On a cloudless summer day, Lindsay Barnett was giving me a tour of Highland Park, a suburb just outside Chicago.

“This was our football field,” she said, pointing to a stretch of grass. “That rock was the end zone.”

Standing about five feet tall, and carrying a Celsius energy drink in one hand, Barnett wore black high-top sneakers and skinny jeans. The neighborhood, with its white picket fences and neat landscaping, is one of the North Shore suburbs that served as the backdrop for “Sixteen Candles” and other 1980s coming-of-age classics directed by John Hughes. The glass garage from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” where Ferris’s friend Cameron Frye kicks his father’s prize Ferrari into a ravine, was just down the street.

Barnett, 33, grew up here in the 1990s, at the height of the Chicago Bulls dynasty. Michael Jordan lived five miles away. “I went to summer camp with his children,” she said. “It was the coolest time to be a kid.”

As we walked along, a car slowed down beside us. “Lindsay!” said the driver, Dana Gordon, a longtime resident of the neighborhood. “Are you moving back home?”

Barnett explained that she was just showing a reporter around.

“This girl’s a genius,” Gordon said, now addressing me. “A passionate Chicago public-school teacher — and now she’s bringing back my kids’ favorite video game.”

She was referring to Backyard Baseball, a point-and-click computer game from the late 1990s featuring a sandlot’s worth of cartoon kids. It taught a generation the rules of baseball, won their hearts with its cast of lovable misfits — and then it vanished.

The studio behind it had folded. The intellectual property rights were scattered. The source code was lost. But from the moment Barnett decided to bring it back to life, she would not be deterred.

Easy to Play

Backyard Baseball hit the shelves in 1997. It was made by a Seattle-area studio, Humongous Entertainment, on a simple premise: round up some neighborhood kids for a pickup game.

The idea came from Nick Mirkovich, an illustrator at the studio. His pitch sat on a co-founder’s desk until 1995, when the Seattle Mariners made an improbable playoff run and the whole city caught baseball fever. One day, a colleague told Mirkovich the company had decided to make his game.

It came alive in development, built around a diverse cast of kids. The project leaders, Mark Peyser and Richard Moe, decided that each character would have a distinct personality. They also made sure the game was easy to play.

Half of Backyard Baseball’s 30 kids were girls, and half were of color. The girls were just as skilled as the boys. The star pitcher Kenny Kawaguchi threw from a wheelchair. The slugger Achmed Khan wore headphones and fronted a rock band. Sunny Day, the play-by-play announcer (and a versatile ballplayer in her own right), was a Black girl.

The standout player, Pablo Sanchez, was a short, Spanish-speaking kid with a bit of a belly. Mirkovich said Pablo was inspired by a minor character in the 1976 comedy “The Bad News Bears”: a Hispanic boy who is rarely on the field. What if he had secretly been a gifted athlete and everyone had missed it?

After the late-1990s success of Backyard Baseball, the studio created Backyard versions for soccer, football, basketball and hockey. With Backyard Baseball 2001, which allowed pint-size versions of Major League stars to play alongside the usual gang, Backyard Sports became a best-selling franchise.

Barnett was 5 when she first loaded Backyard Baseball into the family computer. She was pleased to see a bunch of girls who could go toe to toe with the boys. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is for me, too!’” she said. The game also gave her the idea to round up some kids in the neighborhood to play sports outside. At 8, she was running down boys twice her size on a flag football team.

Humongous was acquired by the conglomerate that eventually became Atari, and the franchise passed from one corporate owner to the next. A 2015 mobile version of Backyard Baseball was met with a frustrated critical response.

“And then it just went dark,” Mirkovich said. “It was difficult to watch it disappear.”

By this time, Barnett was teaching second grade in a Chicago public school. She had majored in radio, television and film at Northwestern University, before earning a master’s degree there in elementary school education.

When the pandemic moved classes online, she had a portal into her students’ home lives through the little boxes of a Zoom screen. She saw that they were playing video games, and the ones they favored tended to be violent. A kid who was supposed to be practicing addition and subtraction would suddenly break into a Fortnite victory dance — the kind you perform over a freshly killed opponent.

Barnett asked her students, Why not play a sports game instead — baseball, football, something? Those were too hard, the kids said. You had to know the rules. “What about Backyard Baseball?” she asked. They had never heard of it.

She went looking for the game that had shaped her childhood, but there was nothing to find. A whole universe had evaporated.

“That was the lightbulb moment,” Barnett said as we continued our walk down the quiet street. “At this point, I go full Nancy Drew. I reached out to intellectual property lawyers and lawyers from the original game, but no one could find anything. They’re like: ‘This is weird. There’s literally no trail.’”

One lawyer suggested she hire a private detective. “Honestly, I thought that sounded pretty cool,” she said. Months later, the investigator sent an email. “The good news was that he’d found the owners,” Barnett recalled. “The less good news was that they didn’t want to chat.”

What Barnett didn’t know, what almost no one knew, was that the people holding the rights were no ordinary owners. They weren’t part of a private equity firm or an investment group. They were just a couple of guys who, like Barnett, had spent years chasing down Backyard Baseball — and they had beaten her to it by more than a decade.

A Secret Deal

Stuart Avi Savitsky and Ari Pinchot, college roommates turned film-producing partners, were watching their kids play Backyard Baseball in the early 2000s when they started wondering about the movie rights.

“We were film guys,” Savitsky said. “We thought these would be really great characters to make into a movie.”

They reached out to Humongous. Then Atari.

“Over the years, we kept tabs on the property,” Savitsky said. “The timing was never right.”

After the franchise had landed at a company called Day6 Sports Group in 2014, the two men finally were able to secure the film rights. “We were ecstatic,” Savitsky said.

