Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:00)
In 1997, Humongous Entertainment released a game called Backyard Baseball, a lovingly hand-animated and voice acted game about kids playing baseball the way kids play baseball. The Backyard Sports series would become Humongous Entertainment’s most successful franchise, with soccer, football, basketball, and hockey games. Eventually though, corporate and economic circumstances conspired against the studio, most of its staff were laid off, and ownership changed numerous times.

The Wikipedia summary of this is actually so complicated, I’m not even sure how to distill it down into a sentence or two. Anyway, the Backyard Sports franchise lay dormant for a while, but it was recently resurrected by Playground Productions and their CEO, Lindsay Barnett, partnering with Mega Cat Studios, led by James Deighan These two founders are my guests on today’s episode, and I’ll be honest, my original plan with this podcast was not to have guests on who were specifically promoting a thing they just released.

But this is an interesting story to me because the era of games backyard sports comes from, which was the height of CD-ROM so-called multimedia games in the late 90s, came too late for me to be interested in it. By that time, I was already playing Quake, so I didn’t really get the importance of games specifically for kids. As an adult, I now better understand how meaningful these kinds of casual experiences with diverse representation are. So when I got a cold email about having Lindsay and James on the show, I thought,

Why not? It’ll be a fun conversation. And it was. So let’s get to it. Part one starts now.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:42)
Lindsay and James, welcome to Make Games Drink Coffee.

Lindsay Barnett (01:45)
you so I’m Lindsay Barnett. I’m the CEO of Playground Productions, better known as the home of the Backyard Sports franchise.

James Deighan (01:53)
Thanks, Aaron. I’m the CEO of MegaCat Studios.

We’re making the new backyard sports title, which we’re really excited about.

Lindsay Barnett (01:57)
Hehehehe

Aaron Nemoyten (01:59)
start with ⁓ a sort of broad question that’s I think both of you probably have some interesting ideas about, which is, you know, I’ll admit I grew up playing games in an era where there were not for the most part games explicitly for kids, right? I started playing on the original NES. Everything was really hard. It was a lot of arcade ports. And then the kids games market

really didn’t get big until the sort of CD-ROM era of like the late 90s. And at that point, you know, I was over it. So I always had this kind of cynical view towards games that were specifically for kids. But now I have kids and I see the value in making something that’s like a low stakes experience that still has some quality to it and some narrative. ⁓ So that kids don’t get frustrated, right? Like my son is…

Old enough to want to play Mario games, but not old enough to have the motor skills to be good at them. So I have to jump in a lot. I’m wondering, like when you’re looking at making a new backyard sports title, how do you approach the design in a way that feels like it’s going to be fun? Is there a challenge? Is there a right amount of challenge? Is it just about the experience in the presentation? Like what do you shoot for there?

Lindsay Barnett (03:15)
Yeah, so backyard sports and the original Backyard Baseball 97, they have always prided themselves on accessibility in the type of game and the backyard games have been the most accessible sports games on the market for almost 30 years. And while they were originally made for kids says five to 10 on the the OG boxes, what we get the pleasure of doing now is

making a brand new Backyard Baseball title that is even more accessible than any of the games in the past. And a huge part of that is it’s not just for kids anymore. Now it’s for the original fans, for gamers. can get ranked in this. There’s a global leaderboard. You can play multiplayer or you can play in exactly the way that the backyard sports were intended to be played with a tutorial and

having an easy mode that any kid can have success in, even if they’ve never played a video game or don’t know anything about the sport. So we’ve spent a lot of time making sure that we have these features that make it so this is truly an E for Everyone game and anybody is gonna have fun trying it out.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:31)
James, I’m curious your perspective on that because we were actually just talking before the interview started about, know, your studio has a background, you know, you’ve got a lot of people there that sort of grew up on these like really hard, you know, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games. And so I imagine like starting from that perspective and then coming all the way to this like extremely accessible experience. ⁓ Is is that a challenge? Is there do you have to change your way of thinking about it? Or is it is it easier than I’m making it sound?

