Image via Complex Original
If you go back and look at the earliest basketball video games, it’s stunning how far we’ve come in the 30 years since Basketball! arrived on the Magnavox Odyssey. The evolution of basketball video games seems like it’s largely about features: the ability to dunk, to call plays, to draw charges, to play as one player for the whole game. But the steps games have taken also reveal something about the game in the real world and how we think about it, from the over-the-top antics of NBA Jam to the struggles of game companies to keep some semblance of Michael Jordan in their games through the mid- to late-’90s when Jordan opted out of the National Basketball Players Association.
From dozens of franchises, we’ve been reduced—more or less—to just one: NBA 2K. But a new generation is promising to bring the return of NBA Live. It’s a tune we’ve heard called before by Electronic Arts, and they have a lot of catching up to do after sitting out the last several years. But if they can bring their own unique take on the game, we might just witness a renaissance of the kind of competition that drove basketball video games to become what they are today.
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Basketball! (1973)
This is where it all starts and this game has it all. I mean, except for dribbling, passing or basically anything other than shooting and walking around. It also features the very bizarre ability to shoot, miss and have the ball bounce back and go into your own basket. This game is, basically, to current video game basketball what a three-foot Playskool hoop is to the NBA.
Basketball (1978)
Atari's Basketball at least brings the game out of two dimensions so you can "dribble" past the opposition, but we're still talking about one-on-one basketball with only the barest resemblance to the actual game. At least there were steals and blocks, and apparently the AI was actually decent-for an Atari game. The 8-bit version added nets to the hoops and allowed you to play 2-on-2. Progress!
NBA Basketball (1980)
NBA Basketball for the Intellivsion is a real odd duck. It's the first officially licensed NBA basketball game-the logo is right there on the box-but it features no actual teams or players. Home team is red; visitors are green. So I guess you can it Bulls vs. Celtics or something. The court features a paint area and free throw line, but no 3-point arc. (To be fair, the 3-pointer had just been introduced in the 1979-80 season.) Also, the players look kind of like Gummi worms.
One-on-One (Larry Bird vs. Dr. J) (1983)
This is where the rubber starts to meet the road. While only a game of one-on-one, it's the first game that makes some attempt to incorporate the character of actual players: Larry Bird is good at 3-point shots while Dr. J is good at dunking. That doesn't mean there aren't weird things about this game. For one, the 3-point arc is cut off, meaning there are no corner 3s, a future staple of video game basketball. But on the bright side, you can break the backboard and a grumpy janitor will come sweep up the glass.
Basketball (1984)
This Commodore 64 title might be the first to introduce a smidgen of physics into the game, with the ball coming off the backboard and traveling through the air in a supposedly "realistic" manner. There are, however, some weird things about this, partly because it's international basketball: the lane is a trapezoid, there's no 3-point shot, the players look kind of like rugby players, and the games are divided into 3 periods of 200 seconds each. What? Another early revolution here, though: ads on the sidelines for companies like Coca-Cola and Kellogg's, although something tells me these aren't exactly endorsement deals.
GBA Championship Basketball (1986)
Released for a host of platforms, GBA Championship Basketball is still probably a game you've never played, and yet it boasts some interesting twists that would eventually become staples of basketball video games. For one, the camera angle is more or less the 2K camera from the NBA 2K series, and a marked departure from the side-scrolling style of most previous games. Secondly, it has a thin veneer of pro presentation in the form of game wraps in the Gamestar Gazette. Players also feature individualized attributes (supposedly based on real basketball superstars of the time) like Dribbling, Quickness and Jumping, although they also have the hilariously tin-eared attribute Race. It's unclear if the white guys can't jump.
Double Dribble (1987)
This is where the evolution of basketball games begins in earnest. Double Dribble is probably best remembered for its dramatic cutaway dunk animations-which are definitely still pretty baller-but if you watch the game in motion now, you can see how this game fully captures the moment of the NES. The players look like they're extra lives waiting to be used in Contra and the sound effects (that rising-falling jumpshot sound!) are so 8-bit it almost hurts. It sounds like you're dribbling a sack of rocks on concrete!
