Backyard Sports (originally branded as Junior Sports) is a series of video games released for consoles and computers. The series is best known for starring kid-sized versions of popular professional sports stars, such as Albert Pujols, Paul Pierce, Barry Bonds, Tim Duncan, Clint Mathis, Kevin Garnett, Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Joe Thornton and Andy Macdonald. About BACKYARD SPORTS. Founded in 2005, Backyard Sports is a unique, community team sports program based in Westchester County, New York. Our programs, for boys and girls in Pre K through high school, focus on developing and sharpening athletic skills and winning strategies.
Please contact us via Discord or Twitter if you experience any problems.
| Backyard Baseball |
|---|
Developer: Humongous Entertainment This game has unused graphics. |
Hey, batter battHEY, BATTER BATTERWE WANT A BATTER, NOT A BROKEN LADDERwe want a batter not aSWING BATTER BATTSwing, batter bWE WANT Aswing, batterSWING BATTERwe want a batter not a broken ladderWE WANT A BATTERHEY, BATTERWe wantswingHEY BATHEYBATTERBATTERBATTER!!!
There, you've gotten a good 70% of the Backyard Baseball experience. The rest is 15% pop flies, 10% foul balls, 4.9% strikeouts, and 0.1% Jen Taylor squealing 'Caught in a pickle!' - just like the real thing.
- 1Unused Graphics
- 3Unused Dialogue
- 4Unused Text
Unused Graphics
Placeholder Headshots
The game contains a full set of placeholder character headshots for the strategy menu. They're stored in a different format from the final versions, which suggests the menu was overhauled at some point and the old graphics were forgotten about.
For what it's worth, this is probably the earliest available artwork showing the characters hatless.
| Character | Early | Final | Character | Early | Final |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimmy Eckman | Ronny Dobbs | ||||
| Maria Luna | Achmed Khan | ||||
| Angela Delveccio | Amir Khan | ||||
| Vicki Kawaguchi | Kenny Kawaguchi | ||||
| Gretchen Hasselhoff | Pete Wheeler | ||||
| Sally Dobbs | Dmitri Petrovich | ||||
| Billy Jean Blackwood | Ricky Johnson | ||||
| Ashley Webber | Marky Dubois | ||||
| Sidney Webber | Reese Worthington | ||||
| Kiesha Phillips | Pablo Sanchez | ||||
| Stephanie Morgan | Tony Delveccio | ||||
| Luanne Lui | Jorge Garcia | ||||
| Annie Frazier | Dante Robinson | ||||
| Jocinda Smith | Ernie Steele | ||||
| Lisa Crocket | Mikey Thomas |
Room Backgrounds
Several of the game's rooms are used only for storing data and don't need a background, but all of them have one anyway. Some are just blank, but a few are more interesting.
Rooms 16 and 19 store the background chatter for the female and male characters, respectively. Their background consists of the handwritten message 'Stupid talkies' against a very eye-displeasing background.
Room 22 contains the batting animations and this quirky message.
Room 25 holds most of the baseball logic, and a similar message to room 22.
Humongous Vision
A few placeholder graphics for the Humongous Vision display are still in the game.
| Final |
|---|
This seems to be how the board looked early in development. Assuming it had the same placement at that point, the green bit at the bottom is the center point of the home run fence.
| Final |
|---|
A placeholder version of the infield fly rule screen.
It's not clear what this is, but it's obviously meant to fit into the same 'slot' as the early Humongous Vision graphics. Possibly it was meant to simulate fields without the display for testing. Most likely, the brown thing on the right connected to some other placeholder graphic, now lost.
Collision Maps
There are several graphics in the game data which, when assembled and overlaid onto the baseball fields, seem to mark parts of the collision data for each area. They're incomplete, though every field except Tin Can Alley has at least one.
Cement Gardens
| Overlaid |
|---|
Dirt Yards
| Overlaid |
|---|
Eckman Acres
| Overlaid |
|---|
Playground Commons
| Overlaid |
|---|
The odd streak on the second base line is actually part of the tree graphic overlay in the bottom-right corner, so it's definitely in the right place. Who knows what it's doing there.
Sandy Flats
| Overlaid |
|---|
For some reason, a Steele Stadium component is stored with the Sandy Flats pieces.
