Title: Backyard Baseball
Platform: PC, Mac (the 2002 Game Boy Advance version will have its own separate page)
Release Date: October 10th 1997
Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Backyard Baseball is a mouse-driven baseball computer game, featuring the first appearance of the most famous fictional athlete of the ’90s generation, Pablo Sanchez.
Gameplay Video
Description
Backyard Baseball is a children’s baseball computer game controlled entirely by mouse. The game’s strong personality and character design spawned a long-running series of Backyard Sports games, the most recent being an iOS/Android game released in 2015.
This game and the next handful in the Backyard Baseball series runs on the SCUMM engine (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). This engine was developed at LucasArts for its line of point-and-click adventure games (Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, etc.) and licensed to Humongous Entertainment, which was founded by Shelley Day and Ron Gilbert, both formerly at LucasArts.
Roster
Subsequent Backyard Baseball games would include licensed athletes from Major League Baseball, but each character in the first game is fictional. The diverse roster of 30 children includes 15 boys and 15 girls, with a wide variety of body types and even a player in a wheelchair, Kenny Kawaguchi.
Each player is rated from 1 to 4 in each of four skills: Batting, running, pitching, and fielding. There are a variety of hidden factors that boost or lower players’ abilities. Some are laid out explicitly inside the game (the Webber sisters play together when they’re both on the same team) and others remain rumors (does Maria Luna really play better for teams with pink uniforms?).
Here are recordings of the voice acting lines for each character in the “Meet the Players” and “Player Select” screens: