- [intense electronic music]

- [Mark] The game was introduced at the NBA All-Star Game in Salt Lake City in '93. So you had a lot of NBA players there of course. Players started asking how they could get one. One of those players was Shaq. It was really interesting.

- [Game Announcer] O'Neal, smashing.

- Shaq bought two games right off the bat. He had one at home, but one they actually traveled with on the team plane, and it's kind of a funny thing to imagine this game getting wheeled out of the team jet into, you know, each hotel room night after night after night.

- [Game Announcer] Boom shaka laka.

- Hi, this is Mark Turmell, the designer and lead programmer on NBA Jam, and this is how we overcame the chaos and challenges to release NBA Jam.

- [Game Announcer] He's on fire! [intense electronic music] Showtime. [fire roaring]

- Well, I started making video games when I was 15 or 16 years old, first playing on a mainframe computer at a local college, Zork and Adventure!, you know, text-based games, and then I bought an Apple II computer, which allowed me to learn how to program in assembly language, which is really needed to get the performance. It took me a while to introduce my first game. Sneakers came out and I went on to do Atari 2600 VCS cartridges, and eventually when the video game business kind of hit the wall, I decided to shift my attention to the coin op business, which still had real opportunities, and so I joined Williams Electronics in 1989. 

I started at Williams with the intent to make a dual joystick game. So I created a game called Smash TV that had dual joysticks. Robotron is my favorite game of all time from Eugene Jarvis, good friend of mine now. He was kind of my mentor at Midway, and then after that, I moved on, I did Total Carnage, which is another dual joystick, but we were all kind of geeking out on the digitized graphics concept, the new technology, if you will. 

So we kind of broke off to do Mortal Kombat. Trog was kind of a Claymation digitized looking game. Strikeforce was another Defender-style game. A lot of games kind of percolating up from this group of, you know, 25, 30 people. I starred in NBA Jam. The NBA had never licensed a game to the arcade space before. Trying to get them to approve their logo going into an arcade, we sent a video of our kind of work in progress movement, you know, characters moving left and right on a court, no crowd, no stands, no NBA players, two hoops and a ground plane, and we sent that and, you know, we explained kind of our design, kind of a one page overview, two on two, dunks, passes, four-player cabinet, and they immediately came back and said, no. Inside Times Square, there were a lot of arcades. Some of our best test locations for all of our games were there, but it was a kind of a rough crowd, kind of a seedy location, 24 hours a day. They weren't sure they wanted their logo in that type of a location. 

So we actually created another video tape showing typical family entertainment centers, bowling alleys, you know, the big arcades out in the suburbs. Lo and behold, they responded with a yes, they would be fine putting their logo into those types of locations. So we were off to the races with a whole 'nother challenge of how to get NBA players now into this game. Of course, the most popular team was the Chicago Bulls. It was during the Michael Jordan era, you know, Jordan and Pippen were the two members in NBA Jam, and they were just dominating. We had all these stats that we would track. They were clearly the winner. We weren't sure if the game was successful, just because we were in Chicago or if this would be a, you know, a nationwide thing, but right before we launched the game, the NBA reached out to us and said that Michael Jordan had just removed himself from all licensing of the NBA thinking that he could go off on his own and, and make more money than, you know, splitting his percentage equally with all players in the NBA, and so we had to remove Jordan from the game, and of course it didn't matter. The game was still a blockbuster success, but there are still some games out there with Michael Jordan in the game, all of our test location games and also some custom ROMs that are out there floating around with Jordan still in the game. 

So we launched the game without Jordan, but it was only a few weeks later before I got a message from an operator, a distributor of games, a young rookie named Gary Payton was upset that he wasn't in the game. He actually reached out and said, how do I get in this game? We did a special version of the game with Gary Payton. He was in subsequent releases, but he initially was in his own private game. He was friends with Ken Griffey, Jr. who was friends with Michael Jordan. Ken Griffey wanted to be in the game. So we had Ken Griffey in the game as a custom set of ROMs, and so then Jordan said, okay, I want this too. So we put Jordan back in the game and we gave him a custom set of ROMs so that he could be in the game for himself. So NBA Jam had numerous challenges, some really significant challenges. 