Fernando Martin Basket Master (1987)
When you think of video game basketball, you probably think of one man: Fernando Martin, Basket Master. All right you probably don't, but Martin was the first player to get a video game entirely to himself (Bird and Dr. J had to share one), foreshadowing years of signature games, some of which were great and some not so much. Mr. Martin's title was a one-on-one game created by Spanish developer Dinamic Soft and starring the titular Fernando. The first Spanish player to play in the NBA, Martin died three years after the release of his game in a car accident. This is tremendously messed up because international star Drazen Petrovic had his own game come out in 1990 and was killed in a car accident three years later. Bottom line: if you're a European player, DO NOT make your own signature video game.
Great Basketball (1987)
Despite the almost sarcastic-seeming title of the Sega Master System's answer to Double Dribble ("Yeah, sure, GREAT basketball"), this internationally-focused basketball title did at least one pretty innovative thing. After you had won a game with your chosen national team (your choice of USA, Canada, USSR (!), Japan, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Italy or Hungary), you could allocate RPG-style points to skills like shooting, passing and jumping. Pointing the way towards offseason training camps and the skill development of MyCareer modes in future NBA 2K games, Great Basketball introduced the novel element of making your players better over time.
Street Sports Basketball (1987)
Epyx's Street Sports Basketball from 1987 was something of an outlier for a company better known for its Olympics-themed games. Still, it was an innovator of street-style basketball, or actually playground basketball, as you got to pick your team of two players (including female players) from various characters like the "shades"-wearing Vic. ("The others call him a hot-shot, but Vic's one cool dude. And he lets you know it.") You could select various courts from schoolyard to alley to backyard. Be aware: Doors and trashcans are not out-of-bounds. Fundamentally, this is one of the spiritual forefathers-along with Arch Rivals-of games like NBA Jam and NBA Street.
Fast Break (1988)
The most notable innovation in Accolade's Fast Break from 1988 was the inclusion of customizable plays. Now, are we talking about the kind of play design that would make College Hoops 2K8 so much fun to mess around with? No, but it's still a cool idea. The presentation is hip enough to feature a classic Nike Force sneaker on the credits screen. No real NBA players here, but you do get stars like Hakeem-Muhammed and the crowd is apparently composed entirely of undead souls waiting to cross the River Styx.
Jordan vs. Bird One-on-One (1988)
The next evolution of Larry Bird vs. Dr. J, Jordan vs. Bird looks remarkably similar to its predecessor, in spite of coming out some five years later, but it features innovations around the edge of the main one-on-one mode. You can compete in a 3-point shooting or slam dunk contest, and each features a new perspective on the court. The 3-point contest positions you behind Bird (at least on the Genesis version), a POV that would become standard in later NBA Live editions featuring the contest. (It's not entirely clear to me whether you could enter Jordan in the 3-point contest and Bird in the dunk contest. One of those seems more feasible than the other.) The dunk contest was from a low side view-presumably for maximum drama-but I'm not convinced of the judges bona fides.
Lakers vs. Celtics and the NBA Playoffs (1989)
Lakers vs. Celtics and the NBA Playoffs might be a mouthful, but it's also the next truly major evolution in video game basketball after Double Dribble. It does a heck of a lot more with the NBA license than NBA Basketball almost a decade before it, featuring actual teams (although only ten of them), but players are recognizably themselves, from James Worthy's goggles to Kareem Abdul-Jabar's skyhook. It also features one of the most infamously overpowered moves in basketball video game history, Tom Chambers' Double Pump Dunk of Doom. This is maybe where canned animations get a bad name. The graphics also went from state-of-the-art cool to outmoded once 3D models came in to now once again being retro cool. Incidentally, this game's later iterations (Bulls vs. Lakers and Bulls vs. Blazers) expanded and improved on this initial version with more teams, more signature moves, more Dennis Rodman hair colors, but this is the one that started it all.
Arch Rivals (1990)
This game imagined a bizarre world in which basketball (or "basketbrawl," as the game would say) was some kind of WWE-esque event where there were no rules and plenty of pushing and also strangely tame cheerleaders. But here's the thing: it's from developer Midway, meaning this game leads directly to one of basketball's all-time greatest games, NBA Jam. The two-on-two play is there, and Arch Rivals can stake its claim as one of the first in a long line of basketball games that decided to run directly away from simulation and towards a gonzo fantasy of what the game could be.
