Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Backyard Baseball ’01 rerelease hits Steam next week
Well, just last week we dove deep into an interview with Playground Productions about their continuing efforts to revive the Backyard Sports franchise. CEO Lindsay Barnett said Backyard Baseball ’01 would be out by end of summer, and sooner rather than later. It turns out, it’s coming out next Tuesday, July 8th.
A theme of this website has been the difficulty of preserving old baseball games due to their license agreements. You’ll see rereleases of Bases Loaded or HardBall! pop up every now and then, because those games had no league or player licenses. Even though we’re in an era full of ports, rereleases, remasters, and remakes of old games.
Well, this is a rare (the only?) example of a baseball video game with a league and player licenses getting brought back out in a new era.
From the sound of last week’s interview, this was a manual negotiation process with the league and with each individual player. The original Backyard Baseball 2001 had 31 licensed players: One for each MLB team, and then an extra for the Reds after Ken Griffey Jr. was traded close to release.
Twenty-eight of those 31 players will return for the Backyard Baseball ’01 rerelease. Those players are: Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Cal Ripken Jr., Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Randy Johnson, Nomar Garciaparra, Jeff Bagwell, Jason Giambi, Chipper Jones, Jeromy Burnitz, Mark McGwire, Shawn Green, Vladimir Guerrero, Kenny Lofton, Jason Kendall, Barry Larkin, Marty Cordova, Mo Vaughn, Raul Mondesi, Curt Schilling, Alex Gonzalez, Juan Gonzalez, Larry Walker, Carlos Beltran, Tony Gwynn, Ivan Rodriguez, and Jose Canseco.
The three hold-outs are Frank Thomas, Ken Griffey Jr., and Barry Bonds. They happen to all be former baseball game cover stars: Griffey for four different Nintendo-published games, Bonds for Sony’s MLB 2003, and Thomas on Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball and All-Star Baseball ’97, published by Acclaim.
Most importantly, this means the world will receive another new video game pseudonym for Barry Bonds, similar to Jon Dowd. We’ll have to see what Playground Productions and Mad Cat Studios come up with.
For now, Backyard Baseball ’01 only has a release date set for Steam. Presumably, it will eventually follow their other recent rerelease, ’97, to other platforms like Switch, PlayStation 5, and mobile.
The “Oh come on!” moment in Ken Griffey SNES
Former Software Creations developer Kevin Edwards shares lots of snippets from games he worked on over on Bluesky. Here he shows Chris Collins working on animation for the original Super Nintendo Ken Griffey, for the moment when the batter looks back at the ump and yells “Oh come on!” after a called third strike.
Chris Collins piecing together the animation for the infamous "Oh Come On!" sequence in SNES 'Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball' – Late 1993. Filmed at the Software Creations Park Place office by @chunwah.bsky.social
— Kevin Edwards ( Retro Videogame development ) (@kevedwardsretro.bsky.social) April 24, 2025 at 12:53 PM
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Harukaze Mound has a Pawapuro reference
I’ve been reading Harukaze Mound, a new Shonen Jump baseball manga. It’s a story of two twin high school pitchers. It’s clearly inspired by Taylor and Tyler Rogers, two real-life identical twin pitchers with extremely different pitching motions.
At the start of the manga, the two brothers mirror each other’s motions, but the protagonist breaks out when he decides to divert from his brother and go submarine (like Tyler Rogers).
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when a training sequence in Chapter 3 includes a Power Pros / Pawapuro reference:
That deformed art style in the middle pane along with the “Form +20” and “Injury rate 1%” are clearly referencing Pawapuro‘s Success Mode training menus.
Song of the Week
I shared Tom O’Malley’s… unbelievable rendition of “Rokko Oroshi” previously. But I can’t help but share the B-side, former Major Leaguer and Hanshin Tigers legend Tom O’Malley singing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game”: