The image is iconic.
A smiling, chubby, cartoonish child wearing a backwards yellow banana hat. Two jet-black eyes just below the hat’s blue brim dot the center of his prize-winning pumpkin-sized head. On top of that enormous melon, which makes up more than half of the child’s body, is an elongated, boomerang-shaped smile. An ill-fitting white T-shirt with a red trim, revealing a pot belly and navel, completes the ensemble.
This is Pablo Sanchez, the most legendary and mythical video game character that has ever existed.
And he’s back, with all his friends.
Backyard Baseball, the iconic point-and-click video game from the early 2000s, is set to be remade and published by a company called Playground Productions “in the coming months.” Specific details remain scarce; no gameplay footage has been released. But there is an interactive websitequotes from the bigwigs at Playground Production and even an online store full of Backyard Baseball bricks.
There is also an “Official of Backyard Sports” Instagram Pagea statement that would have made no sense in 1997, when the original Backyard Baseball title was released by Humongous Entertainment.
The game, which featured 30 playable, highly detailed neighborhood kids in a point-and-click environment, was a huge success. Its successor, Backyard Baseball 2001, took it a step further by featuring 31 MLB players as kids in the game. It became something of a cult classic, even though the Backyard Sports series fell out of favor by the end of the decade. The series was revived in the mid-2010s, resulting in an unsatisfactory mobile-only version of the game.
And so, the return of Backyard Baseball – brilliantly presented in a 45-second YouTube video – is enough to make this 28-year-old baseball fan jump for joy. I can’t be the only one.
For anyone who played the game growing up, the new trailer brings back a slew of memories. You’d sit in front of your parents’ computer for hours and hours, until your eyes became watery and bloodshot. The computer desk, glued to the floor, roared and purred like a jet engine. Play for hours and the machine would heat up like a cast iron skillet. Point and click, point and click, taking the Melonheads to glory as time stopped and flowed at the same time.
The 30 playable children, with elaborate backstories and endearing personalities, became your friends. From Marky Dubois’ barefoot, frog-wearing country boy energy to Stephanie Morgan’s baseball devotion to the rock music-loving, headphone-wearing Achmed Khan. The sheer diversity of the cast of characters was rare in an era filled with interchangeable, white video game protagonists: Half the playable characters are girls, 16 are minorities, and Kenny Kawaguchi plays in a wheelchair.
It’s no coincidence that the game really took off when professional players – one from each team, plus two from the Cincinnati Reds…