How This Former Teacher Revived an Iconic Franchise | Under the Number Podcast

0:01 [Music] Play ball. [Music] All right, we are back for another episode of Under the Number. Today we've got Lindsay Barnett. Lindsay is the founder and CEO of Playground Productions, a company that most famously now owns Backyard Sports. So, Lindsay, thank you so much for sitting down to chat today. Thank you for having me. This is so much fun. Absolutely. I want to jump right in. You hired a private investigator to find backyard sports. This is the backyard sports of backyard baseball, backyard basketball.

1:01 If you're a millennial or older Gen Z person, you remember it. You know exactly what we're talking about. Pablo Sanchez and all the rest. You hired a private investigator. How did that go and how did that come about? At the time, I was a elementary school teacher in a school in Chicago and we were remote teaching and I was looking for a lot of different resources for all of my students who were at home and I started to think about the computer games that I played when I was a kid and was trying to recommend a lot of those games of like, hey, if you're stuck at home, you could do this or that. And the backyard sports games were my favorites. And when I saw that they were nowhere to be found, I well, one, it was a great co adventure. I had plenty of time on my hands. And I wound up, you know, doing the normal process. And when that came up short, I hired a private investigator. And six months later, the PI, I've never met this PI. I have no idea what he or she looks like. And uh but I got the information and then we figured out a plan of how to bring this franchise back. And here we are. And how was your inquiry received by the original owners? How did it go? Well, it was actually not the original uh founders of the brand. This part of what has made the Backyard Sports franchise really complicated is the owners have changed a number of times. So, originally people know the humongous entertainment franchise because of the humongous melon heads and uh a lot of the humongous branding from the game.

2:40 and they sold to Atari. When Atari went bankrupt, this got kind of caught up in that and the rights got split. And the people who I found were these two guys, Ari Pinchot and Aby Seitzki. And they had the film rights and wound up spending like many, many years to actually consolidate all of the rights in one place. And that's when I found them. And they're still very much a part of this franchise and a part of how we're bringing this brand back. pretty crazy that they had spent this much time and was lucky to find them at the at the very right moment. Take me back a few steps. What made you want to pursue this in the first place? First of all, it's just the best franchise ever.

3:19 I was a incredibly sporty kid. Um, I played everything when I was little and watched everything on TV. I just love sports and this was the most accessible sports game that's ever been on the market. And so when I was 5 years old playing backyard baseball, that's when the original game came out, I fell in love with baseball and really learned the rules of it from playing this game. Because what people don't always know and don't always associate is the humongous entertainment brand was an educational brand and the purpose was actually to teach kids the rules of sports through accessible play and the games were so much fun that basically all these kids millennial kids didn't even know they were learning anything.

4:08 But fast forward I wound up becoming a baseball fan. Then 98 came around I became a soccer fan. 99 came around, backyard football came out, and I am like a diehard football fan purely off of this game. I wound up playing in on a flag football team in elementary school, and you can't see from this video, but I'm incredibly little and I was even littleer as a kid. I don't think my parents were going to be like, "Hey, you should sign up for football." But I loved it from this game. And that is really what these games kind of developed was this love of play and love of sport. And we really need that back.

4:48 So that's really the the impetus for why I wanted to do this. It's interesting that it's almost like framed like an edtech product at the end of the day. And given your background in teaching, yeah, it certainly makes sense to connect the dots there because I also learn you started a company during COVID or was it kind of in the works pre-COVID and then kids getting shut out of the schools was almost an accelerant. I I had a a educational tool that I launched the week before COVID and talk about a crash course in in business uh learning how to adapt on the fly. we had like a a purchase order ready to have it in the huge district this product and then the next week later they're like actually students are not going to be coming in for the foreseeable future and had to adapt. But I think ultimately it wound up really helping me for everything that I'm doing now because it was really like the hardest time to launch a business was the week before COVID uh lockdown.

