Playground Productions is taking over the famous children’s sports game franchise
Rumors have been flying across the internet in a viral marketing campaign this week about Backyard Sports. The children’s video game franchise, originally developed by Humongous Entertainment for the Mac and PC in 1997, has a famous cast of cartoon characters, chief among them Pablo Sanchez. The last video game in the franchise was Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers all the way back in 2010. Jason Kelce made some noise back in January about wanting to bring the series back, but seems not to be linked to this current project.
While we don’t know exactly what form the series revival will come in, social media rumors about the series returning were confirmed by the LinkedIn profile for Christopher Waters, the CPO of Playground Productions:
This followed after rumors spread by Caitlin Hendricks, a social media professional and MLB Ambassador, in a series of videos on Twitter. These posts pointed to an Instagram account called Backyard Sports, which follows Playground Productions. That Instagram account has a picture with founder and CEO Lindsay Barnett wearing patches depicting Pablo Sanchez and Achmed Khan, two characters from the franchise:
This is a website about games, and I have some skepticism this will turn into a video game anytime soon. Both the CEO and CPO of Playground Productions have backgrounds in film and animation, not video games. The company’s website About page introduces Playground as a multimedia company, making “film, television, digital media, and video games.” Currently, there are four people associated with the company on LinkedIn, none of whom are listed with job titles suggesting game development:
It seems like the idea is to revive the franchise in both animation and video games eventually. But I suspect animation will come first.
The teases so far have definitely focused on baseball. A glove and bubble gum both seemingly belonging to Backyard Sports character (and baseball obsessive to the detriment of other sports) Stephanie Morgan have been joined today by a picture of the treehouse with a bat and ball leaning on it. And I would guess that the MLB Ambassador has worked with the company directly to help spread the word. Her first “rumor” video went out the same day as the account’s first post, when the account only had 191 followers to that point.
It’s generating a lot of excitement on my social media this week, and hopefully we’ll see an official announcement with details soon.
Pawapuro-kun Fighters merch
In other almost-video-game news, Powerful Pro Yakyuu keeps coming out with more team-specific merch. This time, it’s the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters with some great bobbleheads:
Four separate figures: One for the video game lead character Pawapuro-kun, and three for current Fighters players: Go Matsumoto, Hiromi Itoh, and Kotaro Kiyomiya. Chusei Mannami would have been a cooler choice for me, but you get what you get.
They’re each holding Shakemaru, a sort of “rally fish” icon of the Fighters. Here’s a blog post you can Google Translate to learn more if you’d like.
You can also buy a face towel or an acrylic key holder with Pawapuro collaboration art on their online store. Each bobblehead is 3500 yen, which in the current incredibly low value of yen is only $24 American. Enjoy your cheap imports while they last.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- On theme and well-timed, the ever-popular Pablo Sanchez from Backyard Sports games got a video from Secret Base this week. Their goal was to confirm if he was truly the greatest child athlete in the series as a whole.
- Next week I’ll talk about my setup for DS and 3DS gameplay recording. My first gameplay capture for the systems was Pro Yakyuu Famista 2011, a fantastic 3DS version of the Namco baseball series.
- Next was this cursed object I’ve long wanted to record, Major League Baseball 2K8 Fantasy All-Stars. The character designs are really hideous to me, but the gameplay is worse.