As they tried to make a deal, they found that Hollywood studios had seemingly cooled on one-off movies, preferring properties that could stretch across film, television, games and merchandise. A producer holding only the film rights, with the various trademarks scattered elsewhere, had a tough pitch.

It got Savitsky and Pinchot thinking — what if they tried to acquire the Backyard franchise’s intellectual property in its entirety?

In 2016, Day6 Sports Group shuttered, and the property bounced to a European investment group. Savitsky and Pinchot got in touch in 2020. After a year of negotiations, they purchased the I.P.

As excited as they were, they decided to keep the deal secret. They knew that any announcement without a concrete plan behind it risked breaking the hearts of a fan base that had been disappointed before.

At the same time, Barnett was closing in. With no guarantee that she could secure the rights to Backyard, she quit teaching in 2022. With funding from private investors, she began building a team. “I had blind confidence,” she said. “I guess that’s what happens when you’re 28 and have a vision.”

One of her early hires was Chris Waters, a producer who had spent years building the animated franchises “Robot Chicken,” “Kung Fu Panda” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” He saw potential in the Backyard cast. “This happens to be a video game,” Waters said. “But it could just as easily be ‘Hey Arnold!’”

In the spring of 2022, a college friend of Barnett’s, Miles Bronstein, happened to be talking to an agent at the talent agency UTA, who mentioned an old property that had come across his desk — some computer game from the ’90s.

“That’s Backyard Baseball,” Bronstein told the agent. “You need to call Lindsay. She’s been looking for these people.”

Barnett knew she might not be able to compete with veteran producers. What she offered instead was that she actually cared. She also had a plan. When she finally sat down with the rights holders, Savitsky and Pinchot, in the summer of 2022, she said, “We can have this intention with television and film, but the video game has to come back.”

After a year of talks, Savitsky and Pinchot seemed inclined to make a deal. “There may have been a bigger, more experienced partner out there,” Savitsky said, “but she just got it.”

In January 2024, when they were close to reaching an agreement, a pair of famous athletes entered the fray. On their “New Heights” podcast, Jason Kelce told his brother Travis that he had “secretly been looking into” who owned the rights to Backyard Football and Baseball, adding that he wanted to buy the games and bring them back.

The clip went viral. Barnett watched with dread as the story ricocheted across the internet. “I’m thinking, Oh my gosh, who wouldn’t want to go with them?” she said. She cried that day. “It felt like a horror story,” she said. But the news cycle moved on, and the Kelces never followed up.

In March 2024, two years after she had embarked on her quest, Barnett signed a contract to make the Backyard franchise hers. Savitsky and Pinchot remained on board for any future film or television projects.

As they handed over the assets, Barnett realized the most important piece was missing. The source code — the raw instructions at the heart of a game — was gone. Barnett and her team contacted “every person in the credits,” she said. No one had the code, it seemed.

But it wasn’t entirely gone. It had survived in an unlikely place. For years, a group of obsessive Backyard Baseball fans had been keeping the game alive.

Backyard Superfans

Jim Westerkamp, who works in publishing, loved Backyard Baseball when he was a kid. He kept up with the latest iterations of the game into his teens, when they seemed to be getting worse. In 2015, he dug his old CD-ROMs out of a closet, loaded them into a computer and started streaming the game on Twitch under the handle “Jibbodahibbo.”

He connected with other superfans on Reddit — guys who had figured out how to run the decades-old game on modern machines. The group eventually built an online league. With some light hacking, they were able to play out full seasons.

“We built the community that we once had with these games when we were kids,” Westerkamp, 35, said.

They kept stats in shared spreadsheets. They tracked standings. They drafted teams.

“Because we were a little bit maniacal about the whole thing, we monitored the trademarks,” Westerkamp said. “We saw some activity in 2022. We were crossing our fingers, hoping it wasn’t some company trying to take advantage of the name for a quick cash grab.”

Barnett’s online sleuthing led her to Westerkamp and his crew. “We brought them on to help us to literally reconstruct and rebuild the code,” she said. She had also hired Mega Cat, a digital studio in Pittsburgh specializing in “excavation work” — resurrecting video games whose source code has been lost.

“We were handed the shoe-box equivalent of zip disks and floppies,” James Deighan, the chief executive of Mega Cat, said. “Imagine doing construction on a very old house, but there are no blueprints, and every time you peel back a wall, you find a bunch of live wires.”

“I remember digging through these banks, and you’d find a corner of Pablo’s smile,” Deighan added. “It was a puzzle just to reconstitute his mouth.”

To help with the job of rebuilding the code, Deighan recruited “a strike force of superfans,” he said. Within five months, Backyard Baseball ’97 had been reconstructed, frame by frame.

It was released in October 2024. Over the next year, Barnett and her team brought back five more Backyard games. They have now been downloaded more than a million times. Barnett’s company, Playground Productions, once a tiny operation, is now a real business.

In January, the company produced “Backyard Sports: The Animated Special,” the kind of show that the producers Savitsky and Pinchot had long envisioned. Voiced by Ego Nwodim, Tiffany Haddish and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, it is now available on Amazon Prime Video.

Last week, Barnett unveiled the thing she had set out to make: a brand-new Backyard Baseball, the first original game in the franchise in more than a decade. She voices four characters herself. She has also cast some of the superfans who kept it alive.

On our walk through Highland Park, Barnett said that some of the new game’s setting reflected the leafy streets of her childhood. “Like that,” she said, pointing to a cluster of tall maples and oaks, which now provide shade for the Backyard gang’s clubhouse.

Just then, a kid in a helmet pedaled past. His bike wobbled as he picked up speed.

“See, I just love that,” Barnett said, watching him go. “I might be the only video game C.E.O. who wants people to play for a little while — and then go outside.”