NBA Jams

In the early 1990’s, the console gaming market was absolutely flooded with NBA titles. The NBA was enjoying a pre-lockout, post-really short shorts renaissance, and video game consoles were finally becoming a commercially and socially acceptable reason for avoiding sunlight.

A Sega Genesis man myself, here are some of my favorite, although lesser-known, titles from that era:

Karl Malone Wolf Fighter!





How does Karl Malone train in the off-season? He fights armies of genetically crazed wolves in the Wilderness of Utah. The game play and wolf physics in this game were years ahead of their time. The only downfall was the amount of levels. There were literally 200 hundred levels of non-stop wolf fighting without save points, a truly Herculean trial.

Grant “Hamburger” Hill: War at its worst. Basketball at its best.





The game Hamburger Hill was originally released as a graphically violent port of the 1987 Vietnam War film. The game was deemed too disturbing for the youth market and pulled from the shelves. Looking to cut their losses, Sega reskinned the game into a jungle basketball adventure. They replaced the M-16 with a gun that shot basketballs, turned the Vietcong into cartoon walking basketball hoops, and interchanged dying Vietnamese villagers with cheerleaders. This was a great side scroller on par with Contra.

Bill Laimbeer’s Laimbeard Growth Simulator





Sega wanted to capitalize on the success of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for the SNES. Unfortunately Laimbeer’s contract with Hudson Soft gave them exclusive rights to any basketball game featuring the bruising center. Sega scrambled and came up with this game, wherein the goal is to induce beard growth on a 16-bit version of Laimbeer’s face by pressing a sequence of buttons. This is still the all time best selling basketball videogame in Japan.