Trivia / Backyard Sports

• Acting for Two: Lani Minella plays both announcers in Baseball 2003 and Soccer 2004.
• Ascended Fanon: At the beginning of the series, Pablo was just a normal (though often overpowered) character. When the programmers found out about his Memetic Badass status, they put a huge stained glass window of him in Backyard Skateboarding.
• Bad Export for You: Only three of the titles in the series were released in PAL regions; Backyard Soccer for Windows, Backyard Soccer: MLS Edition for the PlayStation, and Backyard Basketball 2004 for the PlayStation 2. Both titles were debranded of their MLS and NBA licenses with all the pros removed, voices redubbed with British voice actors, and were renamed Backyard Football, Junior Sports Football, and Junior Sports Basketball respectively.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: This franchise was the cause of Humongous Entertainment making a profit. It seemed to evolve further into this as soon as Atari hijacked the series, but it later lost this status as the quality of the games went down and the series lost relevancy.
• Children Voicing Children: Only a few characters are voiced by children, such as Ken Griffey Jr., Jeff Bagwell, Cal Ripken Jr., Chipper Jones, the custom boy, Mark McGwire, Curt Schilling, and Jason Giambi (Baseball 2001), Jason Kreis (Soccer MLS Edition), Griffey, Reese Worthington, Pete Wheeler, Stephanie Morgan, and Ichiro Suzuki (Baseball 2003).
• Creator Backlash: Most of the former Humongous employees detest the later games in the series if the Humongous Alumni page on Facebook is anything to go by. One of the former artists even responded to Evergreen's revival announcement with "This just made me throw up in my mouth a little. Nice to see them flogging that dead horse."
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Most boys are voiced by women.
• Defictionalization: The employees at Humongous celebrated the launch of the first game in the series by making official Humongous Melonheads jerseys (which are the default team selected in both the original Baseball and Soccer).
• Development Hell: In April 2016, Cross Creek Pictures and Crystal City Entertainment acquired the film rights to the series. Nothing ever came of it.
• Dummied Out:
  • Peyton Manning was supposed to appear in Football 2002 on PC, but he only appears in the GBA port.
  • Kobe Bryant, due to his assault incident. It's easy to re-add him, but using him on a team will crash the game. He later appeared in the iOS exclusive NBA 2015.
  • Area 51½/A Nameless Field from the Soccer series.
• Executive Meddling: A positive example - after Backyard Baseball didn't perform well in its first year, everyone at Humongous was convinced not to make any more games, but Ron Gilbert pushed them forward. And surprise surprise, they ended up outselling their already popular Junior Adventures. It got worse when Atari took over, however.
• Fake Nationality: Pablo is voiced by a non-native Spanish speaker. As mentioned in Mythology Gag, the development team wanted to avert this but couldn't find a suitable actor in time.
• Feelies: Earlier installments came with promotional cards of the Backyard kids and pros. The ones that came with Baseball were an Obvious Beta, however, as some kids' clothes are differently colored, and their pitching and fielding stats are inaccurate and labeled as "Throwing" and "Catching".
• Follow the Leader: The 3D Football games are similar to Madden, while Skateboarding copied the gameplay of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, right down to the control scheme.
• Franchise Zombie: The 2007 titles onward (Continuity Reboot and on) are pretty unanimously considered this, as they were all made following the bankruptcy and closure of the original Humongous Entertainment studios. This is the point where the series slowly devolved into a major sports league cash cow, with a pretty obvious lack of care for the quality of the games.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Evergreen Group, the then-rights holder of the series in 2013 and 2014, went on record stating a re-release of any of the older games is heavily unlikely due to rights issues with the pro players (this wouldn't affect the original Baseball and Soccer, however, since they didn't feature any pros to begin with).^note When a pro player retires, they are no longer owned by the league and instead become their own entity. Since most of the games, especially the most popular ones, feature pros that have long left their sport, this represents a large majority of the cast and would mean more trouble than it's worth. This means the only way to play any of the old games at this point is to buy them secondhand or obtain them through... other means. However, NFL star Jason Kelce^note surname pronounced "KEL-see" wants to buy the rights to the series and bring it back into the limelight.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Humongous had no intention of this series outselling their Junior Adventures, especially since Backyard Baseball performed poorly in its first year.
• Mythology Gag: Pablo's Easter Egg (where if you hold shift and click on him, he reveals that he doesn't actually speak Spanish) is actually a nod to his voice actor; the development team was unable to find a suitable authentic Latino voice actor, so they simply took the auditioner who sounded closest to such. His only experience in Spanish-speaking was learning it in classes, as he was actually non-native. The dialogue was actually thrown in as a joke to poke fun at this; see this article for more information.
