But yeah, essentially the whole port is done with binary patches to the original executable.
I dont know much about legacy ports of games like this, would be curious to learn more.
I expected $10 maybe $20. I think $40 is too far outside of impulse / nostalgia purchase.
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.
It seems like the early video games industry did a pretty bad job of preserving development artifacts. There have been a lot of stories about game code being found, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
What I don't understand is why just grabbing the original game files and slapping it inside the SCUMMVM wasn't the whole story. That's definitely how the other Humongous Games were re-released on Steam a decade earlier. I just assumed Backyard Baseball had more complex rights.
Backyard Baseball does not appear to be using ScummVM. https://steamdb.info/depot/3170541/
The .he* files also appear to be the original assets for the game. And then they built a Scumm interpreter to run the game which can talk to Steam to use leaderboards and achievements.
If this was a dude who wasn't working in a ... blue collar? job currently, HN would be all over this as entrepreneurship. A woman who happens to have a job which doesn't pay millions? WE HAVE QUESTIONS!
Im guessing those private investors specifically requested not to be named.
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.
Non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/style/backyard-baseball-v...