Last updated on January 3rd, 2026 at 05:55 am
Backyard Football '99 – Family Game Review
Backyard Football '99 is a Family/Sports game from Playground Productions LLC, first launched in 8th September 2025.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 110+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Backyard Football '99 Stand Out
HUDDLE UP FOR BACKYARD FOOTBALL
Backyard Football 1999 is now enhanced to run on modern systems. Whether you're picking Jerry Rice or Barry Sanders for your dream team, rushing with Pete Wheeler, scoring touchdowns with Pablo Sanchez, or enjoying the witty banter of hosts Sunny Day and Chuck Downfield, simple controls let anyone pick up and play football!
GAME MODES
Single Game: With 5 backyard fields and unique weather condition settings, players can pick their team, design their team logos, and play a pick-up game!
Season Mode: Players can draft seven players from the 30 iconic Backyard Sports characters and a collection of legendary pros including Barry Sanders, Jerry Rice, John Elway, Dan Marino, Randall Cunningham, Drew Bledsoe and Steve Young to compete against 15 other teams in the Backyard Football League. Each team plays a 14-game season. By the end of the regular season, the 4 division champions and 4 wild card teams enter the Backyard Football League Playoffs to compete for the Super Colossal Cereal Bowl!
EARN CLASSIC POWER UPS
Earn power-ups by completing passes on offense and sacking the opposing QB on defense.
Offensive
• Hocus Pocus – A pass play which results in a receiver teleporting down field.
• Sonic Boom – A run play which causes an earthquake to knock over the opposing team.
• Leap Frog – A run play which causes your running back to leap down field.
• Super Punt – A very powerful punt!
Defensive
• Cough Drop – A play that causes the opponent to fumble when tackled.
• Chameleon – A trick play that results in your team wearing the other team's colors for ultimate confusion.
• Spring Loaded – A play that causes your player to leap over the line of scrimmage to sack the QB.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
At our core, we are fans first – not just of video games, but of the Backyard Sports franchise. Fans have asked for accessible and legal ways to play their original Backyard titles for years, and we are excited to deliver.
Without having access to the source code, there are hard limitations on the experience we can create. However, Backyard Football ‘99 runs well, looks better than ever, and creates a new installation for digital preservation within the Backyard Sports catalog that allows the next generation of fans to fall in love with the game.
This Family game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Backyard Football '99 is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 25th November 2025
Recent improvements include:
- improved anti-cheat checks for tournaments
Download & Availability
Backyard Football '99 is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Backyard Football '99 on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Come on, you cant compete with any of these games, this is the best game on earth, better than: Minecraft, Among Us, Fortnite, Madden, and Geometry Dash.
Plz add trades and new drafts every year.then make it when you make a custom person more skill points plz.then add challenging plays it would be so cool! And plz add refs and penalties plz.then plz add replays after every good play like sacks,turnovers, penalties,touchdowns,field goals,big plays and so much more plz devs add this stuff.
The backyard sports franchise was our entire childhood. Words cant describe how happy we are that they are back. Beautifully remade, these guys went above and beyond.
We cant change the difficulty setting in our season. We also cant throw deep because the WR goes off screen.
Not very easy to see when half of screen is a garbage border.
We loved this game growing up. Please let us backbone support.
This game was a favorite from childhood and we love how the series is back.
Need to have a digital analog stick and button. Lot of times when you run the ball youll try to tap to run but the running back will pass the ball.
Ive loved this game since we were a kid. We would suggest that like baseball, you can select the home field for the season mode.
We love the whole trilogy of these games, actually, to say how much we like them, we beat every one of them on our phone! To sum it up, we love these games, but we have a recommendation. Are the people working on these games making Backyard Soccer next? Because we beat Baseball twice and Football twice too, but we have not beat the soccer version yet. We want the developers to tell us if you are making the soccer version, because if you do, Ill be very happy:).
We wish we could play this game 24/7. Its so fun.
Great game, we love how you can play it on mobile now, there is a tiny bug which is more funny than anything, somehow our punter (Dimitri of course) has an average pint of 1538 yards per punt, if you somehow didnt know theres only 120 yards in a football field, and we think it could be related to the super punt going out of bounds as only 1 of our saves has that glitch.
After playing just one game, we can already tell that this has the same level of quality as the previous ports of the backyard sports series, which is a great sign! We were a bit worried that it would be difficult to play on such a small screen, but we were once again surprised to be proven wrong, as thankfully controlling a team of five is a lot easier than we thought. Our only problem is that we cannot seem to change any of the difficulties settings for this season. Im not sure if that was part of the original game, we would like to have a higher difficulty in our season. But overall, if you enjoyed the original game as a kid, then we highly recommend you try this out.
We remember playing this game on the pc its so cool to see all the new teams in this game. Nostalgic.
Thank you for this game!!! We think there may be a bug where the opposing team throws a long throw and the player jumps like 15 to 20 yards to catch the ball magically. Could yall fix that.
Every team has the same colors for the most part. Wish they had some teal teams or some different shades of blue, orange, red and so on.
