A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
97 points by danso 9 days ago | 34 comments
  • danso 9 days ago |
    Deck: 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...

  • mrkaye97 8 days ago |
    I was just going to post this, and searched first and landed here. Not much to say beyond that reading this piece made me so happy, and brought back tons of nostalgia for days I'd long forgotten.
  • cool_dude85 8 days ago |
    Never played the backyard games. For me, the ultimate nostalgia trip along these lines is the excellent Little League Baseball for NES.
  • skrrtww 4 days ago |
    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.

    • spagoop 4 days ago |
      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.

      • saghm 3 days ago |
        My understanding is that the original source files of the game were not available, and that who even owned the IP wasn't entirely clear when she first started looking into the game. I don't have any direct citation for this so it's possible I've misunderstood things that I've cobbled together from following this for a few months.
    • pdpi 4 days ago |
      "Port done with binary patches" has a bit of the same energy as the N64Recomp project[0], which converts N64 ROMs into C programs that can be built for modern PCs.

      0. https://github.com/N64Recomp/N64Recomp

  • ripe 4 days ago |
    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 nice, feel-good story. But I have two questions:

    1. The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this. Sounds like an important detail.

    2. Would have liked to know more about the source code. What happened to the original code (it wasn't in escrow somewhere?) and how did they recreate it? It says some fans had old CD-ROMs with the game on it, and the game dev company in Pittsburgh worked with them to rebuild the game.

    • burnhamup 4 days ago |
      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.

      • skrrtww 4 days ago |
        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.
      • burnhamup 4 days ago |
        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.

    • EvanAnderson 4 days ago |
      > 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.

      • saghm 3 days ago |
        I heard that the only reason WoW classic was even able to be a thing was that someone managed to find an old backup drive with the source code from back in the day. We take version control for granted now, but it seems like that was not how game development tended to operate a few a few decades ago.
    • superposeur 3 days ago |
      1. An NYT commenter clarifies that the “Second Grade Teacher” of the article’s title is from a family worth $30+ billion. If true, this would seem to be egregious omission of context from the article.
    • smelendez 3 days ago |
      > The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this.

      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.

  • brandonmenc 4 days ago |
    Not a single hyperlink in that article. Infuriating.
    • tclancy 3 days ago |
      If only there were ways to look up the things you wanted to know from it.
      • Dwedit 3 days ago |
        Not anymore, now you just get an AI overview, followed by SEO slop results.
      • anigbrowl 3 days ago |
        That's really not the point. The point is that many legacy media outlets deliberately avoid putting hyperlinks in their stories because they care about keeping people onsite more than they do about fully informing them. It's very typical for news outlets to report on criminal indictments without providing any link to the charging documents, for example, likewise with public reports.
      • brandonmenc 3 days ago |
        The point is that I pay for the NYT - in part, because they do so many "digital" things right compared to other newspapers - and yet so often they refuse to do the absolute bare minimum of hyperlinking.

        Like, yeah, no duh - I can use Google.

    • sfRattan 3 days ago |
      Steam Store page for the Backyard Sports franchise, with links to the new/reboot game and the patched/updated classics:

      https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/backyardsports

  • jedberg 4 days ago |
    I 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.

  • Rebelgecko 4 days ago |
    I 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
    • ckwalsh 4 days ago |
      “With funding from private investors,…”

      Im guessing those private investors specifically requested not to be named.

  • reactordev 3 days ago |
  • jasonjmcghee 3 days ago |
    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.

    • boomboomsubban 3 days ago |
      They're probably pricing for a long time sales centered strategy, the old games seem to constantly get recommended to me during steam sales. And I doubt they were going to have a massive release at any price, it's too niche of a thing.
    • geophph 3 days ago |
      I was interested at launch but yeah $40 seemed aggressive. Reviews at launch were pretty negative too for a lot of game bugs and unfinished feel. If those get patched up and it seems to improve … i still dunno, kinda steep!
    • nevon 3 days ago |
      That seems to be a new game. Backyard Baseball '97 is listed at around $10
  • mhast 3 days ago |
    Sounds like this is similar to a decompilation (pay walled article so I haven't read it).

    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...