Steele Stadium
| Overlaid |
|---|
Parks Department Field No. 2
| Overlaid |
|---|
Big City Stadium
| Overlaid |
|---|
Super Colossal Dome
| Overlaid |
|---|
Miscellaneous
| Final |
|---|
A 'TEMP' version of the tournament bracket menu icon snuck into the final game.
This save/load preview placeholder is present in several other Humongous games. This game displays the teams and score instead of a graphical preview, so presumably this is just left over from whichever game this was built off of.
Camera Debugger
| This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: See if there's some way to make this do whatever it's supposed to. |
Room 6 seems to be the remnants of a camera debugging system, probably related to the pseudo-3D gameplay in the overhead field view. The buttons on the control panel are apparently programmed to adjust the specified parameters and print relevant debug text like 'camera X angle is %d', and there are several scripts in the room that are obviously meant to do something, but it's not clear how this is supposed to be loaded or whether it still works.
Unused Dialogue
| To do: There's likely lots more. |
System Messages
Apparently Sunny Day was supposed to read out the text for the game's menus, which are silent in the finished game. These files appear at the very beginning of the dialogue file along with several other unused lines below, suggesting they were moved there when this feature was cut, then forgotten about.
| File | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| Anyways... | |
| All right, then. | |
| Okay, then... | |
| Are you sure you want to quit the game? | |
| Are you sure you want to delete this team? | |
| Are you sure you want to do that? | |
| Are you sure? | |
| Are you sure you want to stop? | |
| Do you want to save the game? | |
| ...nothing. | |
| You pick first | |
| You pick second | |
| You are the home team. | |
| That means you pitch first. | |
| You are the away team. | |
| That means you bat first |
Players at Bat
The only thing Sunny Day says when generic players are up at bat in Baseball '97 is 'steps up to bat', but she has unused variations that would eventually go used in the Major League licensed editions that add pros.
| File | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| steps up. | |
| comes to the plate. |
Color Commentary
A few of Vinnie's lines go unused. Like Sunny's lines above, these are at the very beginning of the dialogue file.
| File | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| The force is off, so the best play is at first. | |
| I think this pitcher should mix up the pitches a bit, because the batter's going to figure it out if you keep throwing the same pitch. | |
| Gotta keep an eye on that juice meter. When the juice is low, so is the pitcher's accuracy. | |
| Might want to try changing up the batting stance... |
Wrong-Way Baserunning
There are several clips of Sunny and Vinnie reacting to players running around the bases the wrong way. Although this is occasionally alluded to in the game, it can never actually happen.
Sunny
| File | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| What's this? Where's she going? | |
| Hey! He's going the wrong way! | |
| Wait a minute... what's happening here? | |
| What's going on here? |
Vinnie
| File | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| Can you believe that? She's heading backwards! | |
| Maybe he has to go to the bathroom. | |
| Well, Sunny, we've got one confused kid out there! | |
| My, oh my! She's running in the wrong direction! | |
| You gotta wonder what's going on in his head. |
'And a Miss'
Sunny has a few lines related to receiving a strike by 'missing'. It's possible there was originally some element of aiming the swing rather than just timing it, or these were just generic variations on the regular messages that were cut because they could be misinterpreted as implying this feature existed.
| File | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| and a miss! | |
| and a miss... Strike 1 | |
| and a miss... Strike 2 | |
| and a miss... Strike 3 |
Other
A clip of Sunny saying 'Tags her!', but for some reason it's incorrectly sampled to play at half-speed (and also with some very bad audio feedback).
Here's what it should sound like normally.
Unused Text
Subtitles
Most Humongous games have inaccessible subtitles, and this one is no exception. Unlike most games, adding 'TextOn=1' to the game's configuration file does not turn them on, making ScummVM the most practical way to see them.
Debug Output
| To do: Document. |
Also like most Humongous games, this one contains a slew of console debug output. The easiest way to view it is to run the game in ScummVM and set the debug level to 0 or higher.