The only problem holding our review back is the inability to change difficulty.
Need better controls or controller movements.
Really needs joystick movement controls. The game is a bit clunky, but works as it should. Idk if its worth 5$ though.
Fun. Nostalgic. Unfortunately, Ive won the 10th game of our season like 3 times now and it keeps not saving. Im done playing the geckos and not being able to advance in our season. Lame.
Awesome to get to play on the phone and have these moments. But please bring Achievements?! We saw them on the STEAM versions, please give iOS achievements too.
We found backyard baseball from dude perfect gaming and loved it then we found out that the playground productions team made a football game and got it right away. This game is amazing and very funny though we have some suggestions like replace chuck downfield with Vinny the gooch at least for pick up games and we think you should make it easier to control the halfback because you cant control him well until hes past the line of scrimmage making it hard to dodge tackles but all in all just an amazing game keep up the good work playground productions team.
First game we ever played on PC. Every weekend and our nanas house we played this game on a disc and this unlocks so many core childhood memories for us.
Please from a 90s child please bring back Backyard hockey to mobile.
This game is amazing. No nostalgia whatsoever, game was created before we were even born and have never played this until a couple days ago. This game is easily the best football video game on this app, combining arcadey action with realisticness in playbook strategy like in real football. Retro bowl doesnt even allow defense to be played, nor choose plays, making this game so much better in our opinion.
These are some of our favorite sports game and seeing 3 days ago they just released the football version which we just had to get.we love this and the baseball and knowing backyard soccer is on pc they at least got to bring soccer or basketball in at least a month.
One of the best old school games out.
Plays just as well as we remember. So happy the Backyard Sports team brought this back.
We have to give this 5 stars because of the immediate nostalgia playing this game. Steve Young throwing to Pablo Sanchez again, what more could you want? The controls are a bit clunky. Especially for quarterback runs. Its very easy to accidentally throw the ball when trying to cut up field. You have to tap behind the line of scrimmage and then drag. But this means your hand will be obscuring the screen. Its doable, but we had to practice for a bit to get the hang of it. In general, the idea of tapping where to run off leads to your hand obscuring the screen quite often. This game would probably benefit from a joystick style of controls, at least as an option. Compared to a game like retro bowl, the gameplay will never live up to that. However, we didnt download this game expecting modern fast paced gameplay we downloaded it for nostalgias sake. And in that way it delivers. We doubt Ill play this much beyond one season though.
The game is amazing. Absolutely love it. But it is so frustrating to finish a game, go back to your teams screen, and then the game doesnt save somehow. Ive had to replay multiple games we already won. If that were corrected the game would be perfect.
Dont get us wrong. This is a very fun game and all of that everythings fine but also the Hocus Pocus play when our receiver does that we can barely throw it because the screen is not big enough and also every time we get the ball to one of our players they fumble like when we got a kick off ball they fumbled. Had five fumbles in the first half of football so if you could please fix the fumbling.
So much fun Im happy they brought football back. We agree with others though its too easy/the controls arent the best. Most running plays we will accidentally throw the ball instead of run.
No subtitles? In 2025? Really? Disappointing because otherwise this could be the best football game on the app store hands down.
Needs an analog stick for player movement. There is plenty of space since the game doesnt take up the whole screen. Also pretty laggy. When we click a play there is like a 2 sec delay.
We just picked up the new Backyard Football and Im glad to say its every bit as fun as we remembered. The gameplay is smooth, easy to jump into, and full of those classic 5-on-5 plays and power-ups that make every game exciting. What we love most is how much our kids enjoy it. They picked it up right away and now were all playing together. Its simple enough for them to have fun, but still competitive enough to keep us engaged too. The new fictional teams add a fun twist, and it feels like the perfect mix of nostalgia and fresh energy. If youre looking for a game thats family-friendly, easy to play, and just plain fun, this one is a winner. Backyard Football really proves that some classics never lose their magic.
How in the world did they bring this back without source? We love the new characters and especially the teams.
This is so good and the nostalgia.
Its very fun but there are some audio and visual bugs. It is just released so cant really complain and hopeful that itll be fixed soon.
We are very excited that they added mouse control so we can actually use the Magic Keyboard mouse and see where the cursor is. The reason it is not 5 is because the cursor is still missing everywhere but the actual plays (the clubhouse and playbook the cursor is missing), but the game plays very similarly to how we remember from back when, and will revisit the review if the cursor gets added so that it shows everywhere, not just on the field.
We remember when we played as a kid we stopped playing because it was too easy even on Hard mode. The same thing happens here as an adult. Even using no Pros, its too easy to blow out an opponent every time. Especially when special plays are gifted so often. No desire to keep playing when you win 35-7 every game.
Need to have a digital analog stick. Lot of times when you run the ball youll try to tap to run but the running back will pass the ball. Game is to clunky.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.4.34
- Size: 443.87 MB
- iOS: 16.6 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Playground Productions LLC
Last updated: 25th November 2025 | Genre: Family, Sports | Developer: Playground Productions LLC