Lindsay Barnett, a former Chicago public school teacher, has revived the beloved 1990s video game franchise Backyard Baseball after a decade-long absence. The franchise, known for its diverse cast of cartoon children and accessible gameplay, originally debuted in 1997, created by Humongous Entertainment in Seattle. Despite its initial popularity, the game’s source code was lost and the intellectual property rights became scattered, rendering attempts to relaunch the series difficult.

Backyard Baseball featured a distinctive lineup of characters, including a star pitcher who used a wheelchair and a diverse roster split evenly between boys and girls of various backgrounds. The game’s standout player, Pablo Sanchez, was inspired by a little-seen Hispanic character in the 1970s sports comedy “The Bad News Bears,” reimagined as an unexpectedly talented athlete.

Barnett, who grew up playing Backyard Baseball, first encountered the franchise at age five. She later pursued degrees in radio, television, film, and elementary education at Northwestern University before becoming a second-grade teacher. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while teaching remotely, she observed students gravitating toward violent video games like Fortnite. Concerned that children lacked access to simple sports games that taught rules and teamwork, she sought to bring back Backyard Baseball. Her search for the game revealed an unusual legal and logistical puzzle: the rights holders were difficult to trace, and the source code was missing.

At the same time, two film producers, Stuart Avi Savitsky and Ari Pinchot, had been quietly working since the early 2000s to acquire the rights to the franchise, initially interested in its potential as a film property. Over several years, they secured the intellectual property in its entirety, purchasing it from a European investment group in 2021, although they chose to keep the acquisition confidential until a meaningful plan was in place.

Barnett’s persistence led her to the rights holders in 2022, where she proposed a partnership that prioritized revival of the video game alongside potential film and television projects. After a year of negotiations, Barnett formally acquired the Backyard Sports franchise in March 2024, with Savitsky and Pinchot remaining involved for media adaptations.

With the official rights secured but the original source code lost, Barnett’s team tracked down a dedicated community of Backyard Baseball superfans. These fans had preserved the game through extensive online play and digital preservation efforts, sharing knowledge and technical workarounds to keep the game operational on modern systems. Collaborating with this community and a Pittsburgh-based digital studio called Mega Cat, Barnett’s company meticulously reconstructed the game from original media and fan backups, recreating the 1997 version down to fine details over five months.

The restored Backyard Baseball ’97 was re-released in October 2024, followed by the revival of five additional games in the franchise, collectively downloaded over a million times to date. In January, Barnett’s company produced an animated special featuring prominent voice actors, which debuted on Amazon Prime Video.

Most recently, Barnett unveiled a new installment in the Backyard Baseball series, the first original game release in more than ten years. She personally voices multiple characters and has incorporated longtime fans into development. Reflecting on the project’s origins in her childhood neighborhood of Highland Park, Barnett emphasized a desire for the games to inspire real-world play beyond the screen.

“I might be the only video game CEO who wants people to play for a little while — and then go outside,” she said.

Barnett’s efforts highlight a rare convergence of nostalgic gaming, grassroots fandom, and entrepreneurial determination to restore and expand a cherished childhood property in the digital age.