OT: The making of NBA Jam
 

Fun little article...
ESPN - ESPN The Magazine

I found this part especially interesting:

I love NBA Jam. I still dust it off for my SNES every once and a while. I love just crushing with Pippen and Grant.

I want the game with Payton and Jordan on the same team!

You can get Madden and put Peyton Manning and Jordan Palmer (Carson's little brother) on the same team. Maybe that will make you feel better. It probably won't, but it might.

I don't know, but I'll try. Thanks Pumpy.

That's great. I still play this game once in a while too. It's great for a few minutes of simple fun.

Didn't work. I think it was because I had a Peyton and not a Payton.

I want one of those Petrovic! machines.

I wish the licensing rules would allow them to remake NBA Jam: Tournament Edition with the players from the mid-90s. I wouldn't really care if they updated the graphics, just add online play and put it up on PSN/XBLA and that'd be great.

I want that and the Jordan/Payton one.

LOL. Rony Seikly is on the cover of NBA Jam.

Or WiiWare :D

SI

I used the Spurs when I used to play (no idea why, I didn't even follow basketball). I remember playing a full game in an arcade once and draining a three-pointer to win by one at the buzzer with the guy who wasn't David Robinson.

I was about 16 at the time and I don't mind saying I was a little too impressed with myself over that.

From memory, that would have been Sean Elliott.

Or Rodman?

I, of course, played with Houston but Horry was the best 3 point shooter, which wasn't saying much. However, when playing with a friend of mine, we played as either the Jazz or Pacers and he would be the 3-point guy with either Stockton or Miller and I would be the board cleaning, shot blocker with either Malone or Smits.

SI

I loved playing with the Clippers, because it always cracked me up the way that the announcer said "Ben-ja-min!". Also, I won at this game a lot so I was usually playing weaker teams to give people a chance.

I lost an awful lot of hours of my life between this game and the early revisions of Madden.

I used to waste way too much money on this in the arcades when it first came out. I always was uhh.. Golden State I think? They had some phenomenal 3-point shooter that you would get heated up early on and once on fire he would make any crazy shot from anywhere on the court the rest of the game.. it was fun!

I believe that would be the immortal Tom Gugliotta

I had more fun with Arch Rivals.

Did you ever find an Arch Rivals arcade machine in a local pizza shop that had the local high school teams programmed into it?

I did. Talk about a cool idea.

I liked Arch Rivals too.

I played with that Golden State team too. I don't think it was Gugliotta. It was Chris ... something. Chris Mullins, right? And the other guy was not bad at 3s either. So it was just steal, 3, steal, 3, steal, 3.

Probably Chris Mullin and Tim Hardaway. I was always a Shaq and Skiles man.

That would have been cool. I always liked Spike.

Absolutely correct.

Shaq wasn't in any NBA Jam game... I remember a friend trying various combinations to try and get him as a secret character (involving LSU, SHQ, SHA, etc.) and nothing worked.

Depends on the version. Arcade probably was Hardaway and Mullin.

I think later on it was Gugs and Sprewell

He was in the arcade version.

Yep. On the console ports he was replaced by Nick Anderson but he kept Shaq's attributes.

Yeah, I think it was Mullin who I always played as. Did the original NBA Jam even come out for the nintendo? I don't remember seeing it until it was a later version of NBA Jam that I think came out for the SNES? Was way too long ago either way so I barely remember. I just remember my friends and I always playing this in the arcade all of the time.

Ahh... I played more of the SNES/Genesis versions.

Hahaha, did Anderson really keep his stats? hahaha.

Yeah I think it was Hardaway and Mullin on the arcade (now that I think about it a bit more) and Spre/Googs on the SNES.

Yeah it didn't matter so much. IIRC the console ports had lesser graphics and the only differences between players were hair color, skin color, and whether they were short (mainly point guards) or normal (everyone else).

In NBA Jam: TE Horace Grant was clearly rated as Shaq would have been, the Grant/Hardaway combo was money.

Who were the Sonics in the arcade game? Payton and Kemp?

I'm pretty sure that's a yes.

I always played with the Jazz, so it was Stockton and Malone for me. When the NBA Maximum Hangtime game came out years later, they expanded the rosters so each team had something like 4 or 5 people on it. You could also create a player.

I ended up creating a character with the Jazz mascot (a bear) as the model, and I had the announcer call him "Crispy". Then I'd control Crispy and team up with Stockton in the first half. I'd have Crispy steal the ball, and Stockton would drain three-pointers. At halftime, I'd bring in Malone off the bench to replace Stockton. Then I'd have Crispy steal the ball and pass it to Malone for dunks.

I played the game almost every afternoon during first two years of college. Unfortunately, most of the other gamers played in the morning, so I usually ended up against the CPU. On the rare occasions that a human was playing against me, I'd sometimes switch it up and use David Benoit instead of Malone. People hated it when I'd beat them with David Benoit.

who wouldn't

Good point.

Sometimes, when a cocky senior would come by - and, from my on-campus NBA Maximum Hangtime scouting, I knew he wasn't any good - I would go with the deadly combination of David Benoit and Chris Morris. Stockton and Malone sat on the bench the whole game while Jeff Hornacek clipped their toenails.

It was the crappy picture graphics on the SNES that made me first realize that Horry looked like Will Smith.

That's awesome! I almost always used either the Jazz or Pacers too just for the three point shooting and shot blocking combo you described. I found that if I always controlled the big man I could either block the other team's shots or at the very least goal tend them. Goaltending doesn't count as a made basket for the other team so I could get "on fire" at will. It was fun to have Malone on fire coupled with Stockton's shooting ability. Three pointers virtually every trip down the court!

I tried using a similar combo as well. I think later on, I was better with two guys like Rodman and Robinson... and then you could sub in a 3-point shooter when you needed.

Wasn't Eric Montross on the Rookie Team? lol.