And within a too-short period, the franchise peaked before its quality cratered, as later entries and expansions into consoles moved away from the loving qualities that helped the first games pop. The original wasn’t a commercial success, and the franchise survived thanks only to conviction and an optimistic outlook from a studio head. That lasting cultural impact wasn’t preordained, with the game coming from a studio new to sports creations and embodying neither the hyperrealistic trend of modern sports titles nor the complete zaniness of classic arcade machines. That’s why there’s brush drums and finger snaps and an upright bass. “I wanted to capture a little sense of the nostalgia of baseball. “It’s a little bit old-fashion-y,” composer Rhett Mathis says. The original game is point and click, requiring only the left half of a computer mouse, and consists only of bright colors, sporting a palette of pinks and yellows, as the sun always shines even its buoyant background music evokes a stroll to the ballfield on a sunny day. Over the next few years, Humongous turned one game into a franchise, adding soccer, football, and basketball titles at the property’s peak popularity and placing atop the sales charts for all computer games, not just sports titles, in the early 2000s.Ĭast against 2017’s complex and gritty gaming landscape, Backyard Baseball may seem anachronistic. Twenty years ago this October 10, the first Backyard Baseball game hit shelves. With Backyard Baseball, that initial sports project in 1997, Humongous had already exhibited a mastery of one kind of fictional baseball, and with Pablo Sanchez, that project’s greatest star, it had already proved that the little guy was actually the best bet to win. Maybe their competition shouldn’t have been so surprised. The little guy, the little cartoon game, won the fantasy league.” “Everybody talked trash year until we won, and then no one said anything,” Humongous animator Haldi says. But Haldi and Mirkovich knew the sport, and the two Mariners fans shrewdly drafted Seattle second baseman Bret Boone, who wound up finishing his career year with 37 home runs and a league-leading 141 RBI, and added middle relievers to shore up their team’s late-season ratio stats on their way to the title. We wanted personality.”Ĭompeting in a standard fantasy baseball league against opponents with “big staffs and these big data analytics,” Haldi says, the Humongous Melonheads were the underdog.
“There were plenty of other sports games where the characters or players had no personality.
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