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 some of the updates that have become long-lost, and the quest to track them down.
With the internet’s ability to connect the world and make information and content readily accessible, there’s a particular interest in using it for preservation. It’s why there’s debate over dumping ROMs of games, particularly those that were never released and could otherwise easily become lost media. We’ve felt the sting of lost content in our modding community. So many great mods from the early days are long-lost now, and even more recent releases have disappeared because they were uploaded to file hosts that won’t guarantee availability in perpetuity.
And then, there are the long-lost official updates for various games. We actually have some old official patches in our Downloads section, as well as official roster updates, but it’s not a complete archive. Files that can be downloaded disappear from personal archives as well as the web, and in-game content updates likewise vanish and become long-lost when servers are shut down. This leaves us on a quest to find those long-lost updates, but all too often, it’s unfortunately been a fruitless search. Let’s take a look back…way back…
If you’d like to dust off NBA Live 98 or NBA Live 99 PC for some retro gaming fun, it’s strongly advised that you install the official patches for those games. That’s easy to do, as we’ve always made those files available here at the NLSC. They’ve made it through multiple hosting changes because I’ve always ensured that I’ve kept a backup of them. They’re relatively small files – miniscule compared to the multi-gigabyte patches we get nowadays – and easy to install on top of being portable. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case with the official patch for NBA Live 2003 PC. The distribution method for that update has unfortunately resulted in it becoming long-lost media.
To install the patch for NBA Live 2003, we had to visit the updates page on the official website. Rather than downloading a file and installing it as with previous patches, we clicked a button that downloaded and applied the patch automatically. It was a simple procedure, but it obviously requires the site and file to remain online indefinitely. At a certain point some years later, that ceased to be the case. Even if you access that page through archive.org, not enough content has been archived for it to work. As such, there’s no way to access and install that patch today, and it’s unlikely that anyone has it in their archives. It’s unfortunate, as that may have been possible.
From memory, the various official patches for NBA Live 2003 were available via EA Sports’ public FTP server, which is also no longer online. If one of us had taken the time to download those files and keep them safe, we could feasibly still provide them ourselves, along with instructions for manual application. Unfortunately, we didn’t think about the site or FTP server being taken down, or the likelihood of retro gaming. On the bright side, the patch only addresses four issues, most of which only occur in Windows 98 and Windows ME, or are otherwise easily avoidable. It would’ve been nice if we’d preserved the update, but it’s actually not that critical for NBA Live 2003.
Fortunately, the patches for NBA Live 2004, NBA Live 2005, and NBA Live 07 were easier to preserve. The same goes for the official updates for the DVD-ROM versions of NBA 2K10, NBA 2K11, and NBA 2K12, while Steam should still install the most up to date version of the digital releases. The official roster updates for those games were also easily saved and distributed. Even if you’re reinstalling those games fresh today with their servers offline, you can download those long-lost roster updates from our database and place them in the appropriate user folder. Unfortunately, we’re not able to provide this convenience for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 releases.
Well, we can in so much as it’s technically possible, but it’s impossible in practice as long as those updates remain long-lost! While gamers have shared the official roster updates for those older NBA 2K titles on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the links you’ll find are no longer working. As is the case with many PC mods over the years, they were shared via free file hosting services that remove uploads after a fixed time, or a period of inactivity. To state the obvious, if the original uploader doesn’t re-upload it, and no one else has the file readily available to share, that update will be lost to time. Sometimes we have luck digging in the archives, but usually they’re gone for good.
This is particularly unfortunate in the case of NBA 2K12, which of course launched with final 2011 season rosters (and no Class of 2011 rookies) due to the lockout. With NBA 2K9 through NBA 2K11, it’s feasible to create a relatively complete unofficial roster update for the console versions using the default assets. Without the updates that came through and are easily preserved on PC, such a roster for NBA 2K12 will be noticeably lacking. As someone who filled out their collection by picking up the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of NBA 2K12 many years later, I have an interest in finding those long-lost updates. To date, I’ve not had any luck doing so.