James Deighan (05:01)
You know, I think that, well, there’s a few layers to this, you know, just because we were like raised by arcades and NES consoles doesn’t mean we haven’t like developed modern gaming sensibilities. We actually worked with, you can see this on the Unity platform. We’ve also worked with Unity on creating accessibility packages and helping to set and make some of these standards available to indie devs. So it’s something we’re very prominently active in. have panels on it. We have a director of accessibility on the team that has her entire full-time job focused around. How do we retain like the…

We’ll say like the Nintendo hard version that has presets and toggles, but also make it accessible to a bigger audience. And, you a lot of times we start talking about accessibility, particularly with indie devs or someone who’s maybe newer to the games product design. And I think there’s a misunderstanding that they think accessibility is a colorblind options, but accessibility is actually just empowering players to have the right number of options to play the game their own way.

And when you start thinking about the best accessibility options, it’s really quality of life features. You know, so it’s, it’s just opening up the opportunity for people to express themselves. No different than choosing the player class that best represents their gameplay sensibilities, right. Or, some people love, you know, kind of clock grips in their shooters and some people want to play lean forward. And that’s, that’s just a preference, you know? So I think, I think a lot of times accessibility has this, this sense of limitations, but it’s, it’s really so much more than that.

So those product design decisions are kind of from the ground up there because I feel like one of the things that makes MegaCat unique is that we have so many genuinely deeply passionate retro gaming community super fans that grown up and were raised by these IP and a lot of this technology and that they’re still deeply active with mods and ROM hacks. And if you look across our leadership team, most of us are introduction to the games industry, particularly because we’re on the East Coast. We kind of came from those mod and

and kind of make your own things, communities before this world of Roblox and UGC and Minecraft and all that stuff. So it’s just, it’s definitely very passion driven. And I think accessibility has grown alongside the industry where it’s not just these toggles. It’s also just making the games easier for anyone to play.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:15)
Lindsay, spent a bunch of time as a second grade teacher in Chicago. That is a pretty far cry from game development, but also wonder this of people who are around kids a lot now, which is that as you were an educator, did you gain an interesting or new or surprising perspective on

Lindsay Barnett (07:21)
Yes.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:37)
how kids relate to technology and entertainment now that’s different from how they did when we were kids.

Lindsay Barnett (07:44)
Absolutely. And I think it’s been a huge reason for wanting to bring back the backyard sports games. ⁓ From the time I had started teaching, I taught for eight years. ⁓ When I started teaching, there was one type of game that was popular. And by the end, COVID had hit and a whole bunch of different kinds of games had hit the market. And what I realized in a small period of time was kids were

and I taught second grade this entire time, ⁓ kids were trying to grow up faster than they were at the start of my teaching career. And it happened so fast where, you know, with technology, there were things like social media and streaming and ⁓ all these very violent games, especially like the rise of some of the shooter games that kind of had kid aesthetics to it. And all of a sudden,

the things that my students liked to play in their free time were very adult in terms of the themes and very violent and inappropriate. And what I had really realized was they were trying to grow up much faster than what I had seen before and what I had experienced in my childhood. And what I love about the backyard sports franchise is the backyard games celebrate being a kid and they celebrate that kind of joy of play.

And I just really felt like a return to that needed to happen. And we’re a very, very unique game in building Backyard Baseball. We are never offended if somebody plays the game and then wants to turn the game off because want to go play in their actual backyard. That is encouraged in our community. We want you to like playing the backyard games so much.

that you want to play like a video game in your real life.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:42)
either of you or did anyone in the sort of development team get in touch with Ron Gilbert or anyone from Humongous Entertainment?

James Deighan (09:49)
like spoiling anything exciting, we’ve worked with a couple of folks from Humongous like both a little bit in some kind of minor feature version during the project. And I have actually some folks in our city here that started at Humongous Entertainment.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:02)
Did you get any advice from them? And especially, I want to frame that in the context doing research for this, ⁓ I found somebody’s video on YouTube where it’s like an early four hour video where they played every single backyard sports game. ⁓ And the video is like seven years old. So it’s before this current era. But they’re sort of, they trace the evolution of it where it starts out as this very bright and colorful and full of character.

