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Midway’s 1993 hit NBA Jam is a rare example of a sports based video game that managed to attract non-sports fans in droves. By the time it released onto home consoles in 1994, the arcade version had already made a huge impression on players. With quick-paced competitive action and impressively detailed graphics, it’s an entertaining pick-up-and-play title that many hold in very high regard to this day. And while the game has an unquestionably 90s feel and aesthetic, Midway had been looking for an innovate basketball video game dating back to the mid 1970s.
The late 1980s into the 1990s
NBA Jam‘s play style is modeled after Arch Rivals, Midway’s second attempt at a basketball game. The 1989 release features an openly violent take on the sport, allowing opponents to punch one another. While Jam doesn’t permit direct violence, it’s admittedly also a very lax version of B-ball. There are only four players on the court at a time, and fouls are non-existent. It’s kind of like a rough match of street ball, only it takes place in a packed arena and prominently features real NBA teams and players. This skillfully boiled down adaptation helped avoid natural pitfalls that keep video game basketball from feeling as intense as a real match – something important to keep in mind as we discuss the 1974 title that kicked things off.
But before that, there was TV Basketball
A full fifteen years before the release of Arch Rivals – nineteen years before NBA Jam – Taito made a valiant attempt at translating the excitement of shooting hoops into video game form. The release was simply known as Basketball in Japan, but when Taito licensed the game to Midway for a North American release, it was changed to TV Basketball. Simple looking by today’s standards, it’s a 1974 arcade release that was quite innovative for its time.
The developers behind TV Basketball found clever ways of turning the sport into an easy-to-understand video game, some of which were paralleled years later when designing NBA Jam. Both games only allowed four men on the court, although TV Basketball only allowed two human players. Both development teams went to great lengths to create immersive graphical presentations. While NBA Jam is known for its use of digitized images of actual people for a realistic effect, tech in the 1970s hadn’t quite reached that point. In fact, most video game imagery at the time was highly abstract, made up of chunky blocks that looked nothing like the objects they were intended to represent. TV Basketball on the other hand, shaped the on-screen images to look like actual people throwing a ball into hoops. In fact, it has the honor of being the very first video game that utilized human shaped figures rather than simple shapes.
Although it goes without saying, a 1993 arcade board obviously has more horsepower than one from 1974. TV Basketball has its inherent limitations, most notably that all players move in unison. Still, it’s intriguing to see some of the trademark concepts that make NBA Jam a transcendentally revered game appear in such an early release. If you’d like to see some gameplay footage for yourself, here’s a video link.
