Wayback Wednesday: Revisiting Fantasy Teams & Quick Pick Play

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a second look back at Fantasy Teams in NBA Live, which debuted as Quick Pick Play.

Although I have many titles and aspects of old basketball games that I want to cover here in Wayback Wednesday, sometimes I do have to revisit topics. As much care and passion as I put into my features, there are times when I don’t do a topic justice, or my opinion changes after some further retro gaming sessions. It’s why I’ve seen fit to post new retrospectives of NBA Live 06 and NBA Live 10. Sometimes my opinion doesn’t change much – as was the case with NBA Live 07 – but another look with fresh eyes can yield something you didn’t notice before, and alter your perspective.

I would definitely say that that’s the case with Fantasy Teams and Quick Pick Play, a mode featured in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of NBA Live 08 through NBA Live 10. I don’t necessarily disagree with what I wrote when I covered Quick Pick Play four years ago, but I’ve developed more of an appreciation for it since then. With that in mind, let’s take another look back…way back…

By 2007, NBA Live’s original Custom Teams and Create-a-Team functionality were a distant memory. It didn’t seem like either concept was popular enough to return, but we did get a compromise in the form of Quick Pick Play in NBA Live 08. It was very similar to the original Custom Teams idea in that you assembled temporary squads. However, instead of choosing players to place on one of four fictional teams – the Jammers, Slammers, Stealers, and Blockers – you created a custom lineup for an NBA team. It was a quicker method than customising the roster, leaving it intact and even allowing both teams to pick the same players (with no duplicates on the same team).

There was also an auto-fill option to quickly throw together random lineups. In my previous retrospective, I concluded that Quick Pick Play and Fantasy Teams were solid modes that lacked the charm of Custom Teams. Looking back now, I wouldn’t entirely agree with that assessment. They were a slightly different take on the concept, and if you wanted the old school approach or full Create-a-Team function, then they admittedly didn’t fit the bill. They had a great deal of potential though, and the ability to quickly customise the lineup of your favourite NBA team for an exhibition game is in some ways preferable to having to use the custom branding of a fictional squad.

With that being said, it’s understandable that the mode flew under the radar, especially in our community given our focus on the PC releases. Furthermore, by 2007, most basketball gamers – whether they were on console or PC – were more interested in Dynasty mode, the prospect of a career mode, or the emerging online scene. It wasn’t mentioned in previews, and thus didn’t receive much attention. As I mentioned, I’d forgotten about it until firing up NBA Live 08 one day. Apart from acknowledging it here and there in an article or on the NLSC Podcast, I still didn’t give it too much thought until Dee4Three and I started playing NBA Live 10 over Parsec this year.

That’s when we started to explore the kind of ideas that Fantasy Teams and Quick Pick Play were intended for. We started out playing games with the default NBA Live 10 rosters, but after recalling the role players that always seemed to play like stars for us (or against us) on the virtual hardwood, we assembled squads of our favourite video game legends for an underdog showdown. This led to a makeshift All-Time Bulls and Celtics matchup, with our squads being made up of the past, present, and future alumni that were available in NBA Live 10’s rosters. Eventually we began creating makeshift classic teams, which then became a staple of our Parsec sessions.

As we discovered, the Fantasy Teams mode was perfect for this endeavour. As it features 10-man lineups, it’s easier to assemble the makeshift squads, even if a few key names are missing. Although some prep work is required as far as signing players from the Free Agent Pool and fixing numbers – and ratings edits if you really want to be detailed about it – it’s much quicker than moving players around to create retro squads. Now that we have a “sandbox” roster in place, it doesn’t take long to set up a retro matchup. It even produced one of the most memorable games that either of us has ever taken part in, thanks to a finish that was undoubtedly a Top 10 Play!

It’s given me a new appreciation for the creative possibilities of the mode. Sure, it’s fun to use the mode in a more “traditional” way, quickly assembling super teams or wacky lineups. There’s great satisfaction in finding out just how many retro teams we can re-create though, from combing through the rosters to find the appropriate players to seeing which teams have reasonably accurate branding that we can use. Take our 2005 Bulls vs 2005 SuperSonics game, for example. By making the Thunder the road team and using the appropriate Sonics retro jerseys, that matchup could be respectably authentic. Sure, the name and logo were still wrong, but the effect was still achieved.

