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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the time that Stephen Curry was briefly rated 99 Overall in NBA 2K16.
Sunday marked ten years since Stephen Curry was named the first unanimous Most Valuable Player in NBA history. We can certainly debate as to whether he should’ve been the first, as there’s been some questionable MVP voting over the years; even when the “correct” player won the award. However, I’d suggest that even if Curry shouldn’t have been the first, he was nevertheless absolutely deserving of the honour. He had a tremendous season, with both he and the Golden State Warriors breaking records. Of course, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers spoiled the ending!
A month before the Cavaliers’ 3-1 comeback became the story that defined the 2016 season however, Curry and the Warriors were obviously the talk of the league. Their impressive campaign and Curry’s individual brilliance naturally inspired debate about ratings and rankings, which also carried over to the virtual hardwood. In the wake of taking home a second-straight MVP and in unanimous fashion, Stephen Curry was boosted to 99 Overall in the official rosters for NBA 2K16, in an update that came through ten years ago yesterday. Let’s take a look back…way back…
These days, being rated 99 Overall is the ultimate mark of excellence for players in video games. This wasn’t always the case. Although no Overall Ratings are visible in early NBA Live titles, the players do actually have them, as you can see in the roster modding tools that our founders created. Notably, the highest-rated players in NBA Live 96 PC have an Overall Rating in the mid to high 80s. Even after Overall Ratings became visible, the best players were still generally in the high 80s to low 90s. In NBA Live 2003, Michael Jordan became the first player to be rated 99 Overall in the official rosters. Previously, he’d topped all players with ratings of 93 and 95 Overall.
In other games of course, 99 Overall didn’t necessarily make a player stand out from their peers. Shaquille O’Neal notably had a rating of 100 in the Dreamcast version of NBA 2K2, though he’s 99 Overall in the PlayStation 2 release. Infamously, NBA 2K9 was too generous with 99 Overall Ratings, with LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and most egregiously Chris Paul all boasting that rating in the official rosters. Additionally, in several NBA 2K games including NBA 2K9, copy and paste ratings for the Legends on the All-Decade teams led to many of them being rated 99 Overall. In short, what should definitely be a rare distinction has sometimes been too common.
By NBA 2K16, 99 Overall was appropriately uncommon once more. In fact, in the final official roster, only Michael Jordan from the 1996 Bulls is rated 99 Overall, while Stephen Curry and LeBron James are the highest-rated active players at 96. To that end, boosting a player to 99 Overall was unquestionably meaningful back then. As it stands, Curry had already earned a significant boost over the course of the 2016 season. He was the top-rated point guard in NBA 2K16 at launch with an Overall Rating of 93, which was second only to LeBron James’ 94 Overall among all active players. It was only fitting that they stood on equal footing by the end of the season.
Mind you, a unique accomplishment such as becoming the first unanimous MVP on a team that broke a 20-year-old mark for the best regular season record is a compelling case for further recognition! Visual Concepts and Under Armour certainly thought so, leading to a collaboration commemorating Curry’s campaign for the ages. Beginning on May 12th 2016, a “Break the Game” roster update for NBA 2K16 was available, featuring a 99 Overall Stephen Curry. It also unlocked a new MVP colourway for the Curry Two shoes, which Under Armour also began selling along with a re-release of the Curry One MVPs. A 99 Overall Diamond Curry was also released in MyTEAM.
The catch was this official NBA 2K16 roster with a 99 Overall Stephen Curry would only be available for 30 hours, in an obvious nod to his jersey number. Future roster updates would still unlock and equip his new shoes, but he was back to being rated 96 Overall. Needless to say he remained a deadly shooter with the return to his regular Overall Rating, as he still possessed a Standing Shot Three rating of 99 and Moving Shot Three rating of 97, among other attributes that ensured that he was appropriately Steph-like on the virtual hardwood. The 99 Overall Curry was even more dangerous though, with 99 for his Moving Shot Three along with boosted mid-range attributes.
While the official NBA 2K16 roster featuring 99 Overall Stephen Curry was only available for 30 hours, gamers who downloaded it weren’t necessarily doomed to lose it. It was obviously possible to save it as a custom roster without making any changes, thus allowing you to load it if you ever felt like playing with the enhanced version of Curry. You could also edit Stephen Curry thereafter to give him the attributes that he had in the promotional update, but there’s something fun about having an “official” copy of such rosters. It’s why I’ve kept an NBA Live 19 roster that features Carmelo Anthony’s phantom Bulls stint, which I saved when it was added in an official update.
