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IP revivals are everywhere in gaming and movies right now, but the rights to beloved franchises aren’t always easy to track down. Just ask Lindsay Barnett, a former elementary school teacher who made it her mission to bring “Backyard Sports” to modern consoles using several lawyers, a private investigator, and a lot of reverse engineering.
The “Backyard Sports” games were an incredibly popular series of desktop PC video games in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The earliest games, developed by Humongous Entertainment, featured a series of cartoon children as possible teammates to recruit, while later installments featured kid versions of some professional players, like Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter in “Backyard Baseball 2001.”
Though the original franchise ended a decade ago with the release of “Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015” and “Backyard Sports: NBA Basketball 2015,” it made a comeback in October 2024 when Playground Productions rereleased “Backyard Baseball ’97.”
As of July 8, fans of the series can now play “Backyard Baseball ’01” too.
“These games were my favorites growing up,” Barnett, founder and CEO of Playground Productions, said on the Sports Report podcast (see video above or listen below). “I was a very sporty little girl in Chicago, and this was the game that made me fall in love with baseball and football. I was looking for great content for kids and especially great games that they could be playing on their computers, and this franchise was nowhere to be found.”
Barnett, who taught elementary public school in Chicago for nine years, explained that teaching remotely during the COVID era set her on the path to find out how to make these games accessible to children again.
“[‘Backyard Sports’] hadn’t had a game come out in almost a decade when I started looking for it,” she recalled. “And so I did the normal process of first searching on Google and then asking IP lawyers — and it was not findable. One of the lawyers said, ‘Hey Lindsay, you could hire a private investigator to track the rights down.’ And that just sounded like a great COVID project. And so I was like, let’s do that.”
She said it took six months to find out who owned the intellectual property rights for “Backyard Sports,” but she eventually acquired them for her own production company, which she founded in 2022.