James Deighan (10:20)
Mm-hmm.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:30)
and really, really intentionally made type of thing with this 2D animation and voice acting. And that is sort of like at the height of the CD-ROM era. And then as it transitions to consoles and 3D and eventually away from humongous entertainment, all that…

kind of personality gets sanded off over time and it gets much more bland and less interesting. And I’m wondering if you guys had any discussions with people that were involved in the IP originally and got any advice about is that something that you talked about and sort of how do you maintain the character of something, you know, in the face of push towards something that could be more easily mass produced?

Lindsay Barnett (11:12)
think the first thing that we really focused on was what did the games, the original games do so well? And we really focused on the positive of it, which is they created characters that people had such personal attachments to from very little information. You saw a walk up, you got to see, hear a couple of voice lines.

You’ve got to read their player stats and see what they looked like and from you know, just that amount of information We we did like things like caption contests on social media and we had thousands of fans who were able to like give stories because of this information so we realized Characters were so important and how can we take those elements and expand it now that we’re not limited by

the amount of memory on a CD-ROM and we can actually ⁓ expand a lot more. How do we make more voice lines? How do we make more animations? There are thousands and thousands and thousands of animations in this new game that really expand the universe. And we realized all of those things that people loved, we did not have the same restrictions for anymore. then the other thing that we really thought about was the design language.

people still were referencing the 90s looks of these characters. And the brand obviously ⁓ didn’t do as well and have that kind of love when they strayed away from those designs. And maybe it was that they tried to age the characters up, but these are kids and they are meant to stay this way in the same way that the Peanuts franchise kids are meant to stay.

in that age. And so we’ve returned to what worked really well and leaned into it that much more.

Aaron Nemoyten (13:10)
gonna shift to something I really wanted to ask about of James, which is ⁓ you’ve mentioned on your LinkedIn posts that MegaCat has a 90 % employee retention rate. That is in the industry, especially nowadays, pretty impressive. And it’s something that I think more leaders should aspire to. And I frankly think it’s ridiculous that they don’t.

James Deighan (13:25)
Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (13:33)
are you guys doing differently? And also, you mentioned on the website, you call it a blue collar game development studio. So what do those things mean and how do you make all that work?

James Deighan (13:44)
know, I always have told the team that our strengths are our culture. And a lot of times when people first join MegaCat and we have this welcome new cat handbook that’s continued to grow over the years. It’s now like a solid 150 pages. It started off having like internal heuristics and internal memes and internal kind of shared language. Like here’s the history of this emoji, sort of like this kind of a for fun, you know, here’s, what you’re going run into on Slack and here’s what these things relate to. And, and sometimes.

it became a place to put these little ceremonies and here’s how we ship games and here’s what these things mean and here’s lessons we learned. But mentioning that because I think all these little things turn into this moment where sometimes people are joining MegaCat fresh out of college and sometimes joining MegaCat after having been in the games industry for 30 years. Like we have team members that worked on the very first SimCity and they’re they’re Greybird village elders, you know, and then we have people on the other side of the diamond that are

you know, fresh Carnegie Mellon graduates that just left the ATETC program and they’re ready to kind of take on the world in a different way. you know, sometimes it’s their introduction to the concept of company culture, which for us is like the mix of individuals, values and goals and missions coming into this big drink and getting swirled up. So there’s a lot of curation there. So we got to make sure that people have some implicit, their personal goals match the company goals, right? So we’re not, there’s a little bit of a trickery there too, because imagine someone just finished this wonderful 3D animation.

program and they look at our portfolio and they see it’s split between 3D and pixel art. And they go, my God, I’m not ready for this. Or maybe their dream is to make very high fidelity simulated titles. And they see the cartoony approachable shape language of backyard on the main site. And they think, OK, this isn’t exactly what I wanted to do. I want to make a Fallout character. So there’s a little bit of creative alignment and then goals alignment, all these other things. But really, comes down to, on a personality level,

