Backyard Sports (originally branded as Junior Sports and then Humongous Sports; also simply known as the Backyard franchise) is an American video game-based media franchise created by Humongous Entertainment and currently handled by Playground Productions. It primarily focuses on video games for children featuring simplified versions of various sports. It is best known for starring a diverse cast of fictional children as well as child versions of famous professional sports athletes. The video game series includes five sub-series based on different team sports—Backyard Baseball (baseball), Backyard Soccer (association football), Backyard Football (American football), Backyard Basketball (basketball), and Backyard Hockey (ice hockey)—as well as the single game non-team sport-based Backyard Skateboarding. The overall franchise also includes two animated specials, an upcoming animated series, and various merchandise.
Backyard Sports is currently or was previously licensed by the five major professional American sports leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), Major League Soccer (MLS), the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL), as well as their affiliated players associations. Between Humongous's closure in 2005 and Playground Productions' 2024 reboot of the series, the series changed ownership and developers several times and endured a years-long hiatus from 2010 to 2024 (excluding a brief mobile game revival in 2015), with a reboot of Backyard Baseball released in 2026 as the first original game in the series since the 2015 mobile games.
In the games, players form a team consisting of Backyard Kids and (in most entries) professional athletes as children, which players take through a "Backyard League" season, attempting to become the champions of their chosen sport. Players can create their own custom characters in most entries starting with Backyard Football (1999). An additional aspect of the games is the use of power-ups, allowing players to gain powerful abilities. For instance, "Aluminum Power" gives the batter a powerful swing that almost guarantees a home run, "Super-Dunk" allows a basketball player to make a 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 distracted for a brief period.
History 1997–2005: Under Humongous Entertainment The series began in late 1997 when Humongous Entertainment, owned by GT Interactive, created the first game in the franchise: Backyard Baseball. Backyard Baseball was conceived by then-Humongous illustrator Nick Mirkovich, who pitched the idea of a baseball game featuring children as the players with one of the company's co-founders. The idea was picked up in 1995 during the Seattle Mariners' first-ever playoff run that season.
Later, GT Interactive was purchased by Infogrames and was renamed as Infogrames, Inc. Infogrames allowed Humongous Entertainment to expand the series, and Humongous later developed more titles such as Backyard Soccer, Backyard Football, Backyard Basketball, Backyard Hockey, and Backyard Skateboarding. Following the buyout by Infogrames, these titles from the Backyard series were released for game consoles, including the GameCube, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, and Wii. In 2003, Infogrames, Inc. was renamed as Atari, Inc.
2005–2010: Under Humongous, Inc. In 2005, Atari laid off much of the development portion of Humongous Entertainment, renaming the company to Humongous, Inc. at the same time. In August, they sold Humongous to their majority parent Infogrames Entertainment SA for shares worth . In October 2005, Infogrames announced that the relaunched Humongous brand would mainly focus on new entries in the Backyard Sports franchise.
In March 2008, Infogrames purchased the remaining shares of Atari, Inc. that they didn't own and renamed itself to Atari SA the following year.Infogrames Entertainment S.A. and Atari, Inc. Announce Agreement to Merge: Financial News Yahoo! Finance The two Atari businesses continued to release entries in the series within this time.
2013–2020: Post-sale and attempted relaunch In July 2013, private equity firm The Evergreen Group bought the Backyard Sports franchise and IP via its portfolio company, Epic Gear LLC, when Humongous Entertainment's parent, Atari, went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in January 2013.
In February 2014, Day6 Sports Group acquired the franchise from Epic Gear. The company announced to relaunch the franchise in December with Backyard Sports NBA Basketball for smartphones and tablets, with Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry as the cover athlete. Two mobile games, Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015 and Backyard Sports: NBA Basketball 2015, were released in February 2015. Day6's purchase of the brand also led to two film producers, Stuart Avi Savitsky and Ari Daniel Pinchot, who had long been interested in the IP since watching their children play Backyard Baseball in the early 2000s, acquiring the brand's film rights. Day6 did not release any further games afterward, as the company was acquired by a European investment group in 2016 and later went out of business in 2020.
In April 2019, Humongous's social media pages tweeted an image of the original Junior Sports logo, which led to ultimately false speculation about a possible re-release of the original games and/or the developer having re-secured the rights to the series proper.
