Bringing Back Backyard Baseball

How a team retro game developers reverse engineered a beloved game

Mega Cat Studios

For a lot of people Backyard Baseball means buzzing computer screens, CD-ROMs tucked in cereal boxes, and long afternoons spent picking out the perfect team. In other words, Backyard Baseball represents a 90s childhood. For that reason, you might think that the days of Backyard Baseball are long in the past.

And yet - in 2024 Mega Cat Studios partnered with Playground Productions to bring the game back to fans’ less-buzzy computer screens. There was just one tricky bit – nobody had access to the game’s source code.

What came next was a winding and arduous road to reviving a game without a roadmap.

I recently had a chance to chat with Mega Cat Studios CEO and Founder James Deighan and Lead Developer Luke Usher to talk about Backyard Baseball, it’s legacy, and the work it took to bring it back.

All right. Let's start with a wide-ranging question. What's your own personal history with Backyard Baseball?

James Deighan: I remember basically elementary school, having it on PCs there and thinking, "This is the most fun I've ever had playing an educational video game." I remember going home and asking my parents to grab a copy. It was a big deal to play baseball in general, too. When I was a kid, our neighborhood, if you went outside during the baseball season and you weren't playing baseball, it was just empty, there were no kids to play with. It was a main event.

It was just really fun to be introduced to this video game version of it because video games were still pretty new to me back then. Very fond memories, for sure, super nostalgic.

Luke Usher: I didn't know this game existed until this project came up.

James: But Luke did go through the million archives and zip disks and tempermentalized files.

At that point, it's like you've been playing it your whole life, I'm sure.

Luke: Yes, actually, a lot of fun.

Mega Cat Studios

Where did the idea of bringing back Backyard Baseball come from?

James: For Mega Cat, we basically were one or two degrees away from the folks at Playground [Productions]. I think we had expressed so much interest trying to track down who owned the IP and the franchise, that it made its way through the grapevine.

Whenever they made the purchase of the franchise from the last stakeholder, I think it came with the rumor of Mega Cat's desire. They were like, "Well, all these guys that really love it, have a history of retro preservation and ROM hacking and retro game development, if you guys are interested in new installations or even playing with the original projects, they would be really interested."

That naturally turned into a new friendship with the Playground folks, and they shared their big vision of all the things they wanted to do, which is really compelling and exciting to us.

I remember calling Luke the next morning saying, "We've got these ZIP disks and this drive dump of files that are super messy and wild. There's more coming in a big manila envelope. I'm not sure if it's usable. We should dig into it and see what we can do."

What did that process look like? You guys didn't have the source code. How did you manage to bring the game back?

Luke: It's not really that different from how people in the fanbases do ROM hacks of other games. We've got to figure out how the games are put together through reverse engineering, then we can make changes, make patches, do what we want to do. It's very different from the usual development, that's for sure. It's adjacent to a lot of the stuff that we do for retro titles already.

James: Normally with a new development, you have access to everything. You can search through code and assets and say, "Oh, look, here's the button I want to change. I'm going to turn this green arrow into a blue light on the user interface." It scales on mobile and UI devices. Then doing that in something like Unity or Unreal is a really natural, almost easy path. Whereas doing it without source code is this very, very slow and arduous task where you're reading what's loaded into the memory and where it's loaded at. Then where it gets deloaded. Then what the RAM address for that might be. Then you're injecting things into that address to see behavior outcome.

It's more guess-and-check reverse engineering. One is "Here's the manual, here's how it works." The other one is, "Here's a car, something's not working. Try to fabricate some new parts from this smelted-down pile of recycled cans and see if you can get the vehicle to drive back home."

It's very slow, very complicated.

How much longer did it take in comparison to if you had all the source code?

James: If I put an arbitrary heuristic on it, it's probably ten times longer. The software toolchain and foundation of these projects is this old LucasArts ScummVM that was used for a lot of point-and-click adventure games. It's almost magic that these folks at Humongous even made a baseball game using the confines of this point-and-click engine in the first place.

None of it’s particularly logical because it's like you're always taking guesses. Then you're running into these little historical quirks where you're like, "Oh, the original developer looks like they may have bolted this other feature on pretty late because it doesn't follow any of the standards the rest of the code base does."

Now I also have to pick up this moment of probably strain or eureka moment that happens in games where you do your first big playtest and then everyone says, "Man, we got to change how batting works." The next thing you know, you're just patching instead working on batting stuff because it's not readable and there's no source code we can just interpret in comments. It's really just moving the parts around and seeing what happens.

With the lack of feedback, there's no sophisticated error logging or data dumping that says, "Oh, here's the error. In Line 7 there's a such and such error that needs resolved." Instead, it just doesn't play. The screen goes black.

Luke: Or worse.