5:49 So, bringing it back to Backyard Sports and once you got your hands back on it, you mentioned it from a personal level, how much you loved it as a kid and it had been, you know, a long time since that game had been out and and uh updated, I guess. How much of that nostalgia factor has been shared by everyone else since you guys launched first on mobile? What, just a month or two ago? So, we we first launched on Steam. Uh, we have baseball 97 and Soccer 98 on Steam for PC, which is the kind of original way that people played was on their computers. And then a few months ago, we launched on on mobile with lots of new things coming. But yeah, that's that was where we kind of originally kicked it off. The nostalgia has been so real, so exciting. Truly, it's an interesting part of culture where you have the original fans of the game who are millennials and those millennials have kids or they're maybe they're teachers or they have nieces and nephews, but they in some ways want to provide a piece of their own childhood to the next generation. And what I really love about this franchise was it celebrates play. like it is truly kids playing in the backyard, playing on the playground and having fun. And it's a comedy first brand that is not just about like, oh, we're going to buy ourselves the win by having, you know, a million Pablo Sanchezes on the team.

7:17 Like, you have to have lots of different players on the team. And I think that trying to give the millennials trying to give a piece of their childhood to their own children is what I've noticed like in droves. And the brand means so much to millennials. The nostalgia is so real. And um yeah, we're doing our best to make sure that the original fan base is served as well as the the kids and that crossover like the multigenerational crossover I guess that you you seem to be experiencing with the game. How is it being perceived by those children of millennials? Like I watch I think of backyard baseball and there's something about like the pace of the game, the graphics. It's It reminds you of like for me, you know, the earliest years I can remember like 2002, 2003, like so simple playing on a PC that's like this fat with a giant mouse.

8:10 But I don't, you know, you don't instinctively think of a game like that transferring very well to a 10-year-old today who's on TikTok and has everything on mobile and everything so fast and short form. How has it worked? Do you think that there's actually been something that's resonated? There has absolutely been something that's resonated and actually One of the most interesting parts about this game with new fans is the streamers are it's the it's such a fun game to stream and there's people like Dude Perfect Gaming and Not the Expert and Squid Legs who are streaming this and that's where a lot of our kid fans are finding it because they're not used to so much comedy being put in a sports game that when people stream it, it's It is unpredictable. You know, you could have the ball hit a player in the face and not be able to catch it. You could throw a ball that like a player just misses or maybe they throw it and it goes one inch in front of them instead of actually make it. It's very reminiscent of what a kids little league looks like. And that is what we found is like the comedy is so high and parents love the kids watching this on streams because it's really safe content. It's a PG game. There's no killing. There's no inappropriate language. It's just fun, funny content. And um that's been a huge part of how we've we've reached our new audience. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I saw the the little Dude Perfect gaming clip on Instagram um and talk about an overlap in ethos. I know that their goal was building the world's biggest family-friendly media company. So that that seems like a home run, no pun intended, but I think that the delivery and making sure that the game and even the branding, which like for example, Zach handd delivered me this hat, which is pretty sweet. And I know that it's ended up in the hands of a couple other pretty interesting people. But I'm sure that's part of the marketing push. How have you guys gone about trying to get cool people, you know, influential people, people who also, you know, are aligned with the values and the ethos of your brand? How has that gone when it comes to awareness and marketing? Well, I mean, we are incredibly lucky and I don't get to take the credit for this at all, but the game was so amazing and meant so much to people's childhoods that now we have so many athletes and celebrities who are in these influential positions who reach out directly to our team or talk about it or promote it there. I mean, some of the biggest athletes in the world like um Jason and Travis Kelce talked about it on their podcast. That was completely authentic and organic. We didn't know that they were going to do that. So, it's that has been just we we call it the power of Pablo on our team. Like there's just sometimes it's athletes that reach out and they say, "We love this brand. You know, can you send us anything for us to wear in the tunnel or whatnot?" And then sometimes they just talk about how much they love it and sometimes they're playing it on a stream and we might find out after the fact. But a lot of this past um in this launch time the past nine months and it's crazy that it's only been like nine months since we we brought back the brand. But a lot of that has been just organic.

