Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Interview sheds some light on future of Backyard Baseball
The streamer Skwidlegs did an hour-long interview with Playground Productions CEO Lindsay Barnett about the present and future of the Backyard Sports franchise. The full hour is worth watching for fans of the franchise, but here I’ll excerpt a few newsier bits that surfaced.
For me, there were two central mysteries around the Backyard Sports reboot: How will the team handle the player and league licenses in their already-announced rereleases like Backyard Baseball 2001? And what will their announced new game be like?
We got a newly-announced release window for Backyard Baseball ’01, a rerelease of Backyard Baseball 2001. This is now confirmed for Summer 2025. Barnett implies it will be sooner rather than later within that window. She also says online play will be supported on the Steam version of Backyard Baseball ’01.
We get confirmation that the long delay from announcement to release on ’01 has been struggles around the licensing. Barnett says they underestimated the difficulties in getting agreements from the individual athletes involved. She confirms not every real-life pro from the original Backyard Sports games will return, and there will be some “Jon Dowd situations” with fake names for players they couldn’t license. She tells an anecdote about calling Randall Cunningham’s church to get him on board for their Backyard Football rerelease.
So what is the next Backyard Sports game going to be? Specific details are still few and far between. Barnett says they’re building a new game from the ground up with Mega Cat Studios, but she doesn’t say what sport or sports it will include, or whether it will have licensed leagues or players. She does however ask Skwidlegs what celebrity, athlete, or comedian he’d want to include if he could pick anybody. So they may be looking at a wider range of potential real-world stars to include.
When specifically asked if the new game would release on mobile or console or both, Barnett says she wants it everywhere, but can’t confirm yet.
There’s a bit of talk about whether the Backyard Baseball characters should be updated for modern sensibilities. But Barnett says the feedback she’s gotten has been to keep everything faithful to the original. Specifically calling out the southern stereotype characters Pete Wheeler and Marky Dubois, she says these are fan favorites beloved by southerners, and it wouldn’t help anyone to change them. She does say Kenny Kawaguchi is given hair, similar to his look in later Backyard Sports titles, to avoid concerns that he’s dealing with cancer or some other illness.
Lots of other little details are scattered around the video, including some fun talk touching on the current online fanbase’s wishes for new Backyard titles. It sounds like we’ll get to learn soon which pros made it into the ’01 rerelease, and online play could potentially be a good feature differentiator compared to ’97.
A behind-the-scenes tidbit for VR Baseball ’97
From a comment on my gameplay video for PS1 game VR Baseball ’97, a former developer revealed a funny bit of background:
You can see the Alomar spitting incident starting at 7:55 here:
I always wonder how many behind-the-scenes player or team-specific Easter eggs there are like this. The most famous example is in NBA Jam, where the Detroit Pistons are coded to sink any buzzer-beater against the Chicago Bulls, out of the spite of lead designer Mark Turmell.
So why is Kyle Muller’s name censored in the new Pawapuro?
Former top Atlanta Braves prospect is now a Chunichi Dragon in NPB. So he was recently added to the rosters of Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025. He is named and has a cartoon likeness and everything in single-player. So, why does his name appear as all question marks in the online modes?
Well, Kyle Muller’s name is rendered “Maraa” in Japanese (マラー). The Japanese dictionary at Jisho.org explains why this might get censored in online play, if you check out definition 3 below:
So a feature surely designed to prevent custom teams with custom players from displaying online also affects a reasonably prominent new foreign player in the league, on the standard rosters. Whoops.
Steam Summer Sale
The Steam Summer Sale just got started, and there are a few games I’d definitely recommend if you don’t own them already:
- Super Mega Baseball 4 – $4.99
- World League Baseball – $2.99
- Out of the Park Baseball 26 – $24.99
- Home Run High – $4.31
Little League World Series Baseball 2022 is also $2.49, but I would still not recommend it. Unless you’re specifically interested in trying out a broken game.
Song of the Week
Since Backyard Baseball is the main topic of the week, this is a track from the original game. Most of the music is short and a little low-res, but still had a lot of character. Maybe saying too much about myself that the track I resonated most with was this Switched-On Bach-esque baroque-but-with-a-synthesizer track made for apex nerd and decent hitter Dmitri Petrovich: