Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five more creepy moments in various basketball video games.

Last year, I finally got around to a Friday Five topic that I’d been considering for some time: creepy moments in basketball games. It felt like an appropriate topic for an article coming out around Halloween, and although that spooktacular holiday is next Monday, I thought I’d get us in the mood early rather than repurpose it for the Tip-Off. There are a couple of examples I forgot about when writing the previous Five, and upon further reflection, a few more came to mind. On top of that, I’d suggest that producing a sequel pays fitting tribute to many horror franchises!

As I said in my previous article, creepiness and horror aren’t usually the hallmarks of basketball video games. It’s not in the spirit of the genre to be creepy and frightening, but there are nevertheless moments on the virtual hardwood that make us jump. Once again, they’re generally unintentional, being the results of glitches or perhaps strange design choices. However, this time there is one example that is definitely deliberate, and while it likely didn’t cause any nightmares, it’s fitting for Halloween. To borrow the tag line of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series: reader beware, you’re in for a scare! Well, perhaps not, but these are some unusually creepy moments in virtual hoops.

1. Monsters in Slam ‘N Jam

Let’s begin with an example that is definitely meant to be creepy: the Monsters team in Slam ‘N Jam. Slam ‘N Jam is an interesting game. Its gameplay is reminiscent of Konami’s NBA Give ‘n’ Go, being a fast-paced mixture of sim and arcade. Fouls and other infractions are called and teams have 12-man rosters, but they also soar higher than normal for dunks. Additionally, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are the only real players in the game, though the number of teams and their locations reflect the NBA circa 1996. This hybrid style of basketball game invites some fun silliness, which is embodied by the inclusion of a bonus team filled with monsters.

A few of these ghoulish players were clearly influenced by the Universal Classic Monsters, and other famous creepy creatures. The Invisible Man is there, though since his body is still visible, he’s really more The Headless Man. There’s a humanoid Fly, a gorilla called Mr. Kong (Super Dunk Shot would be proud of that effort to avoid any trademark infringement!), a mummy, a skeleton, a basketball-headed creature, and even a Purple Guy, long before Five Nights at Freddy’s came along. Again, I doubt that many basketball gamers were truly frightened by them unless they were very young at the time, but it’s nevertheless an example of a hoops game aiming for creepy.

2. Heads Inside Heads in NBA Live 2002

This is actually the example that prompted me to plan a sequel article looking at creepy moments in basketball games, and one that I can’t believe I forgot about in the first one. When roaming around the court with the free camera in NBA Live 2002’s Instant Replay, you may be startled when you clip through a player’s head, and see a wide-eyed second face staring out the back of their skull. I originally discovered this creepy phenomenon while using PCSX2 to get better quality screenshots of NBA Live 2002, and wondered if it was an emulator glitch. However, testing it out on my PlayStation 2 revealed that those second faces show up on the original hardware too.

So, what’s going on here? If you’ve noticed the players’ expressions when they’re going up for a dunk, it’s the same wide-eyed face that you’ll find when you clip through the back of their heads. This indicates that it’s part of achieving the primitive facial animations of the time, swapping the neutral expression for the “hyped” one. Of course, unravelling the mystery doesn’t make it any less creepy when you’re trying to get the ideal angle in Instant Replay, and a second face with a wide-eyed expression suddenly emerges from inside a player’s head. Indeed, I’ll still be caught off guard by it if it happens while I’m positioning the camera to take a better close-up screenshot!

3. Botched MyPLAYER Face Scans

One of the few things that NBA Live did much better than NBA 2K during the eighth generation was user face scanning. The ease of use and quality of the results of NBA Live’s companion apps were far superior to NBA 2K, which is why I gave up trying to scan my face for my MyPLAYER after NBA 2K18. There’s only so many times that I’m willing to try getting a scan to complete, especially when it subsequently fails to import into the game and I’m greeted by a passive-aggressive error message telling me to “pay close attention to the instructions”. 2K has a way of blaming gamers for issues that they’re ultimately responsible for, from server hiccups to errors with face scans.

The fact that there have been multiple articles and videos documenting the difficulties in getting a good MyPLAYER face scan by showing off some of the most hilariously horrific results stands as proof that the problem isn’t all on the end user. If you Google “Funny NBA 2K Face Scans“, you’ll find plenty of creepy examples. From their eyes popping out of their skulls to completely garbled faces to scans that are just a bit too uncanny valley, the results of far too many face scans are “scary” rather than “scarily accurate”. Yes, user error does contribute to some of the creepy MyPLAYER faces – and some gamers make their faces deliberately terrifying – but the tech doesn’t help.

4. Bloodcurdling Screams in NBA 2K9

Player chatter is one of those overlooked atmospheric touches in basketball games. I remember it actually being advertised as a feature in NBA Live around the turn of the millennium. Hearing players verbally react to the action, just as when it’s picked up in an NBA broadcast, was a fun bit of realism. It also added to the atmosphere of the street courts in one-on-one mode, as players would trash talk each other (“I’ve got more game than EA Sports!” is still one of my favourite taunts due to how enjoyably cheesy it is). These sounds also included grunts of exertion and chest-thumping roars on huge dunks. Some of them sounded like Patrick Ewing’s Snickers commercial.

And then, there’s the terrifying, bloodcurdling screams that you hear the players make in NBA 2K9’s Instant Replay, and other games around that vintage. You don’t hear them during NBA gameplay, so when you go into Instant Replay, you may be quite startled when they come blasting through your speakers. Again, chatter, grunts, and roars from players were part of the aural atmosphere, but the scream in NBA 2K9 could be mistaken for someone crying out in sheer terror in a gory slasher film. OK, that might be a slight exaggeration for dramatic effort. Nevertheless, if you’re not expecting to hear it while playing back a big dunk, it may be a creepy surprise!

5. Missing Texture Errors

Admittedly, missing texture errors that don’t crash the game can be comical moments rather than creepy ones, but the ingredients for terror and unease are there. If they’re unexpected, their sudden appearance might cause a jump scare. If a mod hasn’t been installed properly, the entire environment may be garbled, or plastered with unsettling placeholder textures. I remember when I first played The Pitt DLC for Fallout 3 on Xbox 360, which launched with some bugs and missing textures which showed up as big red exclamation marks. Of course, if you’ve played The Pitt in Fallout 3, you know that traversing the steelyard is supposed to be a creepy experience anyway.

NBA Live 07’s placeholder for missing textures is rather creepy, compared to the plain pink textures of NBA Live 06, or the white textures in older NBA 2K titles. When I was playing with the NBA Live Street 2003 mod to cover it for Wayback Wednesday, I missed the step of lowering the detail level to remove parts of the arena, and was confronted by a sea of bizarre red and green textures. It wasn’t frightening, but it was definitely eerie. For the most part, creepy moments with missing textures are self-inflicted, being related to mods. NBA Live 07 PC did launch without a face for Renaldo Balkman, revealing the Venom-like placeholder from the beginning.

Do you recall any of these creepy moments in basketball games? Are there any others that come to mind? Let me know in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.