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Wayback Wednesday: The Golden Presentation of NBA Live 96 PC

Wayback Wednesday: The Golden Presentation of NBA Live 96 PC

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 presentation in NBA Live 96 PC.

While the Super Nintendo version of NBA Live 95 was the first game in the NBA Live series that I ever played – and one of my first basketball video games, period – NBA Live 96 PC was the first hoops title that I actually owned. I remember the day I got it. It had been featured in an ad that showcased EA Sports’ 1996 season lineup, presented as the “EA Sports Countdown”. My basketball fandom was now in full swing, and I wanted to be able to hit the virtual hardwood without relying on a weekly video store rental, where my Season save files were constantly at risk of deletion.

It may have taken a boot disk to run it properly on a rapidly aging 486, and at one point I needed to use a scratch repair kit on the CD to get it working again (it’s never failed me since). However, from playing to modding, I’ve spent countless hours with NBA Live 96 PC, solidifying it as one of my all-time favourite games. Obviously I’m partial to it because of the sentimentality of it being one of the first basketball games that I owned, but I still appreciate the game itself: the on-court experience, the season it’s set in, and of course, that golden presentation. Let’s take a look back…way back…

If the content of old basketball video games – the players and the rosters – make them interactive almanacs, then their presentation makes them time capsules for the style of the era. Obviously, the title of a game like NBA Live 97 gives away the fact that it was released in the mid 90s before you even play it. However, once you fire it up and see those distinctive menus in all their glory, there’s no mistaking the decade it’s from! Basketball games from the 2000s and 2010s have their own style too, influenced by what was in vogue. For a game released in the 90s, the presentation in NBA Live 96 PC was somewhat subdued, yet still fancier than the aesthetics of NBA Live 95 PC.

NBA Live 96 Main Menu

Following a tremendous introduction video, the main menu of NBA Live 96 PC greets you by dispensing a ticket for Section C, Court Side. You’ll immediately notice all of the gold: the “Game Setup” title at the top, the menu buttons at the bottom, and even the mouse pointer. In submenus such as the Players and Teams screens, the titles are adorned by a golden NBA Live 96 logo, which includes a banner displaying the Larry O’Brien trophy. Dialogue boxes, borders, and entire panels are golden. The golden typeface is classy, and there’s generally a professional vibe to the presentation, without it feeling stuffy or sterile. The various menus are neat and well-organised.

Different screens also stand out, thanks to their unique backgrounds. NBA Live 95 PC did this as well, but NBA Live 96 PC improved upon the concept. Its individual team backgrounds are beautiful, combining scenery related to the team moniker with an action shot of a prominent player. Photographs of the city and skybox shots inside the arena in the backgrounds of the pre-game screens made you feel as though you were on location, or watching on TV. Even though backgrounds were reused – View Player and Create Player have the same one, for example – there were enough of them for each screen to feel different, combined with the way that they laid out their content.

Having spent so much time in Season mode, the main hub screen is very nostalgic for me. It’s a simple layout: a 3D version of the team’s logo on the left, ten golden buttons down the right hand side, the familiar tick and cross for advancing to the next screen or backing out of the current one, and an “Other Team” button to view the hub of your next opponent. You don’t have to dig through multiple screens to find the function or information that you’re after. Its simplicity is a reflection of its depth – modern career and franchise modes require more submenus – but it’s straightforward to navigate, and aesthetically pleasing. That basically sums up the presentation of NBA Live 96 PC!

Chicago Bulls in Season Mode

Another adjective that I’d use, and indeed have already mentioned, is “classy”. The aesthetics of NBA Live 95 PC were great, and featured some of the same personality in the form of individual team art and backgrounds. It wasn’t quite as detailed though, and resembled many other sim sports titles of the era. NBA Live 97 PC’s presentation opted for trendy, ramping up the collages in the background, eschewing capital letters whenever possible, and using “cool” fonts with chalk outlines; again, a very 90s look. With its golden touches and spotlight motif, there’s something very stylish and even “grown-up” about the presentation in NBA Live 96 PC. It’s a different kind of cool.