11:32 So with a consumer brand, I know a lot of the time you you will hear people say you only get to make one first impression, right? kind of interesting dynamic with you where it's like, well, the first impression was actually made like 30 years ago almost, but to bring it back was a whole another relaunch. What was the most important or maybe what was the primary focus leading up to the launch? What was it that you wanted people to understand about what was going to happen? How did you position this and get it primed to burst back onto the scene? So there were um two big things that we did that were kind of leading up. But the the first thing like immediately after kind of closing on the rights, we started doing an announcement video which there was this like 40 second video. It's on our Instagram. Um and it was on it's on our YouTube and we launched that where it had basically the kids all coming together to play on at the playground again. And this video was super thought out um both who was in it, who we were showing, um what it kind of represented and the style. And so we did 2D animation um which I think really signaled a nod to the original um the original team. I kind of was like, what did this game look like in the mind of me as a 5-year-old? because it definitely looked less pixelated when I'm like reflecting back on it. And I wanted to provide this incredible piece of content that just show showed people like this is the nostalgia that we're trying to capture. And also this is the tone that we're going after. Like this is we've gone back to this kind of style of how the characters are look looking designed feel. This is what the universe feels like. And I pulled from some of my favorite um you know when you were watching cartoons as a kid like they had the the opening segments. I pulled from a lot of my favorite ones like Hey Arnold and Fairly Odd Parents and I pulled from a lot of what I wanted to gather. And um Hey Arnold's probably a great comp for what we were going for because it was gathering all of the kids up but instead of doing the March walkthrough it was gathering to play at the at the playground.

13:47 That's awesome. I mean, I can see I also from listening to some of the other interviews you've done, the media passion is very real and the experience. Um, I mean, didn't you literally do some sort of whether it was in college or maybe even post college work specifically having to do with animation? Yeah, I I studied I mean, this is all like every friend of mine and family members like everything you're doing makes exact sense because this is truly like my dream forever is exactly this. I studied radio, TV, film, um, and have a module minor in interactive arts and entertainment, which is animation. And then I got my masters in education, elementary teaching, but I focused on digital media. And so it was really about what could I do to create a great children's brand. That was always what I wanted to do and was always very inspired by.

14:42 Yeah, it happened a lot faster than I thought. Right. Looking at my hat that I just flashed here. Are you guys starting with baby steps on things like merch or I mean I assume you probably have some giant vision board or you know Walt Disney style strategy map somewhere for what to do with not to give away any trade secrets to her. No, no, I I definitely I definitely do and our team has a lot that's cooking. um you know sometimes these things take a very some of these big mass uh deals take time to make all the products and get them to market. So you know you could see something I don't know when but you could see it and um other things are are more like immediate to the consumer or a limited edition drop. So, we have a lot of different things that we're kind of building out in our pipeline, but basically high quality um products across the board. We want to be a true kids and family brand that everybody loves. And I think we have a real opportunity to bring people together in a way that is very kind of 90s and speaks to to, you know, the love of childhood and the love of play. And that's that's really what we're trying to bring back. And if we can help do that from a product side, we're thinking about that. If we can help do that from, you know, merch sides, we're thinking about that, too. Yeah. I can imagine your your inbox must be somewhat flooded with uh inbound from brands and experiences, and there there's a lot that could be done. I'm not complaining.

16:17 It's like so cool. It's it's like fun fan mail from like brands that I love and I'm like, wait, this brand is reaching out. I can't believe it. But it's really I am the like I'm Pablo Sanchez's like agent or manager and it's all his fan mail and I just like get to read it for him. That's a that's a very humble way of looking at it. Um I couldn't do this without Pablo and Kesha and Sunny Day. They it's it's fully for them.

16:45 Well, I want to also understand the actual like mechanics of bringing the product back to life. Yeah. This was a game that when I first saw it, probably as a, you know, first grader, it was on a CDROM and you'd slide it into the actual computer and it would show up on your giant monitor and you'd click around and play. Yep. How do you even how do you go about getting a game that you bought the rights to seems like it was almost like this I would think of it as a piece of hardware and then get it into a mobile form you have, like you said on Steam. Like how did that actually go? Well, um, the team at Megaat Studios, uh, they make me look a lot smarter than I am, and they were able to, we don't have any source code, and we knew that we didn't have any source code. Somewhere along the way, it was either destroyed or lost. It has been um, you know, one of the biggest challenges for us is that we did not think that we could bring any classic title back. Um, but we when we decided to work with Meggaat, the huge thing for them was they're into pre preserving titles and they have their own proprietary technology to reverse engineer and CDROM hack and then make those on modern devices. So, what started as PC and mobile has actually now turned into what we have out now, which is Backyard Baseball 97 being on the Switch and the PlayStation. We did not know that that was possible. They were able to do that purely through reverse engineering and hacking without the source code. Out today. Out today.