What do you want to do? What motivates you? What gets you excited? And I think we do a good job curating those things at the interview level, but I also think we do a good job just really focusing on celebrating the wins and not growing too big. I think where a lot of our strength has come from, and it’s going to sound like silly, but it’s this intellectual capital retention. Because every time you ship a game, these people not only have these new unique experiences, but they also have all the tribal knowledge of working with each other and

working alongside all these kind of quirks. that’s often the case when we work as an X studio with other teams. I’ve seen the huge publishers that they have a big layoff and no one knows how to get into the YouTube account. And there’s this moment of panic right? And then on the Mega Cat side, we can go to Andy and Zach and Nick and Flynn and say, Hey guys, it’s been 11 years. But do you remember when we went to the first baseball game we did and we’ve done a couple now. And it’s, it’s interesting because when you solve these different problems with physics or engines and whatnot, there’s

There’s a lot of value in that. There’s a lot of value in this kind of those teams and your synergies knowing how those personalities connect. I know you have a games and production background too, Aaron. So when you’re building these teams, they’re not just staffing charts. They’re also like the synergies of how these people are going to work from an eclectic mix point of view, which can be really tricky with small teams. I think the, yeah.

Lindsay Barnett (16:53)
The thing that James didn’t say

and won’t say, so I’ll jump in to say it for him, is that James is a fantastic leader. And it’s not surprising when you get to work with him as a partner that you can see all that he brings. He cares so deeply about the people and the projects. And there’s something about doing an independent game in a way that is

Part of the reason why we chose MegaCat to build this game for us is that we had this shared kind of belief in doing what was best for the sake of the game and the fan over some of the other things that perhaps, you know, other studios and other kind of game developers don’t think about. They might be thinking about what’s going to make a lot of money first or what’s going to be, ⁓ you know, ⁓ making it more addicting for people or just kind of…

running into the ground on certain things that like morally are not aligned. And James, I think, does a fantastic job of sticking to his morals and really leading the team in a way of like, this is just what fans are gonna like. And for somebody like me who had never made a game when meeting him, he really said like, you have to do this thing.

this is going to make this game that much better for fans and this, have to do this thing, because this is gonna make people really happy that are original fans or this is making it more accessible for people. And I just know that other people are not thinking about that, especially at his level in the gaming positions.

James Deighan (18:32)
Thanks, Lindsay.

Lindsay Barnett (18:34)
Yeah, you can’t say that, but I’ll say it for you.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:40)
Make Games Drink Coffee is brought to you by me, Aaron Neimoitin. I’d love to grow the audience for this podcast to the point that it can pay for itself in some way. To that end, it would really help if you left a review, if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts Spotify, or like and comment if you’re watching on YouTube. You show that algorithm who’s boss. All right, back to the show.

James Deighan (19:03)
I think has been really interesting to other industry colleagues is, and this is really short. When we green light a project at MegaCat, we do a one to 10 enthusiasm on the team. Are they excited and passionate about the genre, about the IP? Then we try to interpret a one to 10 enthusiasm. And if we think that partner wants to work with us.

Like are they being like strong handed into it or is it a cost driven decision? it something else kind of at play? Is there a publisher forcing them to do something and so on? And then we get into the strategic stuff with does it fit our tech vision? Does it fit our genre vision? But because we include that out of the gate, like is this, is the team passionate about it? It’s actually allowed us to make better decisions that keep our team excited and can make the games better. And then related, you asked about us being a blue collar studio.