Yes, we can obviously play with authentic classic teams in any NBA 2K game from the past decade, but there’s immense satisfaction in discovering what’s possible with NBA Live 10’s rosters, and making it happen in Fantasy Teams. I’ve also found it extremely useful for content creation, and it’s inspired several features based around NBA Live 10. From representing What If scenarios to placing active players on their current teams and matching players in the rosters to their rookie retros, it takes far less time to grab screenshots when you’re using Fantasy Teams mode rather than moving everyone around via roster editing. It’s been a huge part of my retro gaming kick.

Of course, there are some limitations. As I mentioned, it does require some prep work if you want to quickly assemble classic teams. Players in the Free Agents Pool can’t be selected in Fantasy Teams or Quick Pick Play, so you’ll need to move them to an NBA roster first. There’s only one copy of every player, so jersey numbers and ratings won’t always be accurate for every team that can be created; at least without further editing for optimal accuracy. Once you have a “sandbox” roster in place however, it’s not a lengthy process. There’s a genuine novelty in being able to change up a game that’s already proven to be extremely enjoyable to revisit all these years later.

Whether it’s against the CPU or Dee4Three over Parsec, Fantasy Teams is a mode that I’ve come to enjoy and appreciate far more than I did all those years ago. That does bring us to a matter I broached in my original retrospective, though: viability. I have to imagine that the mode wasn’t particularly popular compared to the franchise and online team play experiences. I imagine there wasn’t much incentive for NBA Live to bring it back, or NBA 2K to implement something similar. It’s undoubtedly a niche mode, the kind of feature that’s added or retained simply out of kindness to a small audience within the demographic. One might compare it to Blacktop in that regard.

To that point, I believe it would find an audience today, and could arguably be put to even better use with the array of historical content available in NBA 2K. Realistically though, I don’t see it happening. Echoing a point from my previous article, the custom team concept has arguably evolved into card collecting modes such as MyTEAM. From 2K’s perspective – and EA’s as well, should NBA Live ever return – those modes have become popular with gamers, as well as huge money-makers for publishers. It may sound cynical, but there’s little incentive for developers to devote their time and resources to bringing back a niche mode that doesn’t generate recurrent revenue.

If there’s a chance we could see a mode like Fantasy Teams/Quick Pick Play again of course, then I’m all for it. Although I wasn’t outright dismissive of the concept in my previous article, I’ll admit to downplaying its importance and appeal. A full Create-a-Team function would be a welcome addition to the bevy of roster customisation tools, and I do have nostalgia for NBA Live’s original custom teams. I’ve had so much fun with Fantasy Teams in NBA Live 10 though, and it was a major factor in the game becoming an extended retro kick. While modern games have similar concepts and actual retro squads, it’s a convenient way to set up quick games with fantasy lineups.

While there wasn’t much to Fantasy Teams/Quick Pick Play, there didn’t need to be. Sure, the ability to play a series of games with stat tracking would’ve been nice, but not essential for the mode to be fun and useful. A fantasy draft might make for an interesting option, but would also slow the proceedings down. Much of the appeal is in the simplicity, yet the mode also invites creativity. I’m confident that many gamers would enjoy using it to create new classic teams, All-Time East and West squads, and other such lineups, without having to edit the rosters or collect the appropriate cards first. It would complement contemporary modes, not replace or overshadow them.

I’m not expecting Fantasy Teams to return anytime soon, though I’ll certainly throw it out there as a suggestion. As it stands, it’s an overlooked feature that’s far more fun than I originally gave it credit for. It’s one of those modes that you can make great use of if you’re a retro gamer, because of the scenarios it facilitates. Once again, it also stands as an example of how NBA Live did try to be innovative; even during a period where it was struggling to recover from a couple of rough releases, and losing ground to NBA 2K. Perhaps most importantly, it was a mode about having some fun. In an era plagued by grinding and microtransactions, such an idea is novel and refreshing.