Backyard Sports For Mac Download
| The Backyard Sports series | |
|---|---|
| Windows | Baseball • Soccer • Football • Hockey • Skateboarding |
| Mac OS Classic | Baseball • Soccer • Football |
| Game Boy Advance | Football • Football 2006 • Football 2007 |
| Backyard Sports | |
|---|---|
| Genre(s) | Sports |
| Developer(s) | Humongous Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) | |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Android, Game Boy |
| First release | Backyard Baseball 1997 |
| Latest release | Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015 and Backyard Sports: Basketball 2015 2015 |
Backyard Sports Games For Mac
Backyard Sports (originally branded as Junior Sports)[1][2] is a series of video games released for consoles and computers. The series is best known for starring kid-sized versions of popular professional sports stars, such as Albert Pujols, Paul Pierce, Barry Bonds, Tim Duncan, Clint Mathis, Kevin Garnett, Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Joe Thornton and Andy Macdonald. The Backyard Sports series is licensed by the leading professional U.S. sports leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL), the National Hockey League (NHL), and Major League Soccer (MLS).
The series includes Backyard Baseball, Backyard Basketball, Backyard Football (American football), Backyard Soccer, Backyard Hockey (Ice hockey), and Backyard Skateboarding. In the games, players form a team consisting of Backyard Kids and pro players, which they take through a 'Backyard League' season, attempting to become the champions. Players can create their own athletes, starting in Backyard Football (1999). Another aspect of the games is the use of Power-Ups, allowing players to gain 'super-abilities'. For instance, 'Super Dunk' allows a basketball player to make an incredible dunk from nearly anywhere on the court, 'Leap Frog' allows a football player to jump over the entire defensive line, and 'Ice Cream Truck' causes the other team to be completely distracted for a brief period of time.
Backyard Sports For Pc
Some of these games are playable with the ScummVM emulator.[3]
History[edit]
The series began in late 1997, when Humongous Entertainment created their first game, Backyard Baseball. Humongous Entertainment was owned by GT Interactive. Later Infogrames bought the company, and along with it came all of the game titles. Infogrames allowed Humongous Entertainment to expand the series, and they developed more titles such as Backyard Soccer, Backyard Hockey, Backyard Skateboarding, Backyard Basketball and Backyard Football.[4] Following the buyout by Infogrames these titles from the Backyard series have seen releases for game consoles, including the Nintendo GameCube, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, and Wii.
On July 24, 2013, Epic Gear bought the Backyard Sports franchise from the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.[5]
On December 11, 2014, Day 6 Sports Group announced the relaunch of the Backyard Sports series with Backyard Sports NBA Basketball for smartphones and tablets, with Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry as the cover athlete.
On April 19, 2019, Humongous Entertainment tweeted an image of the original Junior Sports logo, hinting at a possible re-release of the original games and/or the developer having re-secured the rights to the series proper.[6][1][2]
Film[edit]
In 2016, it was reported that Cross Creek Pictures and Crystal City Entertainment were developing a film based on Backyard Sports with Brian Oliver and Ari Daniel Pinchot producing.[7]
Backyard Sports Games For Mac
References[edit]
Backyard Sports Games For Mac
- ^ abSchmidt, Eugene (April 24, 2019). 'Humongous Entertainment coming to consoles'. Barrelrolled. Retrieved May 17, 2019.
- ^ abFrech, Ricky (April 24, 2019). 'Humongous Entertainment is Bringing Their Collection of 90s Classics to Consoles'. DualShockers. Retrieved May 17, 2019.
- ^http://gamesdbase.com/list.aspx?in=1&searchtext=backyard&searchtype=1
- ^'Backyard Sports - Backyard Basketball and Backyard Football'. Barcodespider.com.
- ^http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130724006402/en/Evergreen-Group-Agreed-Acquire-Backyard-Sports-Video/
- ^Humongous [@HumongousEnt] (April 19, 2019). '[Image-only tweet; image shows a red exclamation point on a transparent background overlaid with the words 'It's Junior Sports' in blue.]' (Tweet). Retrieved May 17, 2019 – via Twitter.
- ^Fleming Jr, Mike (March 30, 2016). ''Backyard Sports' Video Game In Movie Deal With Cross Creek & Crystal City'. Deadline.
External links[edit]
Backyard Sports Download Mac
- Official website (2007 archive on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine)
- Backyard Sports series at MobyGames