The actual Yard Baseball source code no longer exists. Mega Cat Studios remastered the game anyway.

Yard Baseball 1997 is back in all its nostalgic glory, sliding into Steam like Pablo Sanchez stealing a base. But before Mega Cat Studios could remaster the cult-favorite PC game, founder James Deighan had to sift through nearly thirty years of rubble.

Playground Productions, a children’s media company, obtained the rights to the Yard Sports games, which were originally released by Humongous Leisure for Windows PCs. But the now-defunct video game developer didn’t do a great job archiving its software when it was bought, sold, and dismantled for parts during the 2000s.

“[Playground] “He sent us this huge box of Zip disks and files and CD ROMs and all kinds of stuff over the years,” Deighan told TechCrunch. He reviewed the materials with Luke Usher, an engineer who specializes in emulators (programs that allow computers or other devices to imitate video game consoles, such as an iPhone app that lets you play Pokémon). But Usher and Deighan discovered a key problem.

“I realized that the source code for the games we were trying to work on was missing,” Usher told TechCrunch. “So we got a copy of the Baseball ’97 album, started from there, and then it became clear that we needed to modify the game to make it work well on modern systems. So I started searching the net to see if anyone had worked with that game before.”

That’s how they met John Simon, an engineer who had been modifying Yard Sports games for fun.

“It’s something I do from time to time when I really like a game. I played it, I beat it and, you know, the replay value is gone, but I haven’t had enough,” Simon told TechCrunch. “So what do you do? For me, as a programmer, as a reverse engineer, it’s fun to just go in and dig into the source and see if there are any developer secrets left or incomplete content, the kind of things you see on the cutting room floor.”

When Deighan leads projects like this, in which a retro game comes back to life, he tries to hire people within the fan communities of those games.

“One of the first things we do is expand the Mega Cat team with people who have already been living in that space for several years,” Deighan said. This also applies to a project Mega Cat worked on with the Mike Tyson NES games. “For example, when we worked on Mike Tyson [i.e. Punch-Out! for NES]”We were working closely with Mike Tyson’s ROM hackers, speedrunners, and people who know every nook and cranny of the subject, because they often end up being not only 20 times more passionate, but also much more knowledgeable.”

Simon’s experience with the Yard Sports franchise was especially helpful, as it is built within SCUMM, an outdated game engine that LucasArts released in 1987.

“There could be maybe two dozen people around the world who are actively contributing or working on [SCUMM]”Deighan said. “It is very similar to an artifact inherited from a previous era.”

Even at the time of Yard Baseball’s original launch, SCUMM was already falling out of use.

“Somehow, the Humongous developers back in the ’90s built a 3D game inside this 2D game engine,” Simon said. “Somehow they turned it into a sports game; “It is an incredible achievement, especially in 1997.”

Simon was able to modify Yard Baseball assets and scripts using ScummVM, an open source interpreter of the game engine (the programmer behind the 2001 software program, Ludwig Strigeusbecame one of the first developers of Spotify). But Mega Cat still had the problem of getting the redesigned Yard Baseball to run on modern devices. That was Usher’s job.

“That involved basically building a framework that can hijack the game when you try to run it, take over management and then run our own code before the game code starts, and use it as an opportunity to apply patches, make changes, fix bugs, connect to Steam, that kind of thing,” he said. “So the game doesn’t really know it’s been modified, but we jump in before it has a chance to start.”

Although the Mega Cat team spent a lot of time researching the specific types of problems that arise with retro games, they didn’t lose sight of the joy of bringing Yard Baseball back to life. The game has such a long-standing fan base that even the kelce brothers He considered buying the rights.

“Some of us were doing this stuff for free for 10 years, so it’s a dream project to be part of,” Deighan said. “It’s a really fun hit for the fandom, for people to hit that nostalgia button and go back in time.”

The tension with Yard Baseball, however, is that most of their fans, who played when they were young, are now in their 20s and 30s. Therefore, a game with a difficulty level aimed at children using computers for the first time may be too easy. But Mega Cat and Playground decided to keep the game true to its original version and instead added Steam achievements for players who want an extra challenge.

“We believe strongly in preservation,” Deighan said. “Our emphasis was more on what can we do to allow digital preservation to be independent while also adding all these other features of replayability and collaboration.”

Now, Yard Baseball 1997 is available on Steam, but Mega Cat’s work isn’t done yet. With Playground Productions, they will also remaster Yard Soccer ’98, Yard Soccer ’99, Yard Basketball ’01, Yard Baseball ’01, and Yard Hockey ’02.

“Fans have been showing up like crazy,” Deighan said. “It’s easy to stay excited.”