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 the evolution of roster mods in our community.
As technological improvements have led to the development of bigger and better basketball video games, our expectations have changed. What were once cutting-edge graphics are no longer impressive. What was once a deep and engaging mode now seems shallow compared to what’s available in a newer game…usually! This isn’t to say that old games are bad and not worth playing. I wouldn’t be diving into basketball gaming history, or advocating for retro gaming, if I didn’t see value in older titles! Still, we always want to see the genre make advancements, so the bar does get raised.
The same goes for modding over the years. While we made some fantastic roster mods for the early NBA Live games on PC, there were limitations to what we could change and include. As it became easier to modify textures and models in addition to player and team data, there was an expectation that roster mods would become more comprehensive. This led to a golden age of NBA Live modding that has since been continued with the NBA 2K series, but in some ways, it’s also been detrimental to the hobby. Let’s take a look back…way back…
I still remember the excitement I felt when I discovered the NLSC – then the NBA Live Series Center – in August 1997. My family had just gotten online for the first time, and I was eagerly visiting all the websites that I’d seen promoted on TV and in magazines; yes, the late 90s were a different time indeed! To that point, when it came time to use a search engine to look up my hobbies and interests, I used Altavista, as Google didn’t exist yet. In any case, searching for NBA Live 96 content led me to the NLSC, with all of its roster updates and editors. The concept of updating rosters in a basketball game was nothing new, but our founders’ editors took it to a new level.
The fact that my created Michael Jordan could now have his proper date of birth and draft information, and not be a rookie, was mind-blowing! No longer did I have to clog up the Free Agents Pool with retired players, or endure the inaccuracy of leaving them on the inactive roster; I could overwrite them with new players! Downloading the roster updates that other people had created showed me the way, and tipped off over a decade of creating my own rosters for the community. Although they weren’t my best efforts as I was still new to the hobby, I still have fond memories of tinkering with the rosters of NBA Live 96 PC. Of course, I soon discovered the limitations.
Although the EA Graphics Editor will open up the art files from NBA Live 95, 96, and 97, only a couple of versions have been able to properly handle their fiddly colour palettes. Even if the original file displays properly, a newly-imported texture often has garbled colours. This extends to the portrait files, and while Dee has since developed a method for custom portraits that works, there are still occasional glitches on the first attempt. As such, even today, it’s not feasible to completely overhaul NBA Live 96 PC’s aesthetics. Depending on the project in question, you’ll be left with incorrect portraits and outdated logos, courts, jerseys, and other team art that we can’t change.
Of course, in the early days of NBA Live modding, we understood that there were limits to what could be achieved. There would be questions about it – as you can see from one the FAQs sections of Lutz’s roster updates – but the mere fact that we were able to create current rosters, retro rosters, Legends rosters, and even some NCAA and foreign league projects, still held great novelty. We could overlook the graphical inaccuracies because of the new gameplay experience on offer. Additionally, before the introduction of real face textures, custom players blended in with the original ones as they all used the same selection of heads. New players were thus also easier to add.
Beginning with NBA Live 98, we began to see face, jersey, and court mods. Between the adoption of DBF files for roster data and the flexibility of the textures, NBA Live 98 PC was the first game in the series that we could comprehensively mod. At the same time, these detailed textures required more skill to modify, at least as far as getting the results we wanted. On top of that, internet speeds made uploading and downloading large files cumbersome, and many free webhosts didn’t provide us with much storage space. To that end, current roster updates relied on skilful sculpting of player faces in Create-a-Player, and didn’t include jerseys, courts, and other updates.
Once again, this was just the way things were. If you wanted to enhance a roster with proper faces or new courts and jerseys, you’d just have to download them separately. Furthermore, many modders tended to work solo. Even though we posted our work on the NLSC, we would all host our own mods across a network of NBA Live fansites. It wouldn’t be until we started to collaborate on projects that we saw roster mods expand in scope. If not for Bobby H’s contributions, I never would’ve been able to make my complete update for NBA Live 96! It would’ve just been a basic 2001 season update, rather than a more ambitious project that tried something new with an aging release.
The NBA Live Street 2003 mod by the team at nbalive.org was the first really big project that heralded the next stage in the evolution of roster mods. It added a plethora of teams and players complete with faces, logos, and jerseys. The NBA arenas were replaced by Rucker Park, and the executable was modified so that the sound effects from the original street court were used in regular gameplay. Beyond all of the great content of NBA Live Street 2003 however, it also pioneered the concept of being a complete and comprehensive mod. Big downloads still weren’t ideal at that point, but it was clear that roster mods needed to be released with all of the necessary extras.
