“He’s on fire!”
For anyone who has experienced the true greatness that is NBA Jam, that phrase should be all it takes to transport you away to a world of frenetic, over-the-top, arcade basketball.
It’s a world of dunks, steals, and hot streaks.
It’s a world in which putting yourself in the shoes of superstars like Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajowan, and Shaquille O’Neal (to name just a few) was a mere dollar away.*
* My memory might be hazy on this point, but I do recall the game costing more than the typical quarter or even 50 cents a play – I’m PRETTY sure it usually cost at least a buck to play – and that it was of great annoyance to me that this was the case. “Games used to cost 25 cents. Why are we now charging more? It’s outlandish and unfair!” Clearly, inflation as a concept had yet to penetrate my teenage boy brain.
It’s a world of impossible physics and ridiculous commentary.
It’s a world of insane levels of rubber-banding that could reduce the hardest of men to quivering tears.
It’s a world of fantastical cameos and easter eggs, not the least of which was a playable version of Bill Clinton himself.
In other words, this world, the world of NBA Jam, is the very best kind of world.
Buckle up, kids.
We’re about to go deep on NBA Jam, the most outrageous mainstream sports game our society has ever seen.
NBA Jam at a glance
Genre: Sports
Release: 1993
Platform: Arcade
No. 19 on Flux’s Top 100 Video Games
“Outrageous mainstream” might seem like a contradiction in terms, but honestly, that’s what we’re talking about here. The game, as we’ll speak more to in a moment here, is a wild ride. There are things going on here you just don’t see in other more realistic sims that try to play things safe.
Playing things safe? NBA Jam is decidedly … not that.
(The Bill Clinton thing alone probably could have clued you into that.)
But the game, in addition to being wacky, was also a colossal, mammoth hit. In the arcades alone, the game has reportedly earned in excess of $2 billion over the course of its existence.
Over six million copies of the game on the Genesis and Super Nintendo have been sold.
And most unbelievably of all, the game’s revenue in 1993 exceeded the domestic box office of the summer’s biggest hit, “Jurassic Park,” at over $300 million.
More popular than Jurassic Park? Seriously?
NBA Jam was an absolute monster of a phenomenon.
And its legacy continues to last.
Those corny catchphrases like the aforementioned “He’s on fire!” that seemed to be everywhere for awhile there … yeah, those never actually ever went away.
I still hear people utter them, today. In the same way that Mortal Kombat gave us “Finish him!” we’re never, ever, EVER going to stop hearing “He’s on fire!”
They’re probably going to drop a variation of it at my funeral.
“He’s NOT on fire!”
Not that I’m complaining. They are so darn repeatable, after all, and they do have a multitude of uses.
Like making jokes at my funeral.
Anywho, the point is that NBA Jam was one of the rare games to transcend its medium and enter the public discourse among people who didn’t even play video games.
But among the actual fans of the game, that permanence is even stronger.
I think perhaps every couple of weeks or so I see someone in my Twitter feed publicly debating themselves, while at the Costco (or insert other big box store), about whether they should shell out the $300 or so for an Arcade1Up micro-arcade cabinet of NBA Jam for their home/office/brewery/torture dungeon/whatever.
Like, that probably shouldn’t even be a discussion, right?
Not when that money could be spent on a million other things in that blessing of a store.
And not when they can still go to the retro arcade down the street and play the thing that way. Or even, failing that, go find a used Super NES and one of the six million or so copies still floating about on the used market and play it THAT way.
Not spend $300 on an idea.
And yet…
Do I fault them? Not really. This game keeps a hold over people.
The reasons for that come back to that perfect arcade distillation of a complicated, messy sport, basketball, and taking something that could be inaccessible by the nature of its intricacy and presenting it as something that essentially anyone can do.
The genius in that approach is that it gives a game a larger potential audience. If you don’t have to worry about such trivial (ha!) matters as playcalling and managing more than two players at a time, well, that allows you to randomly plunk your quarters down and give it a go, whether you have a knowledge, appreciation, or fandom for the game of basketball to begin with.
This is no small thing, since the communal aspects to sports games of this type are what drive repeat business.
Yeah, a person can get bogged down in the minutia of a sim and work their way through an 82-game schedule via meticulous roster management and strategy.
People do have fun doing that.
More people have fun popping in and out at their leisure.
And this is why the game is a mammoth hit, and moreover why it endures over EA’s “this year’s flavor of the same game” approach of releasing reboots every 12 months.
Of course, there are other benefits to simplifying your game in this manner.
One of the biggies is that by lowering the number of players on each side and making it a two-on-two game, the developers made the game less taxing on the hardware. A less complicated game with fewer sprites to manage makes the whole thing run smoother and cheaper … making the cabinets cheaper and home ports easier to achieve.
