NLSC Your source for basketball video games.
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 my 1998 season roster mod for NBA Live 96 PC.
It’s overwhelming to think that the NLSC has been around for more than a quarter of a century! Our founders tipped things off in 1996, I took over in 2001, and we’re still around all these years later. Through all the ups and downs, moving to different hosts, and putting up with some nonsense along the way, we’ve managed to outlast a ton of websites. We’ve also outlasted more than a couple of basketball video game series (and indeed, video game studios and publishers). Unfortunately we’ve lost some mods and resources along the way, but we’ve still got some fun stuff from the early days.
To that end, our archives have preserved some of my earliest roster mods for NBA Live 96 PC. Upon discovering the NLSC in 1997 and all of the work that people in the community were doing, I was inspired to try my hand at some modding as well. I released that work through my own site – the NBA Live Domain – and felt immense pride when our founders added it to the database of mods on the NLSC. How do I feel about those mods today? It’s been a while since I’ve played with or taken a long look at them, so I thought I’d start by revisiting my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96, which I actually co-credited to my cousin Clinton. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Whatever content you create, revisiting your earliest work can be embarrassing. We usually improve over time, and so those early projects rarely reflect our best efforts. Even more competent work can make us cringe when we notice minor details that we overlooked upon putting down the brush. I’ve experienced moments like that when I’ve connected with Dee to play NBA Live 06, and we’ve used my final current roster updates. To that end, when I dusted off my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96, I definitely expected to see a few mistakes. However – and not to be too harsh on my younger self here – what I found was a roster update I probably wouldn’t deem fit for release now!
There are typos such as Keith Van Horn being Keith “Van-Horn”. I can’t even chalk that up to Create-a-Player in NBA Live 96 not allowing spaces in names and then forgetting to remove the hyphen in the editor, because that isn’t the case. There are several inaccuracies as far as teams having an incorrect starter, or weird bench order. I’ve left Zan Tabak as the starting shooting guard for the Boston Celtics, after making the trade that saw Kenny Anderson and Chauncey Billups swap places. Some of the players’ positions are incorrect. Worst of all, there are players on teams that they definitely didn’t play for as of February 1998, when those rosters were released.
Those errant players come in two types. Some are simply misplaced, while others are partially overwritten. The first is an example of incomplete work, placing players wherever they’ll fit because the Free Agents Pool is full. The second appears to be an oversight or error in the creation of the patch file for the executable, as they’re clearly meant to be overwritten with a new player, but still have their original name. To that point, more players should’ve been overwritten, though they might’ve ended up not having their new names anyway. It would’ve saved me from using up all of the Created Player slots, which was poor planning and a bad design choice on my part.
I’m also painfully aware of the bias that went into that 1998 roster. Michael Jordan’s ratings aren’t all maxed-out or anything, but they’re more appropriate for his prime, instead of his “still the GOAT, but not at his athletic or statistical peak” years. The Bulls are ranked first in every category, and I’ve clearly tried too hard to tweak ratings to get teams to a specific overall ranking. The readme files and other documentation are also written rather immaturely; mind you, I was thirteen at the time! Generally speaking, my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC is nowhere near as good as I recalled it being. Some good work went into it, but there are also some noticeably sloppy errors.
Of course, I’m more inclined to be a harsh critic because it’s my own work. If it were a mod being made by some other thirteen or fourteen year old that I was revisiting, I’d probably call it a respectable first effort. It’s also worth noting that this was 1998, and the resources we have today weren’t yet available. There were team roster listings on NBA.com of course, but there was no Basketball Reference to look up information and statistics that those pages lacked. There was no YouTube to research players; I just had to make do with the games and highlights that were shown on TV, as well as basketball magazines, trading cards, and whatever resources I could readily access.