TV Sports: Basketball (1990)
There's no doubt about it: TV Sports: Basketball is a weird one. It doesn't seem like Cinemaware-the company that brought you lush, movie-like games including Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger and The Three Stooges-would be a natural for developing a sports title, but their take on roundball introduced the idea of TV-like presentation into the genre, with multiple camera angles and a TV host, a suspiciously Mike Brown-ish looking fellow. Of course, the TV station (TVS) was fictional, as were all the teams since the game didn't have an NBA license. That didn't stop them from putting a player on the Chicago team named Mike Jordache. This was not the last time that a game would pull some shenanigans to sneak Air Jordan into their product.
David Robinson's Supreme Court (1992)
The thing I love most about this game is how they gave one of the most buttoned-up, normal-seeming superstars in the NBA a game with the most buttoned-up name I can think of. Sadly, there was no hidden mode where you got to go through confirmation hearings. Instead, you got an isometric-view vision of the hardwood and what looks to be the first player lock mode in a basketball video game. Termed "roleplaying mode" in Mr. Robinson's neighborhood, the mode had you controlling one player for the whole game, a harbinger of modes like My Player/My Career in later NBA 2K games. Now, how much fun this was is probably up for debate. Without a pretty robust playcalling system, there's limited fun to be had in playing just one player, unless you're Michael Jordan, who's not in this game, because there are no real NBA teams. But who needs his Airness when you can be "Air" Allnite?
Team USA Basketball (1992)
Built on Electronic Arts' established basketball engine, Team USA Basketball featured the megawatt power of the 1992 Dream Team facing off against 13 other national teams. Sadly, what's maybe most notable about this game from a historical perspective is that this is basically identical to 1992's Bulls vs. Blazers with a few new signature animations and a trapezoidal lane, thus marking the beginning of a trend that saw games reskinning themselves or adding a few new bells and whistles with each year's new version, rather than truly innovating. Unless you count somewhat questionable geographical lessons about small eastern European countries as innovation.
Tecmo NBA Basketball and Super NBA Basketball (1992)
From the company that brought you Tecmo Super Bowl and the crushing dominance of digital Bo Jackson comes this game, less well-known than its football counterpart but surprisingly deep. First of all, it features Michael Jordan at a time when Jordan had opted out of the NBPA in order to pursue his own endorsement deals, making his legit appearance in video game form a rarity. It also features a complete playbook with sets as simple as pick and roll and as complicated as flex screens on the low block. And although the realism of the uniforms leaves something to be desired, each team's court features the team logo on it, giving at least a nod to the notion of accurate arenas for different teams. The game also featured a battery backup, allowing you to play a full season with stats tracking for all the players.
NBA Jam (1993)
Ah, the smell of nostalgia is thick on this one. NBA Jam wasn't in any way an accurate representation of real-life basketball, but it made an indelible mark on the culture with concepts like players catching on fire after three consecutive made shots and calls like "BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA!" for thunderous dunks. The super-deformed players with nearly photo-realistic faces put the emphasis on personality-even though Bulls fans had to settle for Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant as their duo because of licensing difficulties with Jordan. The game also featured unlockable players like Bill Clinton. What Jam demonstrated was the power of the cultural aspect of basketball, even in a game that never tried to replicate the on-court product of the NBA.
Michael Jordan In Flight (1994)
The result of Jordan's decision to go solo for endorsements led to games like Michael Jordan In Flight, which is weird for featuring the most famous player in the game and exactly zero other actual players. What's really revolutionary about it, then, is not the way it handled NBA basketball, but that it was built with one of the first 3D engines in sports games, heralding the switch to the third dimension and polygons for games in the next few years. But don't expect photorealism. If anything, the switch to 3D meant a graphical step down from the rudimentary but stylish graphics of other 2D basketball games. But look on the bright side: If you play terribly, Michael Jordan will look at you just like he must have looked at Kwame Brown all those years in Washington.
