NBA Hangtime

In April 1996, Midway released NBA Hangtime to arcades — the third basketball game from the original NBA Jam arcade team, programmer Mark Turmell and artist Sal Divita. The odd name has a story: the NBA Jam trademark had been acquired by Acclaim Entertainment, the publisher of the home versions, so Midway kept the developers, the formula, and the entire arcade lineage — but lost the right to call the game what everyone would obviously call it anyway. Hangtime was NBA Jam in everything but the marquee.

It also out-featured its famous predecessors. The headline addition was create-a-player — set your height, weight, power, shooting, and defensive skills, and take your own creation into the game — plus alley-oops and double dunks to expand the highlight vocabulary. The core stayed gloriously intact: two-on-two, no fouls worth mentioning, heads the size of beach balls, and dunks launched from somewhere near the free-throw line.

The home ports rolled out in waves — Super NES and Genesis in November 1996, Nintendo 64 in January 1997, PlayStation that June — and for most kids the N64 cartridge simply was Hangtime: the version in the living room, the one that ate every sleepover. Midway followed it in 1999 with NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC, but Hangtime holds a particular place in the lineage — the moment the NBA Jam dynasty proved the magic lived with the people who made it, not the name on the cabinet.