Over the next few years, it became common for current roster projects to include all of the necessary art updates. Indeed, once people began contributing faces for the NLSC rosters, I stopped bothering to sculpt likenesses in Create-a-Player, as they were never going to be used or seen! When a game continued to be updated beyond the season it was originally set in, it was imperative to account for any new logos, jerseys, and court designs, as well as faces for returning and debuting players. If a player grew out their beard or changed their hairstyle, those updates were expected. Roster projects were finally becoming what we’d always dreamed of them being.
Naturally, this also applied to retro rosters and other total conversions. In NBA Live 95 PC, we understood that Michael Jordan still had Larry Krystkowiak’s portrait because it couldn’t be replaced without causing issues in Season mode. The Seattle SuperSonics retaining their 1995-96 re-brand in a 1993 roster for NBA Live 96 PC was an inaccuracy that we just had to accept. Even my 1996 rosters for NBA Live 2001 and 2004 could get away with minimal art updates, especially in their V1.0 release. Beginning with NBA Live 2005, there was a much bigger commitment to ensuring that rosters included all of the art updates that they required to be complete.
This led to fantastic roster mods: current rosters, retro seasons, classic teams, street mods, NCAA conversions, and more. The Supreme Update Mod overhauled NBA Live 07, and thanks to the contributions of the community, I was able to keep NBA Live 2005 through 08 updated for a few years after NBA 2K came to PC. The desire to create comprehensive roster mods obviously carried over into NBA 2K as well, which has led to everything from the Ultimate Base Roster and U R Basketball for NBA 2K12, 2K13, and 2K14, to Thunder Shaq’s 2K20 rosters, to Stildo33’s Classic Seasons for 2K19, to Dee’s Ultimate Classic Teams Roster for 2K17. The list goes on.
Much as adding deeper franchise modes, career modes, and connected online team play was the right direction for basketball video games, this evolution of roster mods was something that we wanted to see. However, as with the evolution of basketball games themselves, the higher expectations for roster mods came with a downside. It made minimalist projects tougher to appreciate, devaluing some fun ideas. It invited harsh criticism of minor inaccuracies, which were often the result of having to use whatever art updates were available. It led to demands for perfection, with some truly excellent work being overlooked to grumble about benchwarmers with generic faces.
Obviously, constructive criticism should be welcome, and attention to detail makes for better mods, roster or otherwise. As the saying goes however, perfect is the enemy of good, and the desire to strive for absolute perfection has delayed projects, or even prevented them from being released entirely. While it may be impressive for a retro roster to have proper faces for every single player, I maintain that it isn’t absolutely necessary for a V1.0. To be blunt, if a 1996 roster is missing a handful of faces for players on the deep bench such as Geert Hammink, lookalike placeholders are more than satisfactory for an initial release. Subsequent updates can always add new assets.
Speaking from experience, the pressure to release a comprehensive post-Draft roster also contributed to my burnout on maintaining the NLSC updates for NBA Live. It was once customary to release a few offseason updates, adding the newly-drafted players in batches. Unfortunately, this led to comments about “forgetting” to add this rookie or that rookie, despite the release notes explaining that another group would be coming in the next update. Offseason updates are difficult at the best of times with rookies being signed and rosters in flux – especially with camp invitees and buyouts after trades – so the expectation and pursuit of perfection did make them a chore.
It’s also made us less reluctant to mod until we have tools that can make all of the comprehensive updates that we’re accustomed to. On one hand this is understandable, but on the other hand, it’s refusing to make the best of the situation in the meantime. In some ways, we’ve been spoiled by the evolution of roster mods, because anything basic but still fun is considered a step backwards and not worth the time and effort. I’ll admit that I’m more open to minimalist projects and making do with inaccuracies here and there because I remember a much simpler time for roster mods, but for the long-term health of the modding community, it’s an approach that’s worth keeping in mind.
With that being said, it has been exciting to witness the evolution of roster mods from the early days of the community. Once again, we’ve seen things that we basically had to imagine with the limited modding possibilities of the first few NBA Live titles. As technology has led to better games, as well as faster internet speeds and better hosting options, the community has created some incredible projects for some of our favourite NBA Live and NBA 2K games. We’ve gone from making the best of the assets that a game provides us with to creating new content that blends in seamlessly with original textures and models. The best projects have been amazingly professional-looking!
Sadly, this has also led to elitism, reluctance to cooperate and collaborate, and worst of all, charging for mods. This is another way that modding has mirrored the games themselves: for all the technical and aesthetic improvements, a greedy push to make money has sullied the fun. They’re issues that we’ll battle as best we can. As for those primitive original roster mods, I still look back on them fondly because they paved the way for the evolution that was to come. It’s funny to think that we once made do with Create-a-Player faces and outdated team art, but the simple novelty of adding brand new content was immensely appealing before comprehensive mods became feasible.