NBA Live 95 (1994)
The debut of the NBA Live name signaled the switch over from EA's [Eastern Conference Finals team] vs. [Western Conference Finals team] format and brought a new, isometric perspective to the court, along with arenas that look increasingly like their real-life counterparts. Live 95's other major new feature was a (comparatively) in-depth roster manager that would let you look at team lineups, compare players' abilities and even trade them. It can be a bit shocking to play it now, though, and realize that NBA Live's trademark skating player motion was already in place. Momentum carries your players all over the court, making defense difficult for the modern gamer at first.
Coach K College Basketball (1995)
Despite the oddly casual feel of the title, Coach K College Basketball uses the same engine as NBA Live 95 to bring college hoops to life-a pattern of integration between the Live games and the later March Madness games that would continue for years. Of course, like all college basketball games ever, there are no actual player names, although 32 NCAA teams are in the game, including, obviously, the Duke Blue Devils. The game also establishes the emphasis on atmosphere that has long dominated college basketball games. I mean, just look at the free throw shooting screen. The crowd is not a non-entity hovering in the background but is right up on the sidelines and yelling.
NBA Action '95 starring David Robinson (1995)
NBA Action '95 was Sega's in-house basketball game and it's all right, I guess. The top-down perspective is a little tough to play from and there's nothing resembling defense here (not that defense was very well-represented in any basketball video game for years and years), but what's most notable is the in-game commentary from a digitized Marv Albert. Of course, we're not talking about anything close to the dynamic playcalling we've come to know these days. But there's something charming about Albert's excitement over dunks ("He served up a facial!") and withering assessments when you get the ball stolen ("Not a good decision.") Albert's presence was an early example of the attempt to bring in real-life celebrity commentators as a draw for gamers.
NBA Live 96 (1995)
Although NBA Live for the Sega Genesis continued in its 2D, sprite-filled way through NBA Live 98, 1995 brought three dimensions to the PC and Playstation in the form of what the game called "Virtual Stadiums." What was a little odd, though, was that the player models remained 2D sprites placed onto the 3D arena floors-think more Doom than Quake, basically. The result for PlayStation is a hybrid game that begins to treat the space on the floor a little more dynamically (including having animated play diagrams and on-the-fly playcalling), but relies a little too much on showing off its 3D-ness with a motion-sickness inducing dynamic camera. It probably looked real cool back in the day, but time and handfuls of Dramamine have taught us that more or less stable cameras are the way to go. Oh and Dennis Rodman has green hair.
NBA Shootout (1996)
NBA Shootout was Sony's debut foray into the world of basketball video games and featured fully polygonal player models created by motion capture. And, sadly, that's about where this titles significance ends. NBA Shootout made a run of it for eight years, ending the series in 2004 and not doing much of note except for making that move to mo-cap. Basically, the series can be summed up by Sam Cassell's kind of awkward and not at all dramatic layup photo on the cover of the box.
NBA Live 98 (1997)
By 1997, Live had gotten on the bandwagon with polygonal character models, but good gracious are they ugly. Compared to the fluid-if simplistic-look of the game on Genesis (this would be its last year on Sega's console), the PlayStation version looks pretty ugly, with photo-realistic faces of players pasted kind of flatly over polygons. But the game also introduces wrinkles that will become staples of the genre, like crossovers and fadeaways. It essentially marks the way towards more nuanced control over the ball and body movement on the court. And for your regular update on how Michael Jordan is portrayed in '90s basketball video games, he's here represented by a 6'4" SG with the #99 and the name "player."
March Madness '98 (1998)
After a few years off since Coach K College Basketball-and during which Sony started up its own NCAA Basketball-Electronic Arts returned to the undergraduate hardwood fray with another game built off the Live engine. The team count had been bumped to an impressive 107, not counting 9 top women's teams, which is interesting since before long the women's side of college basketball would be abandoned entirely and-to my knowledge-there has never been a AAA-level WNBA video game. Specific fight songs and chants bumped up the college atmosphere and the game went so far as to include a momentum meter, a feature which would become an absolute must-have for any college basketball video game for the next decade.
