NBA Live on PC didn’t have a steal button until NBA Live 98Ĭan you imagine that? In the PC versions of NBA Live 95, NBA Live 96 and NBA Live 97, there was no way to manually steal the ball…unless of course, you turned off fouls and knocked opponents down, positioned yourself just right for an interception or were lucky enough to pick off a pass when jumping to block.
To be honest, that’s probably better than pretending that a light-skinned player with a full head of hear wearing #98 is actually His Airness.Ģ. Considering how developers must make stand-in players truly generic and not in any way resemble the real individuals that they’re taking the place of, the preferred alternative is to simply leave them out of the game and the historical roster incomplete. The practice has also been discontinued when it comes to legendary players and historical content, due to various lawsuits over the years. That’s no longer an issue with today’s stars, so you don’t see sim titles missing the likes of LeBron James or Kobe Bryant. Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley are the two most prominent examples, while David Robinson didn’t appear in NBA Live 95 and Shaquille O’Neal was exclusive to NBA Live 97, a fact that was even proudly touted among the key features on the back of the box. Back then, some of the big name players had exclusive deals with certain video game developers or retained complete control over their likeness rights, thus they couldn’t automatically appear in just any NBA licensed game.
So, this week I’m getting nostalgic once again and taking a look back at some oddities that I remember from old school basketball titles.įictional placeholder players, commonly referred to as “Roster Players” because that’s the name they were usually given, are definitely a relic of old school basketball games.
However, you’ll also be reminded of a lot of odd, quirky things that you wouldn’t expect to see in one of today’s basketball games. Should you go back and play them today, you’ll be reminded why you spent so much time with them all those years ago. Although those old games may appear to be quite primitive now, the best of them were actually quite good for their day. Many of us have been playing basketball video games for a long time and we’ve seen them come a long way over the years. It’s Friday once again, so welcome one and all to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! If you’re not familiar with The Friday Five and you’re wondering what it’s all about, this is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to basketball video games, the real NBA or another area of interest to our community, either as a list of five items or in the form of a Top 5 countdown.