Backyard Baseball

Genre: Childrens, Sports

Release Year: 1997

Developer: Humongous Entertainment

Publisher: Humongous Entertainment

Age Rating: Everyone

Playability Status: Perfect

Tested On: Windows 10 x64

Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

Baseball is a hugely popular sport in many countries, including the USA and Japan. Here in the UK however, it never really caught on. In school, we play a similar game called “Rounders”, which is frankly a stupid name well worthy of ridicule. There have been lots of computer simulations of Baseball, but Backyard Baseball is specifically aimed at children. In the game, the player will need to pick and manage his or her team of neighborhood kids and take them up all the way to the Backyard Baseball World Series. The original game (which we’re covering here) was released in 1997 and went on to launch a successful series that’s still going strong today.

Installing and playing

The original Backyard Baseball is a 16 bit game which means it cannot run natively on more modern versions of Windows. You could install a Windows XP virtual machine and play the game there. Rather than doing that however, you may wish to use ScummVM instead. ScummVM is a special program that helps older adventure games to run. Now, you’re probably thinking “a baseball simulator doesn’t sound much like an adventure game”, but remember this is a children’s baseball game and so has a few similarities to a point and click adventure game. Because of this, it’s supported by ScummVM and easy to run on modern machines.

To run the game with ScummVM, simply copy the entire contents of the games CD-ROM to a convenient location on your PC, then point ScummVM to the folder. There’s a comprehensive tutorial here that takes you through all the steps in detail.

There are no CD audio tracks to copy, so once the CD is copied and ScummVM is configured and options set to taste, you’re good to go.