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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Deck: Backyard Baseball, a favorite game for 1990s kids, had been off the market for years. But Lindsay Barnett was determined.

Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/style/backyard-baseball-v...

Not a single hyperlink in that article. Infuriating.