NBA 2K (1999)
When NBA 2K dropped onto the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, there were a lot of video game basketball franchises out there. The big kid on the block, NBA Live, was sharing shelf space with Nintendo's Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside, Sony's NBA Shootout, Konami's NBA in the Zone, Fox Sports' NBA Basketball and Midway's NBA Jam-inspired NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC. All you really need to know now is that NBA 2K13 was fundamentally the only AAA basketball title released last year. The series' debut staked its claim on being a more sim-style of basketball game, but with cover athlete Allen Iverson, it also brought ball handling to a new level. It might look pretty clunky now, but at the time it featured a level of detail on players-including tattoos!-that was unheard of. 2K more or less ushers in video game basketball as we now know it.
NBA Live 2000 (1999)
NBA 2K's dominance of video game basketball was not immediate and 1999's iteration of Live brought one ginormous gun: Michael Jordan. This installment also introduced one-on-one playground ball where you could play against his Airness and tracks from artists including Naughty by Nature, Rahzel and Run DMC, prefiguring later games' emphasis on licensed music. It also built on Live 99's multiple season mode and developed a genuine Franchise mode that gave you control over free agency and the NBA Draft in the offseason.
NBA Shootout 2000 (1999)
Sadly, NBA Shootout's biggest contribution to the digital hardwood went unheralded and never caught on: Create-A-Dunk. Maybe it was a casualty of the console generation it appeared in; it's entirely possible that the Playstation just wasn't robust enough to do it justice. Or maybe the problem was Shootout itself, which was never really more than a workmanlike rendition of the NBA in polygons. Whatever the reason, this insanely great idea was poorly executed and stuck in the framework of a just so-so basketball game.
NBA 2K1 (2000)
In only its second year, the NBA 2K franchise took a quantum leap in both options and quality over what was already a stupendous debut. In addition to allowing you to play an entire season, NBA 2K1 introduced a genuine Franchise Mode, at last giving virtual GMs control over a team for the long haul. It also focused in on the game itself, introducing 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 Street Modes that let you play on the blacktop and it even had a functional if bare-bones online play component. To be fair, that isn't even so much on NBA 2K1 but on the fact that online console gaming was just getting going back in 2000.
NBA Street (2001)
The spiritual successor to NBA Jam (at least until Jam got its own HD remake in 2010), Street brought a measure of fun and flair back to the blacktop, capturing the culture of streetball, which was white hot with the And-1 tour at its peak in the early 21st century. EA could once again offer you Michael Jordan as they did in NBA Live 2000, but now he was titanic, a colossus. That kind of imaginative transformation made the game more about wish fulfillment than simulation, but it's undeniable that it made basketball feel great, especially when you went up against a friend, old-school, on the couch.
NBA Live 2003 (2002)
After giving ground to 2K for a couple of years, Electronic Arts managed to temporarily turn the tables on their competitor in 2002 by introducing Freestyle Control, a mechanism that allowed you an unprecedented level of control over your player on the court. On offense, moving the right stick in different ways would let you execute different hesitations, crossovers and behind-the-back moves while on defense, it would allow you to control where your arms went. This was in fact so cool that years and year later, NBA 2K would steal the idea back for the Control Stick in NBA 2K13. Unfortunately for Live, though, there were still a lot of issues with AI and basic things like rebounding and the sensation that the players were skating across the court. Increasingly, the brand focused on integrating cultural elements like custom and authentic sneakers and hip-hop tracks into the product. While this garnered them a casual fanbase, the dedicated basketball players flocked to NBA 2K, eventually leading to the debacle that was the cancellation of NBA Elite 11-and effectively the Live brand-in 2010. NBA Live is promising a resurrection on the next generation of consoles. I'll believe it when I see it.
ESPN NBA Basketball (2003)
Don't get thrown by the funky title: This is NBA 2K3 and the last 2K Sports title to have Allen Iverson on the cover. ESPN's presentation was a big step forward for the franchise, adding halftime and postgame shows and in general pushing everything a step closer to the kind of realistic presentation that basketball games have always put up as the Holy Grail. And yet on the other end, the brand new 24/7 Mode put a very different spin on basketball, one that saw you creating a player to play his way up a ladder at different sites against regular players and legendary "bosses" who would then go on to help you if you defeated them. Boasting constant connectivity (hence the 24/7), the mode shifted and changed depending on the date and time of day, and your player would improve with experience in addition to earning accessories that were, in retrospect, kind of silly. Who plays pick-up ball with a backpack? But nevertheless, this mode, combined with The Life from NBA 06, formed the basis of the much better and more robust My Player and My Career modes.