The transition to the eighth generation has not alleviated this problem in the console releases. Limited storage space has forced me to uninstall the PlayStation 4 versions of NBA 2K at one point or another, and although I haven’t deleted the data files, unforeseen corruptions and unsuccessful calls to a server that’s now offline have resulted in the loss of in-game content updates, including new rosters. It also means that I’ll never be able to get the Adam Silver basketball in NBA 2K14 PS4 again, as it came through with one of the in-game updates rather than the official patches that are downloaded through the dashboard. Thankfully, the final patch still comes through.
I’ve ensured that I keep backups of the content updates for the PC ports of the eighth generation NBA 2K titles, but even there we have issues with long-lost files. The roster editing Cheat Engine tables for NBA 2K17 were not constantly updated, and thus don’t work with the final version of the game. Swapping in an old executable file effectively downgrades the game, but you also require a roster file that was created at the same time, otherwise the addresses won’t match and the Cheat Engine tables will still be useless. Because of the way updates work, if you didn’t happen to have such a save on hand, you’re basically out of luck unless someone has a clean file to share.
Conversely, it is possible to share the most recent update for a game such as NBA 2K17 PC by uploading the sync.bin file. It’s a much larger file than the online data and roster updates for previous PC releases however, but in the wake of the server shutdown, roster modders are sharing that update more frequently to ensure that mod users have everything they need. There was hope that a similar solution could be utilised on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with a user that still has all the necessary updates sharing the appropriate files. Not surprisingly though, such files are not accessible and transferrable on those platforms, rendering the updates long-lost.
Sometimes, we can be lucky. In June 2022, NBA Jam: On Fire Edition’s servers were unexpectedly reactivated. This meant that anyone with access to the Online Arena could fire up the game and download a roster update that had been unavailable for a number of years. It’s an extremely rare event – and possibly accidental in the case of OFE – but occasional server reactivations would be great for retro gaming. Turning the servers back on for a brief period every year would allow gamers to grab long-lost updates, as well as reactivate certain pre-order bonuses such as the Dream Team in NBA 2K17. I’m not optimistic that it’ll happen, but we do have a precedent now.
For anyone who isn’t interested in retro gaming, the search for long-lost updates may seem as odd as the pastime of playing old games in the first place. Of course, if you’re disinterested in retro gaming, you’re probably not inclined to be reading a feature titled Wayback Wednesday in the first place! Obviously there will be limitations when you play an older game, particularly one from recent years with live service content. Nevertheless, there is a desire to play old games in their optimal form, which usually means fully patched and updated. At the very least, we generally want the option to make use of those updates, particularly the new rosters if nothing else.
It goes back to what I mentioned in my introduction: preservation. As long as those files are available, we can choose whether or not we make use of them. If we don’t have them at all, then that choice is taken out of our hands. Once again, consider unreleased games that have been preserved and made available to the public – with questionable legality, admittedly – because their ROMs were dumped. There was the discovery and freeware release of Street Rod Special Edition, not long after the games were freely re-released. The Lost Media Wiki is dedicated to detailing and tracking down a variety of long-lost and difficult to find audio, video, and other media.
That’s something we can certainly attempt to do in our community when it comes to long-lost updates. If you still have the official rosters for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of NBA 2K9 through NBA 2K14, by all means copy them to a USB and share them in our Forum! It may take some steps to get them working properly for everyone – save files for 360 in particular need to be rehashed and assigned to your Xbox Live account – but that’s something we can worry about when we have the files on hand. After many fruitless Google searches, our best bet is for everyone to dig through their archives and old console saves, and see what they’ve got to share.
Needless to say, this also goes for community-made content, including mods and tutorials. Recovering and preserving any useful content for basketball video games is something I’d like to do here at the NLSC. The difference is that mods and tutorials can be remade (sometimes even better than before) by people with the appropriate knowhow. When it comes to long-lost official updates, the only solution is to track them down, or make peace with the fact that they’re lost forever. The latter is perhaps the likeliest outcome in most cases, and we need to be prepared for it. Still, there’s no harm in putting out a call to comb through old backups. And so, the quest continues!