18:22 It's so exciting. Big announcement for Backyard Sports on Under the Number Pod. We love it. It is a huge announcement and I'm like it's the funniest thing because um we have an incredible social media manager uh Teddy McDonald and they're sometimes the fans ask questions and we're like we want to answer them so badly and we can't but now I'm like finally we can tell them Switch and PlayStation and we're actually so excited because the timing of when we were able to to actually hack it and make it possible worked out so well with the Switch too um coming out and a lot of you know those games are or that device is uh backwards compatible. So this will play. I think that that's going to go over very well. I can't I can't seem to get on a flight anywhere without seeing a dozen switches out.

19:11 That was not a thing just a couple years ago. I know. Well, we had our Game Boys uh when we were kids. So, Right. So, you talked about going back in time and reviving this product. What is it like? You're now operating a startup, right? I mean, Playground Productions is a young and relatively small company as far as headcount and everything else. What is it like running a startup that is operating a product that's you know 30 years old? How has that kind of materialized for you?

19:41 Well, it's I mean it has been amazing because I think people who are at a startup in a startup culture, everybody is coming to the team with like a real desire and this is by the way even your your friend Zach Oliver who is now our director of ops like he ran and founded his own startup prior to this and now has come and joined our team and we've attracted this really interesting group of people. Right now we're we're a team of four. It's It's me. Um Chris Waters, who's our chief product officer, he previously was the head of development at Stupid Body Studios, which is Seth Green's company, and he worked on really big IP like Robot Chicken and, you know, a lot of the adult animation. That's a big bet right there. Oh my gosh, it's a huge bet. He he prior even prior prior to that did a bunch of um the DreamWorks properties um in the kids space like Kung Fu Panda and Turtles and yeah it's it's really cool and so we've attracted you know those two and then Teddy who actually is yes he's our social media manager but he's actually an instaff uh a staff writer for us like he his background is as a comedy writer and that was part of why I think people love our social media is that it's super funny because he's writing and editing a lot of that content in a very different way. But all of this to be said, we have this team of people who are go-getters and like to wear a lot of hats and get their hands dirty and nobody's like, "Oh, I'm I'm in this box, so I won't do this." And it's so much fun because we are all like feeling the momentum and the frenetic energy together. What about getting modern-day players and and those types of licensing and rights and things like that? How into the game? How I mean, how are you dealing with that? I can only imagine how many crazy contracts and things you've had to dig up and and kind of navigate on the legal side. Well, I'm plugging Zack Oliver, but that's why we originally brought him on the team was because he had a startup in the NIL space and um for the retro titles. So, we have six retro titles.

21:52 Baseball 97, soccer 98. Those two don't have any pro players in them. Football 99, which had players like Jerry Rice and Barry Sanders, John Elway. Um, basketball 01, which had Lisa Leslie. Uh, baseball 01 had tons and they had 31 players in that game. And then hockey 02, which had uh 10 players. And so what Zach originally started doing was trying to get all of those players back in the game and we've certainly gotten many, many, many people back.

22:29 That is awesome. So, you know, you've been a CEO before with your last venture, so it's not your first time around, but that being said, what about this time and running Playground Productions? What did you underestimate the most about this venture? This is like a good underestimation. I mean, I'm sure you can tell within the very short period of time, I'm a I'm an optimist. I like dream and think very very big for this franchise, I still underestimated the the response. The response was so massive. And when we put out the announcement that the brand was back, I didn't expect that like every single player who's at the height of their career was going to post something and just be like backyard sports. Oh, my favorite game. And I didn't expect to see, you know, when I'm like walking around. I was at the library with my nephew a couple of weeks ago and I was wearing a Pablo Sanchez shirt and like a little seven-year-old was like, "I like your shirt." And like that's the things that those are the things I did not expect when I go to an airport and I see a bunch of people playing these games and to think like this is us doing that.

