I started cruising around Chicago, going to playgrounds and to DePaul’s basketball arena to find a couple of players to model for us. Nearly a quarter century later, SI assembled the game’s makers and stars-in some cases one in the same-to recount how the phenomenon came to be, why the NBA was so slow to sign on and how everyone from Shaq to Macaulay Culkin couldn’t get enough.įor an arcade game, you’ve got to cram enough fun and adrenaline into a minute and a half so that someone will put in another quarter. When Midway released Jam, in April 1993, the game shattered arcade revenue records like digitized backboards, birthing new entries in basketball’s exclamatory lexicon ( Boomshakalaka!) and eventually spawning sequels and spinoffs. In the absence of fouls, defenders full-arm shoved. Hot shooters saw the ball literally catch fire. Dunkers launched as if powered by jet packs. And nowhere was that style more apparent than on the virtual courts of NBA Jam, an over-the-top video game in which the league’s actual stars-minus one contractually excluded Chicagoan-bullied and somersault-slammed their way through a cartoonish brand of two-on-two ball. NBA FANS of a certain age speak of the 1990s in reverent tones, nostalgic for a bygone era in which physical play ruled and larger-than-life stars made jaws drop.
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