Backyard Baseball ’97 Isn’t On Xbox Yet Because It’s ‘Not Working Properly’, Says Developer

If you’re a baseball fan of a certain age, you probably remember Backyard Baseball – a series of PC games that were beloved back in the ’90s in particular. The ’97 version of Backyard Baseball has been enjoying a resurgence on various platforms recently including Switch and PS5, but there’s no version of it for Xbox… yet.

Speaking on social media, the developer behind these modern ports has advised they’re trying to bring Backyard Baseball ’97 to Xbox consoles, but due to not having the original source code, they’re struggling to make it work.

“We are trying our best to get Backyard Baseball on Xbox. We don’t have the original source code for this title. We’re bringing this game back through reverse engineering and CD rom hacking. At the moment, it’s not working properly on Xbox. We’re trying our best to make it playable. Trust us, we want the game on as many devices as possible! We will keep trying.”

It sounds like the team are going to do everything possible to bring this classic sports title to Xbox for the first time, and it’d be pretty wild to see the game running on Series X and S over 25 years since it first launched on PC!

The only question we have is whether the console controls are any good – Backyard Baseball was originally designed for keyboard and mouse — and early reports suggest the PS5 and Switch versions aren’t quite as enjoyable to play as the PC version. Let’s see if they can figure that out by the time it hopefully arrives on Xbox.