We’re based here in Pittsburgh. It’s a blue collar city. I think a lot of times, part of what happens is we have this significant desire that when we’re making a game, we want each game we ever touch to be someone’s favorite game ever. And we have this wish list we’ve maintained since we started MegaCat. We’ve had Backyard Baseball on it since the very beginning. And actually football, I played football in college, so it’s a major passion. it’s like the… ⁓

I have team members here that before we even started this project to keep backyard CDs on the desk. And it’s just like a huge long standing love and this kind of top 20 or so IP on that list, we’ve been able to work with three of them so far. And that’s one of the reasons we met Playground the first time was I tried to share that list with all my industry colleagues and say, if you see these out there, please call us. And the blue collar thing has kind of been a little bit of evolving jokes for us because

In our city, that’s what the city is known for, but it’s become known for technology. It’s number one for robotics and AI, and it has just this huge hub of academia. And, you know, we, we always, ⁓ we try to live our games. Like I always say, we’re method developers. So I was just on a call this morning with one of our, unrelated to anything back yard directly colleague. It was a marketing platform that’s doing something really exciting with discord. And he goes, did I see you guys at PAX East? Like I saw someone there was dressed as a baseball player. I’m like, yeah, that was us. And, and it’s like, you know, it’s just.

Lindsay Barnett (20:54)
Hehehehe

James Deighan (21:11)
If you look around the office right now, there’s baseballs and wiffle balls and backyard cards and piles of baseball cards and stuff everywhere because we’re Yeah, we’re in it. Yeah

Lindsay Barnett (21:18)
I’ve got a few things behind me too.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:20)
you

Lindsay Barnett (21:21)
Every card that’s ever been released of the game.

James Deighan (21:24)
That’s awesome.

You have a very impressive backdrop these days, Lindsay.

Lindsay Barnett (21:29)
It’s getting better and better with my new office, so.

Aaron Nemoyten (21:32)
you

For a lot of developers that do sort of external development, it seems, if you look at their portfolios, it’s a lot of like just whatever they can get. I, but I also know that there are people that was like start their careers at those places and then get the experience and then bail as soon as they can to go work at their, you know, quote unquote dream job.

And I think you’ve touched on something really important that it sounds obvious when you say it, but I think it’s probably just not considered a lot of the time. Cause if you look from a pure business perspective, like I’m sure there’s, there’s bigger projects, there’s bigger checks. but just asking the team, like, would you be happy to work on this? It’s probably keeping a lot of people around just because if they weren’t happy to work on something eventually.

the sort of, you know, the joy of being able to do the work and, you know, having fun with your colleagues and all that other stuff. It’s only worth so much if you’re not working on a product that you care

James Deighan (22:34)
Yeah, it’s a little bit of a competitive advantage sometimes, but it was not initially strategic. It was just a love for game. And it naturally turned into something a little more strategic because to your point, games are hard and retention’s hard. And my business plan is not ⁓ as nearly as sophisticated as the output appears to be at times. It’s really just like great people don’t want to make great games. Sounds really simple. Every game company has some kind of dream and vision of that, but…

There’s been lot of times where I’ve wondered if I’ve made the wrong call for the team because we make so many decisions based on where we think the team’s heart is. And it’s always actually turned out for me. It’s just sometimes, sometimes there’s a couple of walls we have to walk through along the way, but it’s a, it always pans out on the other side. And we’ve been very happy to have continued to grow. the last five years, we’ve had three global number one top sellers and we have really crazy stuff right now happening. And this, I think this is the best game we’ve ever made right now with Backyard.

Lindsay Barnett (23:28)
Definitely include that in any thing.

Aaron Nemoyten (23:32)
I think it also helps probably that you’re not in the Bay Area or Irvine or Los Angeles or something.

James Deighan (23:36)
⁓ yeah, but our

team is global. We have an office in Laguna in the Philippines. We have people all over the West coast. I have people in Japan, like our head of console, know, Gabriel Nakama, he’s in Brazil, he’s transplant. Like there’s people everywhere at MegaCat, but you know, our headquarters is here in Pittsburgh. you know, it really just is in an era right now where there’s so many deeply skilled people available that are now starting to really prioritize, like, you know, what would make me happiest and

What are the concessions that would get me there that make places like MegaCat even more compelling than they were maybe five years ago?

Aaron Nemoyten (24:12)
I was fascinated to read that you hired a private investigator to figure out how to get the rights back. And I, want to imagine that there were like, you know, stakeouts and chases, but it was probably just a lot of there’s a lot of.