The soundtrack undoubtedly plays a role here, too. Throughout the 90s, NBA Live had some fantastic music on every platform, as even the instrumentals in the 16-bit releases will have you nodding your head and in the mood to virtually ball. NBA Live 96 PC’s soundtrack is special, though. I’ve often referred to it as “jazzy”, which isn’t an entirely accurate description. In my defense though, there is some prominent saxophone in the soundtrack! If anything, it’s a combination of jazz, R&B, and rock. However you’d classify it, Traz Damji did an incredible job as always, and it goes superbly with the menu aesthetics. Visually and aurally, it’s just the right vibe.

It’s fair to say that the presentation in NBA Live 96 PC became the standard by which I measure the aesthetics and layout of other basketball video games. Once again, this is perhaps inevitable given that it was one of the first hoops titles I owned and played. At the same time, while I do have similar nostalgia for the menus in NBA Live 95 SNES, I don’t have the same preference for them. The frontend in NBA Live 96 PC undoubtedly influenced how I expected roster management screens to be laid out, where to find certain features, and how to set up a game. From a stylistic point of view, it influenced a preference for classy and professional, but still with character.

Orlando Magic vs. Houston Rockets in NBA Live 96 PC

Additionally, although it bears similarities to the layout of the menus in the console versions of NBA Live 96, the PC frontend was designed with a mouse in mind. This was common in the PC versions of NBA Live up to and including NBA Live 2001, with navigation that made effective use of being able to point and click. One example is the use of scroll bars when selecting teams, or assigning ratings and other bio data in Create-a-Player. There was no need to go through each team or value one-by-one. By clicking and dragging, or clicking on different parts of the slider, you could scroll much quicker. We lost this convenience in later games that were ported from console.

I’ve also always been a fan of the Teams menu in NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96, where you can adjust each team’s lineup. With a maximum of three clicks – one to get into the Teams menu, one to change Conference if necessary, and then one on the team logo – you’re where you want to be. It’s also more visually interesting seeing the array of team logos, as well as the map of the United States displaying their location. Compare this to navigating to a lineup screen, and then cycling through all the teams until you reach the one you want. NBA Live 97 dropped the Teams menu, though the presence of a scroll bar at least sped up navigation on the new team lineups screen.

Although they date back to NBA Live 95’s forerunners, NBA Live 96 PC also firmly established my preferences for layout and design when selecting teams. The team rankings are something I’ve always enjoyed, and I’ve long felt that NBA Live lost some of its charm when it switched to Overall Ratings for all of the teams instead. Displaying a team’s strengths and weaknesses with star ratings from one to five was also a nice touch during the pre-game screens. I also came to expect teams to be listed alphabetically by location rather than name. It took me a while to adjust to the latter approach in NBA 2K, though ironically, I retroactively expect it now I’m used to it!

New Jersey Nets Roster

Something else that I really appreciate in the menus of those older NBA Live PC games – especially given the lower resolution they had to work with – was the way they managed to fit a team’s entire roster on the screen. Whether it was the Trade Players or team lineup screen, the entire roster was visible and ready to select, without ever looking cramped. This ability to view a team in its entirety without scrolling was extremely useful when customising the rosters. It wasn’t always possible given the layout in later games, even those with a much higher resolution. Even to this day, I’d say NBA 2K has some cumbersome roster menus compared to NBA Live 96 PC.

I didn’t actually play the SNES and PlayStation versions of NBA Live 96 until several years after getting my hands on the PC release, so I don’t have the same nostalgia for them. With that being said, they’re certainly not bad! The PS1 release has the same great music as PC, and a similar layout. It trades the gold for blue however, making its menus more reminiscent of NBA Live 95 PC. It doesn’t have the same detailed team backgrounds, but there’s still individuality with the changing colours and logos. As you’d expect, the 16-bit version has much simpler presentation, with backgrounds featuring a generic cityscape that changes colours according to the selected team.

As I’ve said before, the nostalgia for our favourite basketball video games – or games of any genre for that matter – begins long before we dive back into any gameplay. Watching an introduction that never gets old, hearing familiar music, and seeing the menus that have greeted us on countless occasions, takes us right back to a time when we couldn’t get enough of a game. Whenever I see that ticket being dispensed and the glint of the gold headings and buttons, it feels so welcoming. That’s the fun of retro basketball gaming. Whether you spend ten minutes with an old favourite or it enters your rotation again for an extended period of time, that feeling is worth going back.

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