So here's how we, we tackled solving those problems. [funky electronic music] We wanted to have digitized characters to make it look more realistic. We had to figure out how to record basketball players doing these moves. You know, it's kind of funny to think about digitized graphics as being cutting edge. Back then in the late '80s, 1990, the idea of putting a digitized image onto the screen was really unheard of, it was difficult because there a lot more memory required to, to represent an object. You need more color depth, you know, more pixels. Previous to that, all games were hand drawn graphics. Starting with early Pac-Man style games, you know, onward, it was always an artist generating really detailed images of a character running or walking or jumping. So when you think about those early games, most things were hand drawn, but Atari, I came out with a game, a fighting game called Pit Fighter, and they use very coarse, digitized images of some punches. They followed that up with a game called Primal Rage, I believe it was called, where they kind of did Claymation dinosaurs, and so all of these companies were starting to try to get some digital element to maybe ease their development process or just to, you know, be more cutting edge. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

Trying to get digitized characters into the game, you know, we were total newbs. We knew that weather reporters would stand in front of a blue screen to, you know, to do their weather report, and that was about the limit of our understanding. With digitized graphics, we were able to take a photograph or a video and transfer it into digital images that we could then display as a sprite on the screen. It's 2-D, but the images come from a videotape session, and then we chose the frames for running or dunking or passing. Even though it's digitized to begin with, we still have the memory footprint problem where we had to choose and select our frames carefully. I went into the kind of the inner city of Chicago, and I found some basketball players that were out on the streets on the parks that looked like they had a lot of flashy moves, looked really good, and we rented a warehouse. We painted the wall blue, we realized we could do blue or green. So we did this blue screen. We brought the, the athletes in, we ordered these uniforms, gray set of uniforms that these characters would wear, these basketball players I found, but the uniforms came in and they were blue, and so we had no time to, you know, repaint and, you know, we're paying for studio time and the guys were there. So we recorded their moves. We created a little dolly system to follow along a player as he was dribbling and, you know, doing crossovers. We had a portable hoop and so we basically tackled the shoot for two or three days of getting as many moves as we could. We documented everything and then we had, of course, the challenge of what do we do with all that footage and so we had all these tapes that then had to get converted into digitized graphics. We eventually bought a big treadmill, I think they used for exercise and horses, and we had the players running on this treadmill and even trying to dribble and kind of spin around just so that we could record from one perspective to keep everything consistent, and we eventually had to hand trim out from the backgrounds, every single player and every single move, every single frame that we wanted to use from these videotape sessions, because the blue screen obviously didn't magically disappear for us. So we had to do the manual labor of creating those frames from the video tape. 

So once we have these players in the game running back and forth, then we got the NBA license and we had to figure out how to transfer the real players on to our players. So we chopped off the heads from all of those frames that we had clipped out from those recording sessions and we went about the effort of taking every NBA player that we were going to put in the game, which was two per team. We've looked at all of the frames, the different running and jumping and face up, down left, right, and we came up with a sheet of, these are really the heads, the only set of heads we need for the entire set of animations. We embarked on trying to find those exact images based on looking at videotapes, recording NBA games, looking at magazine shots and trying to then lift those images from whatever the source was so we could put them onto our headless bodies and so every frame of animation, it could be a, you know, a pass. On this frame use this head, on this frame, use this head, this frame, use this head and so we had to painstakingly select which of the 13 heads to apply to every single frame for every single animation. [intense electronic music] 

Another challenge was players expected these players to all be distinct. If you were John Stockton, you expected to be able to steal the ball. If you were Shaq, you knew you couldn't make a three point shot. So there was a really large built-in expectation from our players. We had no stats for the players and we found in the arcades as this game went on to test that players expected their player to act the way they did in real life, and so it became a real challenge for us to convert these players into what the players expect, what the video game players would expect. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

We worked on trying to put stats into the game. We had to go back and we did this at like two in the morning one night. We put in a little stats numbers, came up with eight different stats that each player would encompass that would reflect how fast they could run, their shooting percentages, their dunk ability. their stealing, deflections. We implemented all of these little tables all the way through the code, anywhere that could be inflected, we added it. In the end, it was really a smart decision because players really recognized it, and it brought this extra layer of strategy and gamesmanship to our players because they knew that if they have this combination, it would be better than that combination. They're the type that prefers to be fast, not strong, a good shooter or a good dumper. So it brought in a lot of added strategy to the gameplay itself. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

So one of the interesting things about the arcade business is that we would test the game on location. We'd sit back, we'd watch. We wouldn't tell the player who we were. This kid walked up to the machine, but there are four start buttons, much like you see here on this control panel. The player stepped up and he hit the player two start button, and he positioned himself at position number three. His controls were over here, but you know, he was playing on the wrong controls. I was so embarrassed that I stepped up to him and I said, hey, I think you're actually on player number two, and he's like, oh, okay, and he stepped over to position number two and I was like, oh, you know, what a mess, and then after about 30 seconds, he stepped back over to position number three, because he thought he was being more successful over there, you know, which was a drone player running back and forth and scoring and dunking, and so he was not interacting with the game at all and preferred that. So that was a pretty big red flag for us. Players are moving around fast, there's AI moving around fast. Everybody's got similar flesh colors. Trying to help the player identify who they were, who they were controlling, who their teammate was, was a real challenge for players and a challenge for the development team. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