With that in mind, I did succeed in making some detailed updates in my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC. Thanks to the 1997 season stats being printed in One on One magazine, and Doug’s NBA Stats – a site that’s still online and being updated! – I painstakingly updated the stats for all players. There are a couple of typos, and I had to fudge some Games Started numbers because they weren’t available at the time, but it made the rosters feel more up to date. I didn’t completely update the schedule, but I did switch a couple of games so that the Bulls’ season opener was against the Boston Celtics. Ratings and bio data have been updated, along with the All-Star teams.
Overall, the roster plays well on the virtual hardwood, and is a viable 1998 update despite its mistakes. It notably also included opening night rosters, and an earlier season update. Supplementary documentation provided a guide to manually update a Season game in progress with trades and lineup changes, in order to play along with the 1998 campaign. There was definitely effort and passion there, and I remember the enthusiasm with which I tackled the project. It doesn’t include any art updates, but those wouldn’t be available to me until years later, when I made the complete update for the 2001 season. All in all, it was a fun introduction to updating a game’s rosters.
Because I was new to modding, obviously still quite young, and it was before all of the resources we have today were available, I can see how I made those mistakes. The lack of readily-available stats and info would’ve always been a hurdle, but I’m certain that youthful impatience led to me cutting corners – or at least making oversights – in my excitement to release the roster. Not that I’ve ever become immune to typos and oversights, but I probably didn’t think to properly test the patch file to ensure that all of the original players I’d overwritten had their new names. Once Keith “Van-Horn” had been added, it seems I moved on to the next player without a second thought.
I’m able to recognise these shortcomings now that I’m older, and far more experienced in creating roster mods. I’ve learned from those mistakes…or at least, I’d like to think that I have! It’s been more than twenty years since I took a good look at my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC, so obviously I’ve forgotten about some of the specific mistakes that I made with it. I’ve also grown accustomed to having a wealth of information that I can consult within seconds. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to pore over magazines and almanacs for those details, or wait for a weekly recap show to get a breakdown of trades and other news. It’s become much easier to be thorough.
Once again, I have to give myself some credit for trying to be detailed with the minor schedule update, inputting all the 1997 season stats, and providing guides to making manual updates in Season mode. I was inspired by what Tim, Lutz, and other roster makers had done, and I wanted to create a great and comprehensive update, too. I’m surprised that I wasn’t called out for some of these errors by people who downloaded the update, but I suppose we all had similar limitations when it came to access and resources! As for some of the bias in my ratings and rankings, that’s something that I just had to grow out of. Fortunately, it didn’t spoil the gameplay or simulated results.
I’d also suggest that in the early days of modding, there was a certain amount of novelty and goodwill when it came to roster updates. Simply saving someone the time and trouble of adding missing players such as Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, creating two new rookie classes, and making all of the necessary trades, was greatly appreciated. I hit on most of the major points as far as bringing NBA Live 96 PC up to date for the 1998 season, and that’s apparent when you load up the roster. It’s a mod that could conceivably be fixed with a bit of effort, though with certain design choices such as using up all of the created player slots, it might be preferable to start over.
Even though there are some embarrassing errors and sloppy oversights in my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC, I have no hesitation in sharing this retrospective. It’s important to acknowledge growth and improvement, and while it may cause us to cringe at times, see how far we’ve come. I’m not hung up on the idea of appearing as though I’m infallible in my knowledge, or that I never had to improve my modding abilities. I have no need to present myself as the smartest person in the room, or the best modder in the community; I don’t believe that I’m either of those things! I’d much rather reflect honestly on my early work, and graciously acknowledge shortcomings.
Since then, resources have improved, and in my humble opinion, so have my roster projects. We all have to start somewhere though, and keeping NBA Live 96 up to date for the 1998 season allowed me to play along with a memorable campaign, since the family PC couldn’t run NBA Live 98. It’s something I wanted to share with my fellow basketball gamers, as other modders were doing. That interest led to many more fun modding projects, creating other content, and even a few trips overseas to attend community events! In that regard, while that 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC may not stand as my best work, it was nevertheless one of the best things I’ve ever done.
