book post: nba jam by reyan ali
May. 26th, 2020 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaThis is a thoroughly amusing making-of romp, covering, of course, the titular arcade classic NBA Jam, aka the last place where my beloved Seattle Supersonics still exist.
The book is very much in the vein of, say, Masters of Doom. It’s short and plenty fun if you’re a dork about arcade history, but here’s some of the more amusing tidbits I learned:
* New York apparently banned pinball from 1942 until 1976. Damn puritans.
* Though Michael Jordan was left out of the original NBA Jam game due to licensing shenanigans, after NBA Jam became huge (multiple NBA stars owned their own cabinets), Jordan contacted the company and asked if he could have his own version, with him in it. So there’s like, three Michael Jordan versions out there in the world, somewhere...
* Most of the folks in the book go on to have careers in console game development, or other general sectors of the computer and/or gaming industry, but Eugene Jarvis just up and made his own lil’ arcade game company, even as the whole arcade industry is collapsing around him. “At some point in your life, you just decide who the hell you are and what you do. You stick with it until you go broke or die—one of the other.” Happily, his little business has been doing particularly well with the whole barcade trend going on these days.
* this whole excerpt is a total highlight
* The book goes into lots of detail on poor Tim Kitzrow, the iconic voice actor for the game, who never saw any real royalties from his one-time voice acting contract; he’s an interesting story in and of himself.
The book is very much in the vein of, say, Masters of Doom. It’s short and plenty fun if you’re a dork about arcade history, but here’s some of the more amusing tidbits I learned:
* New York apparently banned pinball from 1942 until 1976. Damn puritans.
* Though Michael Jordan was left out of the original NBA Jam game due to licensing shenanigans, after NBA Jam became huge (multiple NBA stars owned their own cabinets), Jordan contacted the company and asked if he could have his own version, with him in it. So there’s like, three Michael Jordan versions out there in the world, somewhere...
* Most of the folks in the book go on to have careers in console game development, or other general sectors of the computer and/or gaming industry, but Eugene Jarvis just up and made his own lil’ arcade game company, even as the whole arcade industry is collapsing around him. “At some point in your life, you just decide who the hell you are and what you do. You stick with it until you go broke or die—one of the other.” Happily, his little business has been doing particularly well with the whole barcade trend going on these days.
* this whole excerpt is a total highlight
* The book goes into lots of detail on poor Tim Kitzrow, the iconic voice actor for the game, who never saw any real royalties from his one-time voice acting contract; he’s an interesting story in and of himself.
