NBA Jam Sets The Wii On Fire In 2010

¹²³ · Jan 11, 2010

There were jams and rumours of jams, but now it’s official – EA is bringing back Midway’s classic arcade basketball game this year with EA Sports NBA Jam for the Nintendo Wii.

Midway’s NBA Jam took arcades by storm in 1993, its over-the-top arcade basketball action and colourful commentary packing in the crowds at the arcade. The console port, released on March 4, 1994 (Jam Day!), sold extremely well. Now Midway and sequel creator Acclaim are both dead, but jam is alive and well in the hands of EA Canada in Vancouver, where EA Sports NBA Jam is being developed.

EA’s NBA Jam “mixes the old school with the new”, with familiar gameplay mixed with new characters, additional game modes, and “gameplay depth”.

“NBA JAM is one of the most recognisable franchises in video game history,” said Peter Moore, President, EA SPORTS. “Diehard fans of the original game have been asking for a remake for more than a decade. We’re very excited to give them their wish this year with the return of this iconic franchise.”

Ressurecting NBA Jam sure seems like an interesting way to bolster the Wii sports game audience, an audience EA Sports seems to have had trouble locating over the past three years. Is it in the shoes? We’ll see later this year.
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speeds · Jan 11, 2010

...except they already did this in the mid-00s on the Xbox/PS2. It didn't really pan out.

The consensus was that it couldn't live up to the current basketball games as it was little more than a pile of gimmicks.

¹²³ · Jan 11, 2010

Some cool facts about the game.

Until then, I leave you with some of the secrets of "Jam's" past from my ESPN The Mag column, straight from the mouth of famed creator Mark Turmell:

The Limited Edition Team of Michael Jordan and Gary Payton

"Payton didn't make the cut to be in the [first arcade] game, and of course, Jordan pulled himself out of the licensing of the NBA, so we had to pull him out of the game," explained Turmell. "But one day, I got a phone call from a distributor out on the West Coast who told me that Gary Payton was willing to pay whatever it cost to get into the game. So we told him what to do in terms of taking photographs, so he sent in photographs of himself and Jordan, saying, 'We want to be in the game, hook us up.' So we actually did a special version of the game and gave both players all-star, superstar stats. There are only a handful of these machines, but Jordan and Payton did end up being in one version of the game."

The Pack-A-Shaq

"Shaq actually bought two machines," said Turmell. "He kept one at home and then, if you can believe this, they shipped the game with them on their road trips, setting up the machine in their hotel rooms as they traveled. The players would play, then get someone to pack it up and ship it off to the next city."

The Pippen Jinx

Did Scottie Pippen's ratings really drop when he played certain teams or was I just the least clutch shooter every time I played Detroit? "It's true, but only when the Bulls played the Pistons," explained Turmell. "If there was a close game and anyone on the Bulls took a last-second shot, we wrote special code in the game so that they would average out to be bricks. There was the big competition back in the day between the Pistons and the Bulls, and since I was always a big Pistons fan, that was my opportunity to level the playing field."

The One Where Drazen Petrovic Haunted the Studio

"We had already finished making 'NBA Jam' when Drazen Petrovic died," said Turmell. "The game had already shipped and he was on the Nets. So we had all of these coin-op machines around, and one night we were playing 'Mortal Kombat' and there was a 'Jam' machine next to it, and all of a sudden the game started calling out 'Petrovic! Petrovic!' And this only happened after Petrovic had died. Everyone started freaking out. Something weird was going on with the software, and to this day, if you have an original 'NBA Jam' machine every once in a while it will just yell out 'Petrovic!' It's wild."
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