Thought/Process: Full-Court Press
Pass me the rock and I'll score 'em with decorum
10/6/2009 8:16 AM | 6 Comments | Page 1 of 2
I haven't been on fire for years now. What I mean by that is that it's been many, many moons since I've played a basketball videogame.
Now, I've never been much of a sports gamer because I've never been much of a sports fan. My only athletic heroes growing up were Muhammad Ali and Reggie Jackson, and since I grew up with the gangly clumsiness of a nerd, I knew that I wasn't going to replicate their prowess.
Basketball was the only sport I had any kind of grasp on. Even if I wasn't very good at it, the immediacy of passing and shooting was easy to understand. And in early basketball videogames, waggling a joystick to shake a defender, tilting to aim, and pressing a button to shoot felt somewhat similar to doing the real thing on the court. But my skill with a joystick let me pull off moves I could never execute in real life.
In 1983, Electronic Arts'
One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird pit the legendary dunker and three-point shooter against each other in a half-court showdown. It was the smooth animation and controls on the Commodore 64 version that drew me in. But it was the ability to shatter the backboard with a powerful dunk that really had me playing obsessively.
The dramatic camera angles in
NBA Street Vol. 2 made you feel even more superhuman.
When you broke the glass, a janitor swept up the shards while cussing the players out. After he was done, the backboard magically regenerated and the game went on. This little bit of unreality proved to be incredibly appealing. I could lose a game against my brother or friends, but if I tore down that glass more than once, I was still happy. The stupendous act increased my sense that Bird and Erving were basketball demigods. Most videogames grant the player the ability to perform feats they can't actually do; but in a game crafted from the material of real life, breaking a backboard or never missing a shot was even more fantastical.
That extra layer of remove proved elusive. When it landed the NES,
Double Dribble didn't give it to me, and other basketball games also lacked such mind-bending moments. When
NBA Jam hit the arcades in 1993, the addition of pro team titles, player names and team colors inched things closer to real life. Midway's game looked like it'd be following
Double Dribble on the march to verisimilitude.
But
NBA Jam's On Fire game mechanic freed actual players like Charles Barkley and Hakeem Olajuwon from the shackles of gravity. Once the player made three successful shots, being On Fire let Sir Charles and Hakeem the Dream pull off superhuman leaps and flaming jump shots that would've been more at home in a Super Mario Bros. game.
That iconic feature tapped into the uncanniest element of professional athletic life -- being in the Zone -- and made it attainable to ordinary Joes. Pro sports already happen on a level of performance that most people will never encounter. But only a rarefied few will pitch no-hitters, nail every free throw, or hit a hole-in-one. Those streaks of high-performance, high-percentage execution are only attained by a singular combination of instinct, emotional control, training and muscle memory.
NBA Jam boiled those electrifying moments down to something formulaic. If you were playing
NBA Jam, you didn't need a decade-long career to finally have a game where you were On Fire. All it took was three shots.