23:46 Um yeah, I've really underestimated that response. I thought it was going to get there at some point. I just didn't know it was going to get there this quickly. What is your kind of pitch or strategy around there are some kind of people caught in the middle age-wise? Like I have younger brothers who were born in one of them was born in 2002. He probably knows what backyard sports is. Like maybe he's kind of heard of it, but he's in between where like my parents are 56 and he's so they obviously never played. He's 23.

24:17 Okay. How do you get to someone like that? How is the kind of like what would be your pitch to why he loves video games, he loves sports. Why does someone that age group, how do you pull them in to say, "Try out backyard sports. Just give it a go." Well, first of all, we're finding tons of Gen Z um PE players are coming back or coming to this game for the first time. One, they hear people talk about it, they want to check it out, and they're really loving it. in I think because of the comedy like it's if you like streaming content and you want uh almost all these games are trying to get funnier and funnier and you know even like a game like Fortnite has these emotes that's not something that was in Call of Duty that's a funny thing that they've added to the game and so this has incredible humor original animations uh the style of these original type games are just super fun and you know that pixelation is like it's very attractive to a lot of like the Gen Z players. Uh there's something about like old Pokemon and old Mario that you know people are interested in going back to.

25:30 So I mean we're finding like comedy is a huge draw. And then the second thing that we're finding is cozy gamers, which cozy gamers really like have become a a bigger trend more recently, which is like you're watching uh the NBA finals and you're playing Backyard on your phone during the commercial breaks and we have a ton of people who are like filling their time with this game. I'm sure there are lots of people filling their time with it and and you know, I don't know, you could be playing the game right now without uh I am not double screening right now. Got to be honest, I did not know what a cozy gamer was, but as soon as you described that, I definitely know what you're talking about. It's It's I think that a lot of our millennial players, especially our mobile players, whether they're Gen Z or um millennial, I think a lot of them are are cozy gamers where they're like doing other things and it's relaxing for them. If they're a millennial, it's relaxing because they're like playing a little piece of their childhood while they watch TV. um if they're, you know, Gen Z, they might be filling time with something fun, moving through the commercials and skipping. And a lot of our um consumers who are on the iPads and tablets who are kids, they're not as much having the cozy experience. They're having like the gaming experience. Yeah. And I can totally imagine people playing this like on their commute on a subway or something. It seems like kind of it's I think that planes and subways are probably like, you know, I mean, I'm in Chicago, we have the L, but I'm like trains, planes, subways huge for the backyard. Yeah. Well, the the offline component does not hurt that right.

27:08 Yeah. I mean, the subway people were like going to lose service and then they're just, you know, it's an offline game. Same thing with like if you don't have Wi-Fi on a plane. um which is great for our millennials and parents really love it for their kids because they're not going they're not stumbling on anything crazy because it's a you know a game that exists within one ecosystem right okay a couple of quick questions to wrap it up who or maybe it could be a couple uh the most well-known athlete who has expressed their love for backyard sports since the the the relaunch I mean probably Jason and Travis Kelce, you know, they went on their podcast, talked about how this how baseball and football were their favorite games when they were kids. Um, and they're so like their whole vibe is backyard. They're like comedy first.

28:03 They're funny. Um, but they're incredible athletes and they all have their, you know, their things that they don't take themselves too seriously for, which I feel like is very backyard. Um, but you know, Jaylen Brunson obviously had one of the best seasons. He's a massive backyard fan. He actually wore uh Pablo Sanchez jersey on his podcast. Um, and we again, we did not know that he was going to do that. Um, yeah, we had Baker Mayfield wore uh a jersey before one of his games, which happened to win like tons of people's fantasy football leagues that year if you had Baker on your team. uh because he scored five touchdowns the day that he wore his his Pablo Sanchez jersey. I mean, it's crazy. We have so many like incredible incredible um fans of this and you know, they're all just kind of big kids who grew up to be pro aletes.

28:59 Well, I also heard that that that Kelsey podcast where they were talking about their love for the game, they also expressed their desire to buy it themselves. I heard that that had you sweating bullets because it the deal wasn't actually finalized on your end yet. The deal wasn't closed and um I was I it it was funny because that year the Chiefs were in the Super Bowl and power Pablo, anytime someone talks about Pablo, they wind up winning. It's like Baker wins, Bobby Wit Jr. hits a home run when he's got a Pablo bet. Travis talks about it on the pod, wins the Super Bowl. And I was hoping so much that they were going to win because I was like, if they win, he's going to have to do so much press. He's gonna have to do all these things that it's gonna like fall into the background. And I'm so glad they won. That sounds like that sounds like an ad that you need to cut up for your social team. Just the mention, the on the field domination.

