E-Mail This Article to a Friend The nostalgia files NBA Jam BY MITCH KRPATA

Something about basketball just lends itself to exaggeration. Maybe it's because the NBA itself is so ludicrous in so many ways: a player who once choked his coach can claim his multimillion-dollar contract won't allow him to feed his family; teams with losing records can limp into the playoffs; and pale European metrosexuals routinely attempt five-step handshakes with men named "Rasheed." Whatever the reason, basketball is even more ridiculous now than when the players wore booty shorts, and somehow it translates better into video games than any other sport.

Since game developers have been making basketball games, they've been making gimmick basketball games. You can go back to Jordan vs Bird on the Nintendo, which featured three-point and slam-dunk contests, as well as the titular one-on-one match. The NES also offered the iconic Double Dribble (or, as the in-game announcer pronounced it, "dbbl dbbl"), which featured mind-blowing, monochromatic, three-frame dunk animations.

Then there was an Atari 7800 game called BasketBrawl, which the manual described as "a fast-paced basketball simulation with a twist: the players on each team try to knock each other cold with punches to the face. Meanwhile, the referee, Scott "The Blade" Savage, roams the sideline throwing knives at players."

Wow! Sounds almost as dangerous as a Pistons-Pacers game! My only question is why we haven't seen a next-gen update of this game. Who wouldn't buy that?

Wacky basketball took a backseat for a couple years, even as Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey came out on the Genesis. Then, in 1993, Midway released NBA Jam in arcades around the nation, and a legend was born.

NBA Jam was the first officially-licensed sports game to appear in the arcade, and that alone was enough for it to garner attention. Even though Michael Jordan never appeared in any version of NBA Jam due to his exclusive licensing deals – which, let's be honest, was a crime – no other arcade basketball game let you play as actual honest-to-God NBA stars. And although other basketball games, such as Arch Rivals, had let you play without all those pesky rules, none of them, to my knowledge, allowed you to dunk on people from about 30 feet in the air, shattering the backboard and sending everyone sprawling.

The innovations were thrilling. In addition to passing and shooting, players had a turbo feature that allowed them to run faster, and when used in conjunction with the other buttons, caused special moves, like shoving an opponent to the ground. Of course, the best turbo feature was, without question, The Dunks.

Many things led to NBA Jam's appeal, but without the dunks this game would probably be forgotten today. Every character could dunk from at least the foul line, and the variety of them was amazing. We all loved the somersault dunk that sent the player all the way off the screen. Somehow, the dunks just never got old.

NBA Jam was a huge hit in the arcades and at home, where its various cheat codes and Easter eggs could be exploited without paying a buck a pop. Secret characters included most of the design team, both George Clinton and President Clinton, and – demonstrating that time is but a wheel – the Beastie Boys. NBA Jam was a bona fide phenomenon, and several NBA stars at the time reportedly owned the arcade machine.

Although the game's many upgrades and sequels never came close to improving upon the original, it's easy to see how NBA Street V3 would never have come into existence without NBA Jam paving the way. In fact, the Street series could still learn a valuable lesson from Jam's Marv Albert-esque announcer. I'll take "It's a brick," "From downtown," and "He's on fire!" over anything I've heard from Street's play-by-play announcer.

Boomshakalaka!