From 1999 to 2015, Backyard Sports was a beloved kid-friendly sports game franchise with colorful graphics, easy gameplay, and one of the most dominant athletes in video game history in Pablo Sanchez. Today, Playground Productions has announced that Backyard Sports is coming back, and it’s doing so as more than just video games.
Backyard Sports will be returning “across multiple verticals, including video games, merchandise, film, television and more” according to a press release. The first of these projects will launch “in the coming months,” but nothing specific–including whether or not it’s a video game or what platforms it will arrive on–was announced.
A brief teaser trailer was released alongside the announcement, which shows multiple kids in the signature Backyard Sports art style preparing for a baseball game. We see a treehouse with league standings and tournament brackets, the playground itself, and then as the pitcher takes the mound, Pablo Sanchez steps up to bat.
Playground Productions was founded in 2022 by Lindsay Barrett, a former second-grade teacher with “over a decade of experience in the Chicago public school system.” The company’s website says that by “leveraging the best technology, talent, and character IP, Playground creates content that celebrates the spirit of play, meets children where they are developmentally, and allows kids to be kids.”
Backyard Sports debuted on PC as Backyard Baseball in October 1997, with Backyard Soccer and Backyard Football following it in September 1998 and October 1999 respectively. The most-recent Backyard Sports games before this announcement were on mobile devices, as both Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015 and Backyard Sports: Basketball 2015 launched simultaneously in February 2015. A Backyard Sports movie was also announced in 2016, but the project never moved forward.