James: Or worse. I think one of the most satisfying things about this work is when you have those little breakthroughs. "Look, we're doing it. It's working. The thing's working." In normal game development or software, there's a constant dopamine hit of this consistent incremented progress of reward of, "All my work is paying off. I'm on track. I'm going to finish Level 2 today."

Then all the work that we're doing on Backyard, it's like nothing's happened for two weeks. “I've worked every day, all day, and everything is completely broken. I wish we could just see any light at all.” Then, next thing you're like, "Oh, look, it works."

It requires a certain type of person to love and live in that work. Luke's done a ton of that work for many years, all sorts of community projects and reverse engineering projects. It's honestly a part of his career at this point.

Mega Cat Studios

Were there any particularly difficult challenges you all had to face?

James: Everything about this project has been a constant strain. There's no documentation as a source. The fan expectations are so high. We pride ourselves in delivering fan service.

Right now, we're working very, very hard on the finishing touches on some other Backyard work. It's a few months behind what we had targeted because we're not leaving anything on the table that we think we can do better. There's just no real easy way to forecast this stuff. I know it can be frustrating because we'll talk about, "Hey, what about target timelines to do X?" We're like, "Yes, let me just scream into the void for a few weeks and see what happens."

I can see why people don't do this as a service. I can tell you that for sure. It is so deeply satisfying whenever it works, and it's so close now.

If I summarize what has been the biggest challenge, it would be creating tools. The original intent was to create tools that work with this ScummVM engine that we can make compatible and more modular across the Backyard Sports franchises. Fast forward, many months later, we're like, "That was not feasible. There is nothing feasible about this skeleton key. This is just a lot of metal with a lot of goop attached to it that's now doing exactly what we want to do, but it’s not reusable in any way."

It's also wonderful in that this is real preservation work. Not only the work we did for the re-release, but also the tools that we've added to some of these community ranges. It actually allows the next generation, twenty, thirty years from now, to also do this kind of stuff. The future of Backyard Sports, we feel like we were part of this second wave of pioneers.

Luke: More than once a task has come up, "Oh, that'll take me a day,” then two weeks later, I've still been on the same thing. Hockey was built with a different engine than every single one of the other games that we've worked on in the Backyard franchise. None of the knowledge transferred. It was basically starting from scratch again.

What has the response to the release been like?

James: It's been awesome. There's nothing more satisfying when you're making or working on games than having fans show up at trade shows or on social media. Something that's been pretty wonderful about the Backyard experience is that the fan base is so genuinely positive. We don't see a lot of the more traditional, I want to say trollish, toxic little corners like you might see in some gaming communities. Everyone just seems so genuinely happy and ecstatic.

The game itself is very wholesome. It's different than an online shooter where people are arguing and swearing at each other. It's very fun, pure, teaching and learning baseball. Everyone remembers it from grade school, middle school. Those people show up, and they're in their 30s now reintroducing that same thing they love to their children.

We've had a lot of Luke fan mail for all the work he's done bringing it back. Luke and John [Simon] have been the vocal spearheads of a lot of this really complex reverse engineering work. It's not just them. There's a team of twenty of us that are all playing roles and parts and making everything else, but it's completely impossible without all the tools and all the work that Luke and John have been just sweating over and making work for the first time ever.

Luke: I have seen people mention them in passing in quite a few online communities in retro gaming and things like that. It's come up in organic conversation, like, "Oh, have you seen this? Oh, this is really cool what Mega Cat are doing."

Do you guys have favorite players?

James: That's tough. I'd say Kiesha.

Luke: It's a bit of a boring answer, but I haven't paid attention to who the players are that much.

James: That's the most engineering answer you could have ever added, Luke.

Luke: I'm not really a sports person, but I have enjoyed the gameplay. I've been quite impressed.

Mega Cat Studios

I'm going to throw out an even more sporty question, so don't be terrified. The Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. had a Pablo Sanchez-themed bat at Players’ Weekend last year. Why do you think this game has stuck in the public memory for so long?

James: First of all, Pablo is the real GOAT, right? I'm so glad Pablo is coming back in a big way. The nostalgia definitely is strong.

It's not just cool art and cool characters. Given the era of the game, these characters have these big punctuated moments and all this flavor animation, this silly voice, and these fun little mannerisms that make them feel pretty alive. You can watch them walk up to bat, the way they prep before they bat, the way they celebrate, and the way they look defeated when they strike out, all these little bits are all so interesting and punctuated.

You actually have a sense of the personality of the players by how they are playing baseball, despite it not being this rich storytelling environment. I think they just stick with you. There's a lot of sports games you play, and you don't ever remember the players. With Backyard, their characters are the currency.

I don't want to spoil it but some of us do have Pablo tattoos. It's probably not appropriate photos, but it's a real thing. The Playground team does too, so it was a little bit of a tribal, "How much do you love Pablo Sanchez? Let's prove it."

[This interview was conducted over video call on January 28, 2025.]