NBA 06: The Life (2005)
NBA Shootout was reborn simply as NBA 06 in 2005 but with a sneakily revolutionary subtitle: The Life. A new game mode, The Life sought to put you in the shoes of an up and coming rookie, doing more than just putting you on the court and actively getting you engaged in the day-to-day existence of an NBA player. But it wasn't all bread and roses. There were some weird oversights in the mode, like that you couldn't make your player left-handed, and some equally weird decisions, like forcing you to play as a point guard. Although ambitious-and the forefather of NBA 2K's My Player/My Career mode-The Life was ultimately a failure.
College Hoops 2K8 (2007)
All you need to know about 2K Sports' last college basketball game is that diehard fans are still out there creating updated rosters to download. It has an unmistakable feel that's notably distinct from its cousin, NBA 2K, and features a well-designed and comprehensive play editor that lets you replicate with a good deal of accuracy whatever plays you could want. The game also deploys one of the best and most devastating home crowd boost mechanics with its "6th Man Advantage," whereby a string of good offensive or defensive play can yield a temporary bonus. Throw in just about every Division I school in the NCAA and you have a comprehensive college basketball package that also happens to be one of the most satisfying pure basketball sims ever created. If it's the last one 2K ever makes, they went out with a bang.
NBA 2K8 (2007)
It might not seem very revolutionary on the surface, but NBA 2K8's introduction of Signature Styles went a long way towards establishing the players on the court as unique individuals and laying the groundwork for the Signature Skills that would arrive in NBA 2K13. Now players not only had signature dunks-which went all the way back to Lakers vs. Celtics-but also dribbled and shot like themselves. Again, it's one of those changes that's so ingrained into the way we approach basketball video games now that it's easy to miss-until you go back and play an earlier game where the only difference in players is their height, with little individuality in how they move around the court.
NBA Elite 11 (2010)
For better or worse, EA's NBA Elite 11 earned its place on this list when all of its touted gameplay innovations crashed and burned spectacularly. It was a disaster from which EA's basketball brand has still not recovered. Its controls were supposed to be revolutionarily intuitive, but instead they were revolutionarily difficult to adapt to when EA dropped the demo. And that doesn't even touch on glitches that had Luol Deng hitting every shot he took from a particular spot on the baseline and-of course-Andrew Bynum doing a tribute to Soundgarden's "Jesus Christ Pose" at half-court. But for all of its missteps, NBA Elite 11's failure was ultimately a tragedy in a genre of sports game that thrives on competition to drive innovation.
NBA 2K11 (2010)
The announcement that Electronic Arts was shelving their rebranding of the Live series as NBA Elite 11 in 2010 could have led to 2K Sports taking a victory lap. After all, NBA 2K10 had been a tremendously successful and critically acclaimed game of basketball. But 2K Sports stepped it up into another stratosphere when they put Michael Jordan on the cover and gave you the opportunity to replay some of His Airness' greatest moments from "The Shot" to "The Flu Game." It was wildly popular when it came out, but almost three years later now, it's possible to see just what a revolution the game was for basketball video games. Suddenly, history was on the table in a way it had never been before, and 2K Sports has kept pushing each year since with more all-time teams and Hall of Fame players.
NBA 2K13 (2012)
2K13 sports two major innovations: the Control Stick and Jay-Z's involvement. Each has their proponents and their detractors, but there's little doubt that as much as the Control Stick changed the way players handle the ball by moving dribbling commands to the right stick (much like NBA Live 2003 did), Jay-Z's involvement as a producer for the game set the bar high for presentation in sports video games going forward. With a hand-picked soundtrack (and less obvious things like having menu effects pulse in time with the background music) and-maybe most importantly-Mr. Carter's imprimatur on the product, NBA 2K13 served notice that it was not just the best simulation of basketball out there, but also a gold standard cultural product.