• One-Book Author: OK, technically two, but the last two games in the series as of 2024, Backyard Sports: Baseball 2015 and Backyard Sports: Basketball 2015, both released on the same day on February 6, 2015, were developed by Day6 Sports Group, a company founded in 2014 that acquired the franchise's rights from The Evergreen Group (who, as an equity firm, published no entries) the same year. Both games failed to find an audience, and Day6 was bought by a European investment firm in 2016 and then went out of business in 2020.
• The Other Darrin: The series has had many different voice casts. The voices that most people are familiar with, and what's considered the definitive voice cast of the series, are the 1997-2001 voices with Jen Taylor as Sunny Day. For Baseball 2003 and Soccer 2004, the recording moved to San Diego with the Audio Godz voices, including Lani Minella as most of the announcers alongside some other big names such as Ryan Drummond. 2003-2005 moved back to Seattle, but with a totally new cast (except Dex Manley), including Samantha Kelly as Sunny Day. 2006 onward brings back a few more of the classic voices, such as Mark Lund, Dolores Rogers, and Shelley Reynolds. Chuck Downfield (Clem Daniels) and Barry Dejay (Dex Manley) were the only Seattle actors who were never replaced.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: Similar to the Madden Curse, the cover athlete in Backyard Football was also stricken by bad luck during the season. In the original game, Steve Young suffered a career-ending injury in the 1999 season. In 2002, Drew Bledsoe got injured and Tom Brady stepped in (and the rest is history). Jeff Garcia (2004) became a journeyman after that season, and Daunte Culpepper (2006) blew out both of his knees and wound up in the now-defunct UFL. While Brady (the 2008 cover star) guided the Patriots to a perfect regular season, they lost the Super Bowl that year.
• Production Posse: A number of voice actors in the series are Sonic the Hedgehog veterans, due to it being recorded at Bill Corkery Productions, where the Sonic Adventure-era games were recorded. Notably, these include three versions of Tails (Corey and Conner Bringas and William Corkery), all of Chaotix (Bill and Emily Corkery and Marc Biagi), Lani Minella (Rouge), and even Sonic himself, Ryan Drummond.
  • Additionally, many voice actors from the Super Mario Bros. series are regulars here, such as two separate versions of Princess Peach (Jen Taylor and Samantha Kelly, both of whom have also voiced Toad and Toadette), Dolores Rogers (Bowser Jr.), and Dex Manley (Lakitu prior to Mario Kart 7 and the announcer for Mario Golf).
• Referenced by...: In the Molly of Denali episode "Eenie Eenie Aye Over," the video game the kids are playing at the start of the episode resembles Backyard Sports.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Backyard Soccer 2004 has a copyright date of 2002 and all signs point to it being completed around the same time as Baseball 2003 (sharing voice casts, having similar updates to its direct predecessor, and being SCUMM-based), but it was held off until 2003 after the release of Backyard Hockey for unknown reasons.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Basketball's credits list the people who programmed an online mode, suggesting that it would have had online play. Football 2002 also has a screenshot in the help files that replaces "Network" with "On-line", suggesting it was supposed to be this instead of LAN.
  • Peyton Manning was going to be one of the playable pros in Football 2002, but he was removed before the game was released.
  • A network mode was planned as early as the very first game in the series. One of the pitches for the original game went into a little detail about this, and even mentioned a possibility of being able to spectate an in-progress network game. This idea was ultimately dropped for the final product likely due to the high development costs and complexity of adding such a mode that wasn't likely to be used very often, especially since one of the target audiences for these games was families who had budget computer setups.
  • The original Backyard Baseball had a discarded power-up in the form of the batter swinging a tennis racket. Among one rule on the drawing board was the addition of a garbage can in the outfield that would award ten runs if a batted ball landed there.
  • According to some data in the game files, a console port of Backyard Skateboarding was being planned during development.
• Word of Saint Paul: Jen Taylor has said that Sunny Day organized the Backyard Sports League as an outlet to show her (Day's) love of sports.
• Write Who You Know: The Backyard Kids ran on this. Nearly all of them were based on kids the developers grew up knowing — in fact, the entire purpose of the game was that they were meant to represent the kind of kids that you would know in the neighborhood. To top it all off, many of the stories you can listen to from their player cards were actual stories from the staff themselves, or from people the staff knew.