The solution for that was we went back to the office and we created what I call bozo boxes. When you start the game now, there's a vertical panel that shows up right over your station on the control panel, and it says, you are Pippen, your shoes are red. You only control Pippen. That allowed us to educate the player because he wasn't sure if he would pass and take over control of another character or, you know, whoever had the ball, it was him. That's not the way NBA Jam works. So we had to educate the player with these bozo boxes, changing the shoe color, changing the turbo meter color, to make sure that players would recognize who they were, even to the point of choosing the players on the team, the roster, and, you know, as a taller guy or a shorter guy or different flesh tones, trying to make it easier for the player to recognize on the screen and this fast action who they were. Another thing NBA Jam is well known for is the big head mode. You know, it's funny, you get a chance to see these NBA players up close, but really the genesis of that was that we needed players to understand who they were even more than their shoes or their color, and so big head mode really was back to player communication. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

The AI, the way players move was a real challenge because if you have them moving too successfully or making too many good moves, it was a problem. If they didn't move where you'd expect them to move, it was a problem. NBA Jam costs 50 cents per period, two dollars for a full game. Of course we wanted players to play it all the way out, but if they were ahead by say, seven points at the end of the first quarter, [foghorn blares] we would not get them to pay that extra 50 cents. If they were behind by seven points, they would quit and maybe start over from the start, choose a different team, and so that led us to CPU assistance. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

CPU assistance is what a lot of games have done over the years, driving games you catch up from behind. It was really particularly important to NBA Jam, and it was too obvious at the end of the day to the players, but it was really important for us to rubber band the scores back and forth to make sure that it was a competitive match. We didn't want players to run ahead. We didn't want players to fall way behind because we knew we'd lose money in that circumstance, and so we created this idea of the on fire mode and on fire changed everything.

- [Game Announcer] He's on fire.

- [Mark] We allowed the player to start heating up after he made two shots.

- [Game Announcer] Heating up.

- The third shot, he would catch on fire. His ball would have flames on it. He would burn the hoop and he would shoot like 99% three point shots. He could goaltend on the defensive end and it changed the strategy of the game dramatically because now when you started to heat up or your teammate recognized that you were heating up, they were trying to feed you the ball because it had to be a streak for that one, you know, consistent player. When an opponent was heating up, you stopped trying to make three point shots. You wanted to go in there and score, you know, do an easy dunk. If your opponent was already on fire, you certainly didn't want to go down and take a three point shot because he could goaltend your shot and get away with a legal goaltend. So you would change your strategy to go in there and you know, knock somebody down and do a simple dump, which extinguishes the fire. So the on fire mode became the solution for the disparity of scores and to let people come from behind and it layered in the strategy that we didn't really even anticipate. [fire roaring] [intense electronic music] 

The key lesson that I learned right off the bat from NBA Jam was the competitive game was magic. From that point forward, I never made any solo experience games. It was always head to head competitive.

- This is bad, man. This is bad.

- Trying to get, you know, somebody excited on their own is hard to do. When you have two players and they're talking trash to each other or one guy's better than the other, it brings a whole 'nother layer of excitement to the player. The rubber banding and the tight scores made things more exciting, and that spans different genres. Racing games obviously do what, they try to keep things tight. Sports games do it, even on a match three game. If you have a tight score, it's a more exciting circumstance for the player. You know, being from Michigan originally, I'm a big Detroit Pistons fan. Making this game in Chicago during the height of the Michael Jordan era, there was a big rivalry, you know, the Pistons and the Bulls, but the one way that I could get back at the Bulls once they got over the hump was to affect their skills against the Pistons in NBA Jam and so I put in special code that if the Bulls were taking a last second shot against the Pistons, they would miss those shots and so if you're ever playing the game, make sure you pick the Pistons over the Bulls. 

In the end, NBA Jam was a monster hit. We sold about 27,000 arcade cabinets. The game ended up earning about $1 billion in quarters, one quarter at a time in its first 12 months, and that is pretty staggering when you think about, E.T. had come out and become the number one film of all time, and there was like, you know, $300 million, and so to have a billion dollars go into the coin box in one year, set a record that we were pretty proud of. I think all game developers encounter problems. What my advice would be is to, you know, take it one bite at a time. You know, in my company now we always have a saying, how do you eat an elephant? And the answer is one bite at a time.

- [Game Announcer] Grabs the rebound.

- Sometimes it's easy to get overwhelmed with the number of challenges and problems, you know, popping up all over the place, feedback coming from all these different angles, but you just have to tackle one thing at a time, make that right, and then, you know, move outward, and so I learned a lot there in 1992, 1993, on making NBA Jam. [light piano music]