Backyard Football is an
American football video game with five-on-five play designed to be simple to use for children. The game contains three game modes: Single Game, Season Play, and Online Play. Hall of Fame records and player cards are also visible on the home screen. Along with the 30 "Backyard Kids",
Backyard Football includes eight young versions of
NFL players as playable characters, being
Jerry Rice,
Randall Cunningham,
Brett Favre,
Barry Sanders,
John Elway,
Dan Marino,
Steve Young and
Drew Bledsoe and the option to create a custom player to play in a game. The 1999 version also featured the ability to choose NFL teams from the
1999 season. The player has many offensive and defensive plays to choose from, as well as a few power-up plays. In Season Play, the player drafts a 7-player team using either NFL or custom team branding through the "Backyard Football League", a 16 team, four division league based on the National Football League (Original Version only). If the team manages to win their division or be a conference
wild card, they can qualify for the playoffs where the player's team can attempt to beat the other conference champion in the "Super Colossal Cereal Bowl", a spoof on the real life
Super Bowl. Throughout the mode, the player can track and print season standings, player statistics and league leaders. They can also practice playing football against a robot team called the Tackling Dummies in between games. This feature was also included with
Backyard Baseball 2001. However, when
Humongous Entertainment was acquired by
Infogrames in 2002, the servers were shut down due to underuse. == Development ==