31–40 of 41 posts
I saw backyard baseball on steam the other day and was blown away by the $40 price tag. I expected $10 maybe $20. I think $40 is too far outside of impulse / nostalgia purchase.
Not a single hyperlink in that article. Infuriating.
If only there were ways to look up the things you wanted to know from it.
Not a single hyperlink in that article. Infuriating.
If only there were ways to look up the things you wanted to know from it.
Like, yeah, no duh - I can use Google.
I saw backyard baseball on steam the other day and was blown away by the $40 price tag. I expected $10 maybe $20. I think $40 is too far outside of impulse / nostalgia purchase.
TLDR; 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…
TLDR; 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…
Yeah, this is the big question. Family money?
Whatever the case, it’s still pretty impressive. Running a project involving legacy IP and legacy source code and actually getting multiple games out the door (and a puff piece in the New York Times) isn’t as simple as throwing money at it.
I 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.
Say more, seems like a simple game? Was it written weird or something? I dont know much about legacy ports of games like this, would be curious to learn more.
TLDR; 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.
I saw backyard baseball on steam the other day and was blown away by the $40 price tag. I expected $10 maybe $20. I think $40 is too far outside of impulse / nostalgia purchase.
A while back a listened to a podcast where they interviewed people doing this and it was quite interesting. (And it's an engineering podcast so many technical details.)
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2024/05/24/bonus-episod...