A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game
62 points - last Monday at 5:13 PM
Sourcejasonjmcghee
today at 11:24 PM
I saw backyard baseball on steam the other day and was blown away by the $40 price tag.
I expected $10 maybe $20. I think $40 is too far outside of impulse / nostalgia purchase.
I know from people who actually worked on this that the process of actually getting the game running and following modern platform conventions was somewhat insane and tortuous, but interesting. Too technical for the Times to go into though I guess.
But yeah, essentially the whole port is done with binary patches to the original executable.
"Port done with binary patches" has a bit of the same energy as the N64Recomp project[0], which converts N64 ROMs into C programs that can be built for modern PCs.
0. https://github.com/N64Recomp/N64Recomp
Say more, seems like a simple game? Was it written weird or something?
I dont know much about legacy ports of games like this, would be curious to learn more.
TLDR; a Chicago-area schoolteacher was able to find the rights to the old Backyard Baseball PC game from the 1990s, and she commissioned a software game development company and a still-live fan base, to recreate the source code (because the original source was lost).
She founded a company called Playground Productions. Thanks to her efforts, nostalgic Millennials and their kids can purchase and enjoy this old game.
A nice, feel-good story. But I have two questions:
1. The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this. Sounds like an important detail.
2. Would have liked to know more about the source code. What happened to the original code (it wasn't in escrow somewhere?) and how did they recreate it? It says some fans had old CD-ROMs with the game on it, and the game dev company in Pittsburgh worked with them to rebuild the game.
EvanAnderson
today at 6:53 PM
> What happened to the original code (it wasn't in escrow somewhere?) ...
It seems like the early video games industry did a pretty bad job of preserving development artifacts. There have been a lot of stories about game code being found, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
burnhamup
today at 6:31 PM
I'm curious too. The original developers were Humongous Games (Putt-Putt & Freddi Fish) whose other titles used the SCUMM engine. My guess would be Backyard Baseball was as well.
I dug up this article that seems to go through the process but not in great technical detail: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/backyard-baseball-97-in...
What I don't understand is why just grabbing the original game files and slapping it inside the SCUMMVM wasn't the whole story. That's definitely how the other Humongous Games were re-released on Steam a decade earlier. I just assumed Backyard Baseball had more complex rights.
IIRC, part of the order was for stuff like Steam achievements, upgraded assets, modern resolution support, other platform conveniences, plus other required changes to the game due to licensing agreements shifting, all of which made slapping it in a VM a poor fit.
burnhamup
today at 6:59 PM
I poked at the Steam Depots for some of these games for more information.
A game like Putt-Putt ships the ScummVM under the GPL license and runs it with the original asset files: https://steamdb.info/depot/294661/
Backyard Baseball does not appear to be using ScummVM.
https://steamdb.info/depot/3170541/
The .he* files also appear to be the original assets for the game. And then they built a Scumm interpreter to run the game which can talk to Steam to use leaderboards and achievements.
> The story doesn't mention how this schoolteacher got enough "private investors" so she could quit her job and pursue this. Sounds like an important detail.
If this was a dude who wasn't working in a ... blue collar? job currently, HN would be all over this as entrepreneurship. A woman who happens to have a job which doesn't pay millions? WE HAVE QUESTIONS!
mrkaye97
last Monday at 11:25 PM
I was just going to post this, and searched first and landed here. Not much to say beyond that reading this piece made me so happy, and brought back tons of nostalgia for days I'd long forgotten.
Rebelgecko
today at 7:46 PM
I thought this article was really interesting but it's odd how it doesn't mention where the funds came from. I can't imagine the salary of a school teacher in her 20s can cover lawyers, a dev team, buying IP, etc
“With funding from private investors,…”
Im guessing those private investors specifically requested not to be named.
cool_dude85
last Monday at 11:39 PM
Never played the backyard games. For me, the ultimate nostalgia trip along these lines is the excellent Little League Baseball for NES.
I came here expecting an AI story, and instead got a story of a classic IP hunt. Awesome!
Interestingly it ends in them never finding the source (and another commenter here says they got it working by monkeypatching the binary.
At this point I wonder if they could feed all the assets and patches into and LLM and have it recreate the code from scratch, so that they could add new features.
brandonmenc
today at 6:41 PM
Not a single hyperlink in that article. Infuriating.
If only there were ways to look up the things you wanted to know from it.
Not anymore, now you just get an AI overview, followed by SEO slop results.