Backyard Sports

Backyard Sports (originally branded as Junior Sports and then Humongous Sports) is an American video game-based media franchise created by Humongous Entertainment and currently handled by Playground Productions primarily focusing on sports video games for children. The franchise features simplified versions of various sports and is best known for starring a diverse cast of fictional children as well as child versions of famous professional sports athletes. The video game series includes five sub-series based on different team sports—Backyard Baseball (baseball), Backyard Soccer (association football), Backyard Football (American football), Backyard Basketball (basketball), and Backyard Hockey (ice hockey)—as well as the single game non-team sport-based Backyard Skateboarding. The overall franchise also includes a couple animated specials and various merchandise.

Backyard Sports is currently or was previously licensed by the five major professional American sports leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), Major League Soccer (MLS), the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL), as well as their affiliated players associations. Between Humongous's closure in 2005 and Playground Productions' 2024 reboot of the series, the series changed ownership and developers several times and endured a years-long hiatus from 2010 to 2024 (excluding a brief mobile game revival in 2015).

In the games, players form a team consisting of Backyard Kids and (in most entries) professional athletes as children, which players take through a "Backyard League" season, attempting to become the champions of their chosen sport. Players can create their own custom characters in most entries starting with Backyard Football (1999). An additional aspect of the games is the use of power-ups, allowing players to gain "Super-abilities". For instance, "Super-Dunk" allows a basketball player to make a dunk from nearly anywhere on the court, "Leap Frog" allows a football player to jump over the entire defensive line, and "Ice Cream Truck" causes the other team to be distracted for a brief period.