Cha-ching.
And from a gameplay perspective, keeping it at two players per team also opened up the floor spacing considerably … making dunking the ball and canning long threes an easier thing to achieve for the player.
The game, as a result, lends itself to more outlandishness, and thusly you get dudes dunking the ball from the three-point line, canning threes from the length of the court, and other such nonsense.
“He’s heating up!”
Hell yeah, he is.
The announcer’s booming, ridiculous commentary sets the tone for the action on the court, which again features a wide array of Easter eggs and cameos (Hugo the Hornet might be my favorite), but more importantly, provides ridiculous, physics-defying dunks.
You don’t come to NBA Jam for things to be played straightly.
You come to NBA Jam for the announcer to lose his shit over you dunking the ball through your legs from the rafters.
On the other hand, the use of real-life players lends an authenticity to the proceedings that certainly grounds things a touch.
It’s not like “Space Jam” where you’re shooting 300-point buckets over space aliens.
There’s an appeal in taking over someone like Larry Johnson or Scottie Pippen (as random examples) and dominating people.
Certainly, that act provides an element of wish fulfillment or fantasy engagement. It is immeasurably satisfying to dunk the ball in Karl Malone’s face or steal the ball from John Stockton.*
* In retrospect, the Utah Jazz are the definitive villains of the game, though it seems the Seattle Supersonics are making a push for the title. I mean, YIKES.
But using real players (and real teams) also makes things approachable.
It’s the correct mix of realistic and over-the-top, when a random person (who may or may not even play video games regularly) can pop into a game easily, get the gist of the basic idea, maybe recognize some of the names and faces, actually begin to attempt to develop a strategy for winning, and then achieve nirvana as the controlled character jumps over the scoreboard to dunk it home and smash the backboard into atoms in the process.
“Boomshakalaka!”
Part of that easiness for novices comes from a programmed “rubber-banding” in the game’s engine.
If one side gets too far ahead, the shots stop falling, the turnovers pick up in intensity, and the opponent finds things easier in turn. The ensuing “rubber-band” effect keeps games close and competitive, keeping newcomers and veterans alike invested, as no team can ever realistically fall too far behind nor get too far ahead.
If there’s strategy to be had, it mostly comes during team selection, wherein the rosters can differ from one another mightily.
Land a team with a pair of dinky three-point shooters, and your strategy should be clear.
Conversely, settle on a team of high-flying dunkers and maybe (probably) you prioritize getting to the rim as the game unfolds.
It’s the same on defense, where you can choose to gamble for steals or merely try to brutalize your opponent by repeatedly shoving him into submission, Bill Laimbeer-style. Those choices will again be informed to some extent by whatever players you’re controlling.
Finally, the pursuit of a hot streak looms large in one’s approach as well.
Connect on three straight shots with the same player, and the PA dude loudly declares, “He’s on fire!” At that point, your guy goes into god mode, where basically every shot goes in, he doesn’t get tired, and he basically just ruins every other player on the court as a human flamethrower.
And thusly, trying to string together three makes in a row becomes its own game within the game, since the reward for doing so is so high.
Is it worth passing up an easy breakaway layup with your teammate? Repeatedly committing goaltends on defense? Trying for an easy layup over a more difficult three?
These sorts of questions will weigh on a player’s mind as he or she determines whether to pursue making the on-screen avatar go completely nuclear.
(Spoiler alert: You always, ALWAYS, try to get your player to go nuclear.)
So what makes it worth playing today?
There’s more to say.
I could go on for days about this game.
I could talk about the first time my brother and I played the game on a home console (SNES), to a literal tie in regulation that only went to overtime because his last shot, at the buzzer, was a dunk animation that was so over-the-top ridiculous, that merely engaging in the act of trying to complete the dunk actually ran out the game clock.*
* There was much fist-pumping to be done on my end as the horn blared with his player mere inches from sealing my fate. I won in overtime.
I could talk about the fact that someone wrote a book about the game because it’s such a cultural touchstone.
I could sit here and try to convince myself to go get the Arcade 1Up.
But ultimately, I think we’ve covered it.
NBA Jam is an all-time great in the pantheon of sports games, the sort of game everyone should play. The arcade version is best, but the Genesis and SNES games are passable too. Either way, make a point to play it.
Even if you’re new to the experience, or returning to the game for the first time in decades, you might be surprised to see how well it holds up … and how well you’ll do in the process.
You might even hear those three special words.
“He’s on fire!”
Dave’s Score: 10/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Arcade
- SNES
- Genesis
- Atari Jaguar
- PC
- Sega CD
- Game Gear
- Game Boy
- Arcade 1Up