Backyard Sports

Backyard Sports is an American video game franchise originally created by Humongous Entertainment and now owned by Playground Productions. It launched under the names Junior Sports and Humongous Sports before settling on the Backyard brand. The series targets children with simplified versions of real sports, and its main draw is a cast of fictional kids alongside childhood versions of famous professional athletes. The franchise includes five team-sport sub-series: Backyard Baseball, Backyard Soccer, Backyard Football, Backyard Basketball, and Backyard Hockey, plus a single non-team title, Backyard Skateboarding. Beyond games, it has two animated specials, an upcoming animated series, and various merchandise.

The franchise has been licensed by all five major American professional sports leagues—Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League—as well as their players’ associations. After Humongous closed in 2005, the series changed hands multiple times and went on a long hiatus from 2010 to 2024, with only a brief mobile revival in 2015. Playground Productions rebooted the series in 2024, and a new Backyard Baseball game released in 2026 became the first original title since those 2015 mobile games.

In gameplay, players assemble a team of Backyard Kids and, in most entries, pro athletes as children, then guide them through a Backyard League season to win the championship. Starting with Backyard Football (1999), most games let players create custom characters. Power-ups are a key feature, granting temporary advantages—for example, "Aluminum Power" gives a batter a near-certain home run, "Super-Dunk" allows a basketball player to dunk from anywhere, "Leap Frog" lets a football player jump over the entire defensive line, and "Ice Cream Truck" distracts the opposing team briefly.

**History**

**1997–2005: Under Humongous Entertainment** The series began in late 1997 when Humongous Entertainment, then owned by GT Interactive, released Backyard Baseball. Illustrator Nick Mirkovich pitched the idea of a baseball game with child players to a co-founder, and the concept was greenlit in 1995 during the Seattle Mariners’ first playoff run. GT Interactive was later bought by Infogrames and renamed Infogrames, Inc., which let Humongous expand the series with titles like Backy