such as the sandlot, the urban parking lot, and the rich kid's backyard. Pitchers throw crazy pitches such as the 'Elevator' and the 'Crazy Ball.'
Background ambient noises and the taunting by the opposing team add to the rich atmosphere that you can almost smell.Everything about this game is charming and cute. Swing and MissGameplay includes all the necessary elements. Pitchers choose the pitch as well as the placement. Hitters swing at the ball and can even see the strike zone.
Fielding is accomplished by clicking where you want the ball thrown, and running is as simple as clicking in the direction you want the runner to advance. Everything is here, and everything is easy enough for kids. The pace is a little slow, but not too fast for children. Each batter has a distinct personality - from the boy who hops to the plate to the girl who says 'my game is really tennis, anyway' when she strikes out. I was extremely impressed with all the details of each character.I have a few complaints about the game. This game doesn't install any files to the hard disk - everything is run from the CD. For some reason, each swing of the bat causes the CD to be read.
This makes the animation choppy and the mouse click to hit feels sluggish and unresponsive. While the game is playable with this problem, it makes hitting the ball a little difficult. Instead of getting better the more balls I hit, I never really improved.
I think this is because I never was able to time when I hit the mouse button and the player started their swing. That little delay when it read from the CD just ruins the hand/eye coordination.I tried copying the entire 270MB of CD data to the hard disk to see if that improved performance (note: this is not an option in the install menu, I just copied it by dragging the contents of the CD into a new folder on my hard disk.) It did speed up the game somewhat, but the batting problem didn't improve significantly.I also encountered one bug: I hit a ball that bounced infield, then over the fence for what should have been a double. The announcer even stated this was a double, but the runner advanced only to first.
Worthy of PraiseThis game is terrific and has all the elements of a Gold Medal winner. But I can't do it. The delay in clicking the mouse and the batter swinging the ball just ruins it for me. I still like the game a lot and highly recommend it, but a Gold Medal is for games without such evident flaws. I guess I'm mad because this should have been corrected. Even a little play testing would have shown that this was a problem.
Instead, we are left with what could have been a 'Game of the Year,' but instead fails to deliver on one very important game element.This is still an outstanding game and I recommend it strongly.Review By GamesDomain External links.