Backyard Baseball

Humongous Entertainment released the first Backyard Baseball on October 10, 1997 — an idea the studio had picked up in 1995, during the Seattle Mariners' first-ever playoff run. Instead of stat sheets and stadium crowds, it offered a neighborhood sandlot and a roster of cartoon kids, each with their own commentary-booth nickname and wildly uneven skills. The stroke of genius came with Backyard Baseball 2001, released in June 2000, which added child versions of real major leaguers: suddenly you could put a kid-sized Griffey or McGwire on the same field as the neighborhood regulars.

And yet the best player in the game was never a pro. Pablo Sanchez — the compact neighborhood slugger — was simply better than everyone, licensed superstars included, and became the franchise's mascot and the stuff of genuine sports-internet folklore. Decades on, he is still routinely invoked as the greatest athlete in video-game history, a claim nobody who played the game has ever seriously disputed.

The series sprawled across football, soccer, basketball, and hockey and onto consoles and handhelds, but its true home was the family PC and the school computer lab, where it filled a million rainy recesses in the early 2000s. After fading through the late 2000s, the franchise went dormant from 2010 to 2024, when remasters of the originals brought it roaring back — downloaded over a million times, with dozens of the original licensed athletes signing back on. The nostalgia turned out to be a franchise-reviving force; Pablo, of course, never left the lineup.