1/22 – Backyard Baseball

Hello and welcome! My name is Katosepe and I’ll be your host for today’s video game of the day.

Today’s game is Backyard Baseball by Humongous Games. The first game in the Backyard Baseball series was originally released on Windows and Mac computers in 1997 and wasn’t brought to consoles until 2003 on the Nintendo Gamecube. A version was released on the Playstation 2 a year later.

Backyard Baseball was, quite obviously, a baseball game with the gimmick that you played as children playing a pickup game in their neighborhood. Locales would include everything from an empty sandlot to haunted forests or grungy factories. While the original game included original characters, later versions of the game, including the console ports of Backyard Baseball, would start using professional baseball players adapted for the game’s cartoony art style.

Along with a standard pickup game mode, allowing you to customize various rules like number of innings, errors, etc., the game also included a season mode where players would manage a team over the course of an entire season. Season lengths varied drastically depending on the version. Some versions had seasons of 14 games while others would have a full 32 game season.

Backyard Baseball enjoyed much popularity when it was first released but it has not received much attention since the early 2000’s. The most recent release was Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015 on iOS and Android. The last console/PC release was nearly a decade ago in 2010.

Check back here tomorrow for another Video Game of the Day. If you enjoy these updates, please consider leaving a review on Amazon and spreading the word about what we’re doing here. Full transcripts and other musings are available on videogameoftheday.com