Backyard Football's Marketing

I was looking on Humongous' old web site via the Wayback Machine, and when looking at the press news, I came across an article talking about Backyard Football. Before I get into Backyard Football, I want to give a little back story.

I remember reading a comment from Rhett Mathis on Ron Gilbert's site, and he said that Backyard Baseball did poorly in its first year. Nobody was convinced the series should have gone on any longer, but Ron Gilbert pushed them forward. Thus, Backyard Soccer was born. And boy, did it sell. It ended up outselling the Junior Adventure games, the last thing Humongous expected at that time. They actually got licensing from the NFL, MLB, and MLS due to this.

Back on topic, it seems Humongous used this as a perfect opportunity to hype their then-upcoming Backyard Football. And boy, did they hype it. They launched a whole separate network on their site known as JrSN, or Junior Sports Network, and it would allow online play. You guessed it, that's where the forum name comes from. Even with this aside, there was a ton of other things they did to hype it. Here's a store display they created just for the game:

Pretty simple for now, but it will get a lot bigger if you continue reading. They actually also had a sweepstakes shortly before the game was released, so they could hype it up even more. While it wasn't directly related to the game, anyone who entered it got a $5 discount on the game when it would come out. Still not too bad. But here's where it really begins to show - they started putting it into print and over the radio. And then came a TV commercial. Yes, the series actually did well enough to give them a commercial to hype the game even further. They even got Jerry Rice to play in the commercial! There's a lot more things I could probably mention here for how much they hyped the game, but they really went out of their way with this one. Do you think it's enough they had a multimillion dollar campaign going on? They must have had very big ambitions with this game. I just figured I would share this with everyone on the forum.