Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still has a paywall for me.
Gift link, if you'd like to use it: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/style/backyard-baseball-v...
Thank you, that worked. What a massively wholesome story.
A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#12Deck: Backyard Baseball, a favorite game for 1990s kids, had been off the market for years. But Lindsay Barnett was determined. Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/style/backyard-baseball-v...
Archive from a dead comment is the only link that worked for me: https://archive.is/jWK6m
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#13TLDR; a Chicago-area schoolteacher was able to find the rights to the old Backyard Baseball PC game from the 1990s, and she commissioned a software game development company and a still-live fan base, to recreate the source code (because the original source was lost). She founded a company called Playground Productions. Thanks to her efforts, nostalgic Millennials and their kids can purchase and enjoy this old game. A…
I'm curious too. The original developers were Humongous Games (Putt-Putt & Freddi Fish) whose other titles used the SCUMM engine. My guess would be Backyard Baseball was as well.
I dug up this article that seems to go through the process but not in great technical detail: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/backyard-baseball-97-in...
What I don't understand is why just grabbing the original game files and slapping it inside the SCUMMVM wasn't the whole story. That's definitely how the other Humongous Games were re-released on Steam a decade earlier. I just assumed Backyard Baseball had more complex rights.
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#14Not a single hyperlink in that article. Infuriating.
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#15TLDR; a Chicago-area schoolteacher was able to find the rights to the old Backyard Baseball PC game from the 1990s, and she commissioned a software game development company and a still-live fan base, to recreate the source code (because the original source was lost). She founded a company called Playground Productions. Thanks to her efforts, nostalgic Millennials and their kids can purchase and enjoy this old game. A…
I'm curious too. The original developers were Humongous Games (Putt-Putt & Freddi Fish) whose other titles used the SCUMM engine. My guess would be Backyard Baseball was as well. I dug up this article that seems to go through the process but not in great technical detail: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/backyard-baseball-97-in... What I don't understand is why just grabbing the original game files and slapping i…
IIRC, part of the order was for stuff like Steam achievements, upgraded assets, modern resolution support, other platform conveniences, plus other required changes to the game due to licensing agreements shifting, all of which made slapping it in a VM a poor fit.
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#16TLDR; a Chicago-area schoolteacher was able to find the rights to the old Backyard Baseball PC game from the 1990s, and she commissioned a software game development company and a still-live fan base, to recreate the source code (because the original source was lost). She founded a company called Playground Productions. Thanks to her efforts, nostalgic Millennials and their kids can purchase and enjoy this old game. A…
> What happened to the original code (it wasn't in escrow somewhere?) ...
It seems like the early video games industry did a pretty bad job of preserving development artifacts. There have been a lot of stories about game code being found, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#17TLDR; a Chicago-area schoolteacher was able to find the rights to the old Backyard Baseball PC game from the 1990s, and she commissioned a software game development company and a still-live fan base, to recreate the source code (because the original source was lost). She founded a company called Playground Productions. Thanks to her efforts, nostalgic Millennials and their kids can purchase and enjoy this old game. A…
I'm curious too. The original developers were Humongous Games (Putt-Putt & Freddi Fish) whose other titles used the SCUMM engine. My guess would be Backyard Baseball was as well. I dug up this article that seems to go through the process but not in great technical detail: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/backyard-baseball-97-in... What I don't understand is why just grabbing the original game files and slapping i…
I poked at the Steam Depots for some of these games for more information.
A game like Putt-Putt ships the ScummVM under the GPL license and runs it with the original asset files: https://steamdb.info/depot/294661/
Backyard Baseball does not appear to be using ScummVM. https://steamdb.info/depot/3170541/
The .he* files also appear to be the original assets for the game. And then they built a Scumm interpreter to run the game which can talk to Steam to use leaderboards and achievements.
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#18I know from people who actually worked on this that the process of actually getting the game running and following modern platform conventions was somewhat insane and tortuous, but interesting. Too technical for the Times to go into though I guess. But yeah, essentially the whole port is done with binary patches to the original executable.
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Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#19I came here expecting an AI story, and instead got a story of a classic IP hunt. Awesome!
Interestingly it ends in them never finding the source (and another commenter here says they got it working by monkeypatching the binary.
At this point I wonder if they could feed all the assets and patches into and LLM and have it recreate the code from scratch, so that they could add new features.
Re: A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
#20I thought this article was really interesting but it's odd how it doesn't mention where the funds came from. I can't imagine the salary of a school teacher in her 20s can cover lawyers, a dev team, buying IP, etc