2020–present: New ownership and full brand relaunch After Day6's closure in 2020, the franchise's intellectual property was purchased in full by Pinchot and Savitsky in 2021, establishing Backyard Sports LLC to manage the franchise's trademarks. The two producers kept the acquisition a secret as they did not have full plans on how to properly revive the IP. Around that time, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago elementary schoolteacher Lindsay Barnett, a fan of the franchise since its early years, decided to revive the franchise after noticing during her online teaching classes that her students were playing video games that were inappropriate for their age group and discovering from them that they did not play sports games because of their difficulty. Barnett contacted intellectual property attorneys, including those who previously worked with Humongous, and then hired a private investigator to uncover the brand's current trademark owners. Despite not having the rights secured by then, Barnett resigned from teaching in 2022 and received private funding to establish Playground Productions LLC, hiring several individuals including animation producer and writer Chris Waters to help her with the brand.
Barnett eventually made contact with Pinchot and Savitsky in summer 2022 and negotiated with them over the course of a year, beginning to work together in relaunching Backyard Sports across gaming and other verticals. In January 2024, before Barnett reached an agreement with Pinchot and Savitsky, the franchise regained media attention when NFL player Jason Kelce, in an episode of his and his brother Travis's podcast New Heights, reminisced about playing Backyard Football and Backyard Baseball, and stated his desire to purchase the rights to the brand to develop a new game in the series, unaware of Pinchot and Savitsky's 2021 purchase and Barnett's own attempts to acquire the brand. Although the Kelce brothers' interests in acquiring Backyard Sports caused Barnett to worry about losing the franchise's rights to them, they ultimately never followed up on the idea, and Barnett acquired the franchise in March, with Pinchot and Savitsky retaining co-ownership of the film and television rights.
Backyard Sports received further attention in August 2022 when Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals used a baseball bat themed after Pablo Sanchez, a popular character in the series, to hit a home run against the Cincinnati Reds during Major League Baseball's Players' Weekend. Later that month, Playground Productions officially relaunched the franchise publicly by releasing an animated trailer featuring several of the Backyard Kids preparing to start a game of baseball.
As the source codes of the early games were lost, Barnett and Playground Productions enlisted the help of Backyard Sports fans—including Jim "Jibbodahibbo" Westerkamp, who alongside other fans hacked into early games to establish an online multiplayer league—and hired Pittsburgh-based developer Mega Cat Studios to reverse engineer and remaster some of the original games from CD-ROM copies. Six remastered classic titles were released throughout 2024 and 2025, including Backyard Baseball '97, Backyard Soccer '98, Backyard Baseball '01, Backyard Football '99, Backyard Basketball '01, and Backyard Hockey '02. Over 60 athletes from the original releases, such as Barry Sanders, Lisa Leslie, Dan Marino, and Mark McGwire, signed with Playground Productions to return for the remasters, with Major League Baseball also signing on to re-license its brand and trademarks (including all 30 MLB teams) for Backyard Baseball '01. Most of the remasters received releases on mobile devices. , the remasters have been downloaded over one million times. It was also announced in 2024 that a new original Backyard Sports title was in development at Mega Cat for a 2026 release, which was later revealed at the end of Backyard Sports: The Animated Special to be a new Backyard Baseball game. The Backyard Baseball reboot was released for computers on July 9, 2026.
Characters The series is known for its diverse cast of children characters, known as the "Backyard Kids", who vary in appearance, personality, and stats, with some kids being stronger in certain sports and weaker in others. The below lists only show the original characters of the franchise, excluding the real-life athletes who appear in the games.
Backyard Kids The Original Thirty These are the original Backyard Kids introduced by Humongous in 1997's Backyard Baseball. They all appeared in every game up until Backyard Skateboarding (2004), which featured only a limited selection of the kids as either playable characters or non-playable characters. From that game until the 2024 reboot, some of these kids were excluded in select games, especially from 2006 to 2010 when Atari, Inc. controlled the franchise. Achmed Khan: A Pakistani American boy who loves rock music to the point of wearing headphones all the time in most games. He is the lead singer and guitarist of a rock band featuring his younger brother Amir Khan and their cousins called the Knights of Rockville. Amir Khan: A Pakistani American boy who is the younger brother of Achmed Khan. He also loves rock music and serves as the drummer of the Knights of Rockville, although earlier games showed that he desired to play bass guitar. He often gets a stat buff if he's on the same team as Achmed. Angela Delvecchio: A tomboyish Italian American girl with a New York accent whose personality is modeled after the Pink Ladies of the 1950s-inspired musical Grease (1971) and its 1978 film adaptation. She is the clumsiest player among the Backyard Kids. She has a sibling rivalry with her older brother Tony Delvecchio and usually gets a stat buff when playing against the team he's on and a nerf when they're both playing on the same team. Annie Frazier: A Caucasian American girl who has a peaceful, hippie personality. Ashley Webber and Sidney Webber: Caucasian American identical twin sisters who come from a rich family and enjoy tennis (despite the sport never being represented in the franchise). In most games, both sisters get a stat buff if they both play on the same team.