29:49 The mention, the on the- field domination. Is it a coincidence? Well, Steve, we've got lots of We've got the um NBA finals right now. We've got the softball, college World Series, baseball World Series for colleges coming up. Whoever wears Pablo or a backyard character probably will win. I'll just put that out there. I love it. All right, couple quick ones here. If you were not working, you know, as the executive and and founder of Playground Productions and working as an entrepreneur, what would you be doing?

30:19 What would be maybe your backup dream job? Well, you know, it was funny because I I like this question a lot because when I was a teacher, I would always ask kids in my class like, you know, what what do you want to be when you grow up? And I it's just a common question that everybody asks little kids and they would say an answer, you know, like I want to be a doctor and I would always ask and like almost like a and what else? And so what I always told my students is like I grew up and I wanted to be a teacher and I also want to make TV shows and I want to make movies and I want to do all these other things. And the reason why I always did that was like I I never wanted to limit someone's dreams to like only one thing that they can do. So yeah, I mean I think I probably would have been doing I I had kind of completed my journey as a teacher and I loved that so much. I think I would have been working on another children's brand in some capacity. Uh it just happened to be like this incredible property, but I I think that was always going to be the next step for me. Who is your favorite entrepreneur of all time? Maybe your entrepreneurial role model. Oo, that's a great question. I'll give Martha Stewart as an example of like someone who I think is really amazing to see how she's taken like someone a way that people have put her in the box and in some ways for me like people could put the box of like being a teacher or for her being a homemaker and building a career out of that. And you know I think we've seen what she's done with over 100 cookbooks and TV shows and partnerships with Snoop Dogg and all sorts of other things. To me that's really an interesting comp of a person who like I think they people would have limited her but she kept going and dreaming really big and I think a lot of the the people like that who have the limitations on them of like ah you know what's so and so or so and so going to do and then you can see them kind of like go way way way beyond um anybody's wildest dreams whether that's Reese Witherspoon or um you know Kim Kardashian, like they all have kind of broken through the glass in a different way. At the end of the day, I think when I think of entrepreneurs that really inspire me, a lot of them are actually not the ones that you would hear of or know of. It's in many ways having grown up in a community and watching um whether it was people in my family or friends do something that was really um exciting and dream big and and make it happen. I think when you can see it in your own community, you really can believe like that it's attainable. And you know, that's what I saw. Martha Stewart, one of the OG influencers for sure. I mean, Martha is awesome. And I I cannot I I cannot say enough good things about like Martha's brand and Snoop Dogg's brand. What an incredible reach the two of them have and what an incredible duo.

33:30 You did you read the book Shoe Dog? Yes. night. One of my favorite books ever. And again, like someone that was not the star runner on the team, but like saw this vision, hustled. I love that book and I love what he's done. And Nike is Nike. But yeah, that that's another one for me that like actually really inspires me of how he did it. Yeah, that's one of the best sports and business books of all time. Who is your favorite athlete of all time? Michael Jordan. I heard you grew up down the street from him. I I mean in the same community, but I will add Michael Jordan is like an entrepreneur that I genuinely really love. Obviously an incredible athlete that everybody knows, greatest basketball player of all time. Um not even debatable to me unless we put Pablo Sanchez up there and then you know then that's a debate. Um but what I think he's done as a brand is just unbelievable. Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for taking the time today. help people where and how they can find all things Backyard Sports. Yeah. So, backyard sports official, that's our our Instagram. Uh you can follow us on on YouTube, um or subscribe to our YouTube channel, check us out on Twitter, Tik Tok, we're all over the place. And then if you go to backyardsports.com, you'll be able to see all of the games that we have. Like I said before, we have this those six classic titles coming and we are in production on a brand new Backyard Sports title coming out next year. So stay really really really tuned in cuz we're going to have some fun things to share. Got us on the edge of our seats. All right. Thank you, Lindsay. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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