Lindsay Barnett (24:17)
Yes.

imagine that too. ⁓ It

was it deep in covid. It was like during a lockdown. ⁓ So you know it was the process started really out of this desire to find better content for students when they were stuck at home and trying to entertain themselves and they were going to much much more violent content and games that I was not in support of. And so.

I was trying to find Backyard just online and I couldn’t find anything of it. So I, you know, might’ve been a board teacher. So I played a little Nancy Drew and ⁓ tried to look up who had the rights to it and wound up, you know, reaching out to a lawyer who was like, no, we don’t have this, but it’s weird. We can’t find it anywhere. You know, you could hire a private investigator, track this down. Now my mind went right to like,

You can imagine the thought bubble coming up with Inspector Gadget, Nancy Drew, all these very cinematic PIs or whatever. I have no idea. I think this person probably was just a lawyer who ⁓ filled out some paperwork, sent some emails out, but I have not met that person because it was in a lockdown. And so I’m going to continue my false memory that they had some cool outfit or with binoculars or something.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:54)
Do you think that there is anything about that search that might be more widely applicable? Because there’s a lot of zombie IP that’s of held in legal limbo that people would want to see come back. a lot of it is in the same sort of scale or level of popularity as Backyard, where

No studio that wants a $500 million revenue game is going to touch it, but they might own pieces of it. And so they’re just sitting on it and it might be really valuable to a smaller studio that doesn’t have the legal resources to figure that out. So what can we learn? Can we learn anything?

Lindsay Barnett (26:22)
Mm.

I mean, I think there’s a bunch of things. think there’s the first part of this is like, why me in terms of like, why did I, a teacher from Chicago who had no gaming experience, why was I able to do this? And it was very difficult to find. If you look at the rights of this franchise, the games had sold, they had gone through a bankruptcy, they…

well, Atari had gone through bankruptcy, the rights got bifurcated across, you know, some people had different verticals. It was very hard to consolidate all of these. And the guys who had bought this and who I was able to find had spent many years consolidating the rights. And so when I was able to finally find, them and they had finally done it, I had to convince like why I was the right person for this. And

It came down to passion and like being someone who is really not going to give up on the process. I think that’s the story that is much more applicable to everybody is like the everyday story of like, should never have gotten this. And I just didn’t give up. had a real dream and real belief that I could do this. And, you know, if you look at what happened, it took two and a half years.

from the start of looking for it to going through the actual legal But I’m the happiest I’ve ever been and working the hardest that I’ve ever worked because this brand. I always like to bring up one of the biggest hiccups of that process was not the private investigator, not that any of the other parts that I’ve mentioned.

It was right as I was about to close on the rights to the franchise, Travis and Jason Kelsey went on their podcast and talked about how Backyard Baseball and backyard football were their favorite games as kids. And wouldn’t it be great if we bought the games and brought them back? And all of my friends and family who had heard it were texting me being like, this is amazing, like free promo. And I’m like,

Well, I don’t own the brand. ⁓ That is not a good news situation right now. ⁓ ultimately, I did wind up closing on the rights. But I was super nervous. And all this work that I had put into this process might get taken away, but you gotta just believe in yourself.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:10)
Wow, that is, I could imagine that would be a moment where you’re like, no, value of the theoretical value of this just went way up. Like that’s not a good thing.

Lindsay Barnett (29:11)
Yeah

Way, yes, I am

a Chicago, I’m from Chicago, I’m a Bears fan. ⁓ It was the Super Bowl and it was the 49ers versus the Chiefs it was like a week before. And I had never rooted harder for the Kansas City Chiefs in my entire life because I realized that if they won, maybe they’d be too busy with other stuff.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:42)
you

Lindsay Barnett (29:43)
to think about this game and ⁓ it seems like what happened.

Aaron Nemoyten (29:51)
And that’s the end of part one. Check back in two weeks for part two of my interview with Lindsay and James. Thank you for listening to Make Games Drink Coffee. You can find out more at makegamesdrinkcoffee.com and you can email me at makegamesdrinkcoffee.gmail.com. Drink up, I’ll see you next time.