As for the “Break the Game” update for NBA 2K16, it was undoubtedly a marketing tactic. From the #BreakTheGame hashtag, to advertising the new version of the Curry Twos, to encouraging gamers to fire up NBA 2K16 to snag limited-time content while it was still available, to a desirable item in a mode with loot box mechanics, it was absolutely a commercial promotion that was for the benefit of Under Armour and Take-Two. We shouldn’t pretend that it was done solely to enhance the quality and accuracy of NBA 2K16, and that a couple of big corporations weren’t trying to sell us something. There’s no denying that the update was a gimmicky commercial tie-in.
With that being said, I’ll admit that I don’t view it as cynically as some of the other promotions and marketing gimmicks in NBA 2K. Yes, it included content that was intended to encourage gamers to spend in MyTEAM, but it also gave us a souped-up Stephen Curry in the regular rosters. These days, award winners are most likely only going to be celebrated through the live service content and loot box mechanics. Sure, Under Armour were trying to sell more shoes, but we also wanted to see them in the game, and at least they weren’t paid DLC (though saying that is a damning sign of how the bar has been lowered). Most of the content was free and readily available.
It certainly helps that even if you took away the commercial aspect of “Break the Game”, making Stephen Curry 99 Overall for a limited time would still be a fun way of celebrating his unanimous MVP in NBA 2K16. Perhaps most importantly, it also predates the steady increase in greed and in-game advertising over the past ten years that’s eroded much of the goodwill that the NBA 2K series had established. Contrary to the tagline, a boosted Stephen Curry didn’t completely ruin the gameplay, but he was an incentive to grab the update and see just how well you could shoot the lights out with him. Gimmicky though it may be, it still celebrated a major accomplishment.
Once again, it was also meaningful in an era where the developers were trying to be stingier with 99 Overall Ratings, even when it came to the prime versions of all-time greats such as Michael Jordan. Nowadays, multiple versions of MJ and also LeBron James are 99 Overall in the official rosters. Furthermore, MyTEAM ends up with a plethora of overpowered cards, many of which flat-out ignore a player’s actual skills and play style in order to max out their ratings and thus make them more desirable to competitive players and compulsive collectors. If 2K attempted a similar stunt with NBA 2K26’s rosters, it’s likely that many gamers would just shrug and ask “so what?”
It’s fair to say that the Hall of Fame Ratings Scale didn’t turn out to be as good of an idea as we’d hoped, though perhaps it’s more a case of it not being implemented as well as it could’ve been. That’s a topic for another day, but if nothing else, there was merit to limiting the number of players with Overall Ratings of 95 or more, and only having one Legend – 1996 Michael Jordan – stand out with a 99. It definitely made a 99 Overall Stephen Curry feel special, placing him on par with the Greatest of All-Time; if only for 30 hours. Again, that isn’t the case nowadays where overpowered 99 Overall versions of bench players from the 2000s are featured cards in MyTEAM!
To that point, despite the commercial nature of “Break the Game”, briefly updating NBA 2K16 with a 99 Overall Stephen Curry stands as a reminder of a time when many of us felt more positive about the series. We hadn’t yet been burned by the rising cost of upgrading a MyPLAYER, and MyTEAM was also generally fairer to the consumer. We were still a couple of years away from the Pink Diamond debacle in NBA 2K19, and other decisions and controversies that shook our trust in the brand. Gamers that desired realism and authenticity were the core audience, instead of the online elitists who somehow hijacked the premiere sim title from hardcore hoops fans.
We do have the benefit of hindsight here. If you look up posts about the “Break the Game” update from 2016, you’ll certainly find some cynical and scathing opinions about a 99 Overall Stephen Curry, and using NBA 2K16 to sell shoes. You could argue that they were looking at the big picture, and the gimmick only feels harmless now because NBA 2K has done worse things. Nevertheless, as far as commercial tie-ins are concerned, this one was fairly benign, and potentially fun. And of course, if you strongly disagreed with Stephen Curry being rated 99 Overall in NBA 2K16, you only had to wait 30 hours for the next roster update to return everything to normal.
