Backyard Baseball 1997 makes its grand slam to Steam, sliding on like Pablo Sanchez stealing a base. But before Mega Cat Studios could remaster this cult favorite PC game, founder James Deighan had to dig through almost thirty years of detritus to find what was hidden within.

Who ended up with the rights to the Backyard Sports games, originally produced by the company for Windows PCs? It was Playground Productions, but the now-defunct video game developer didn't exactly do a great job of archiving its software when it was bought, sold, and dismantled for parts during the 2000s.

[Playground] sent us this massive box of Zip disks and files and CD ROMs and just all sorts of things from over the years," Deighan told TechCrunch. He spent hours digging through the materials with Luke Usher, an engineer who specializes in emulators programs that allow computers or other devices to imitate video game consoles, like an iPhone app that lets you play Pokémon. But Usher and Deighan found a key issue.

"I noticed that the source code was missing for the games that we were trying to work with," Usher tells TechCrunch. "So we got a hold of a copy of the disc of Baseball '97, then started from there, and then it became apparent that we'd need to modify the game to get it to run nicely on modern systems.". And so I started researching on the web to see if anybody had worked with that game before.
That's how they met John Simon, an engineer who had been modding the Backyard Sports games for fun.
"It's just something I do from time to time when I really like a game". I play the game, I beat the game, and you know, the replay value is gone, but I haven't had enough, so what do you do, Simon told TechCrunch. For me, it is in itself exciting as a programmer and even as a reverse engineer, to go in and dig into the source and see if there are any developer secrets left behind or just simply the kind of content that would make it to the cutting room floor.

When Deighan works on projects like this-that bring a retro game back to life-he will reach out to hire individuals who have already been part of the fan communities of those games.

"One of the first things we do is we extend the Mega Cat team with people that have already been living in that space for some number of years," Deighan said. This was also the case of a NES Mike Tyson game development project where Mega Cat worked on: "So by example, when we work on Mike Tyson [i.e. Punch-Out! for NES], we work closely with Mike Tyson ROM hackers, and speedrunners, and people that know every single corner of it because often they end up being not only 20 times more passionate, but much more knowledgeable.

Simon's experience with the Backyard Sports franchise really came in handy, because it's built atop SCUMM, which is this old game engine that LucasArts released in 1987.

"There might be maybe two dozen people globally that are actively contributing to or working in [SCUMM]," Deighan said. "It's very much like a legacy artifact from a previous era."

Even when Backyard Baseball launched initially, SCUMM was already being phased out.

"Somehow, the Humongous developers back in the 90s, they built a 3D game inside of this 2D game engine," Simon said. "Somehow they turned it into a sports game-it's kind of an insane achievement, especially back in 1997."

Simon could respecify assets and scripts from Backyard Baseball using ScummVM, an open-source interpreter of the game engine; the programmer behind the 2001 software, Ludvig Strigeus, went on to become one of the first developers for Spotify. But Mega Cat still had the problem of running the retooled Backyard Baseball on modern devices. That was Usher's job.

He said it basically involves building a framework that can hijack the game when trying to run it, take over the control, and then run our own code before the game code starts and use it as an opportunity to apply patches, change stuff, fix bugs, hook into Steam, that kind of thing, you know? So the game really doesn't know it's been modified, but we get in there before it has a chance to start.

Of course, Mega Cat's team spent a lot of time in the weeds on the kinds of niche issues that crop up with retro gaming, but they didn't lose sight of the fun of bringing Backyard Baseball back to life. The game has such an enduring fanbase that even the Kelce brothers looked into buying the rights.

"Some of us were doing this stuff for free for 10 years, so it's kind of a dream-type of project to be a part of," Deighan said. "It's such a fun sleeper hit for fandom, for people to kind of hit that nostalgia button and go back in time."

However, the issue with Backyard Baseball is that most of its fans, who played the game when they were small kids, are now in their 20s and 30s. So, the game with difficulty level kept for kids using the computer for the first time might be too simple. But Mega Cat and Playground decided to hold on to the game as is, and added Steam achievements for all those wanting an extra challenge.

"We very much believe in preservation," Deighan said. "Our focus was more around, what can we do that allows that digital preservation to stand alone, while also having all these other replayability and collaborative features added in?"

Now Backyard Baseball 1997 is on Steam, but Mega Cat's work isn't done. They're not just restarting the classic series; they also have Playground Productions remastering Backyard Soccer '98, Backyard Football '99, Backyard Basketball '01, Backyard Baseball '01, and Backyard Hockey '02.

"The fans have been showing up like crazy, so it's easy to stay excited," Deighan said.