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V3 and Homecourt were pure DOO-DOO compared to Vol. 2
NBA Street Vol. 2 Apprecation
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how is this surprising?Originally Posted by Air Kalo
I had no idea this game was so popular among NT'ers
I remember when Vol 2 first came out, there were big threads on NT about it
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Many memories from HS with this one
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3 MJ's on my team ^_^
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The Legend of 'NBA Street Vol. 2', the Greatest Basketball Video Game of All Time | GQ
Danny SchwartzMay 2, 2018
Here’s the story of the unlikely people who made Vol. 2—and why nothing has come close since.
It’s been a decade and a half since Electronic Arts released NBA Street Vol. 2, the last truly great basketball video game. Even 15 years later, the game’s sense of style and spirit (and not to mention its soundtrack) have never been matched. Sure, new technology has granted us games like NBA 2K and its hyper-realistic graphics and gameplay—but realism was never the point of Street Vol. 2. It framed basketball not simply as a sport played in identical, sanitized arenas across the country, but as a vital civic institution with its own history, music, and sense of place. It paid homage to basketball as spectacle, as art, as cultural lynchpin.
The gameplay was fluid, dynamic, fast-paced—each game a 3-on-3 sprint to 21 points by 1s and 2s at streetball courts located around the United States. Vol. 2 did not seek to faithfully capture regulation basketball, but rather the everyday soul of the sport. There was no fouling, no out of bounds. (There was goaltending.) When you went to dunk, your player was temporarily subject to lunar gravity, and he glided to the rim like a ballerina, like Jumpman.
It was the sounds of the game that truly animated each moment, not only the grunts of the players and jangle of the ball slicing through steel net but the noises that came from beyond the court. A handful of onlookers aahed and oohed in earnest from the sideline. Choice cuts of ‘90s and early ‘00s hip hop—Dilated Peoples, MC Lyte, Erick Sermon and Redman, a custom pack of Just Blaze beats—blasted at block party levels. Real-life streetball emcee Bobbito Garcia a.k.a. DJ Cucumber Slice served as one-man commentary team/hype man, and he strained to be heard above the din, extolling every block (“Protect the nest!”), steal (“Oh, he boofed it on you, money!”), and handle (“Do you need a straw with that shake?”).
The gentle learning curve and responsive touch of the controller forgave novices. Vol. 2 did not believe in delayed gratification; it took little practice to be able to cross up your opposition halfway to Guatemala or posterize him like Blake Griffin did Kendrick Perkins. The game incentivized you to drive to the hole and acrobatically soar to the hoop, to make use of the dozens of tricks and dunks at your disposal, with the prospect of accumulating enough trick points to serve your adversary a soul-crushing Gamebreaker. When you triggered a Gamebreaker, you were no longer an actor but a spectator having an out-of-body experience, bearing witness to your own legend unfolding in real-time. Instant nostalgia—that was Vol. 2 in a nutshell. The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of NBA Street Vol. 2, GQ spoke to the unlikely people who made it—a team of Canadian “hockey players” who went into the project with little collective streetball knowledge. They did their homework, became “eager disciples of street basketball religion,” and paid tribute to the fertile, hallowed grounds of Rucker Park at 155th Street in Harlem.
Open Court
Electronic Arts
NBA Street Vol. 2 was created over the course of two years at EA’s Vancouver campus by a team led by producer Wil Mozell. A veteran of five NBA Livegames and a holdover from the first NBA Street team that had since dispersed, Mozell embraced the blank slate by building a team of individuals largely unfamiliar with the formula and legacy of sports video game production. Some had never worked on any video game before; Mozell’s search for a new art director led him to Kirk Gibbons, a “zen master” who had once won national championships with the UC-Santa Barbara surfing team and had developed several digital basketball products for Nike. The members of the Vol. 2 team set about diligently educating themselves on the history of streetball and hip hop; they pored over books, documentaries, and AND1 mixtapes and visited New York City’s most venerated streetball courts.
“We steeped ourselves in the culture as much as some white dudes on the west coast of Canada could,” said Adam Myhill, the game’s technical art lead.
TRENDING THIS VERY SECOND
“I was really into Jadakiss and Nas at the time,” said Gibbons. “I kind of joke that I’m a method art director, I was just listening to hip hop non-stop when I was making that game.”
Inspiration struck early in the form of the Nike Freestyle commercial, a two-and-a-half-minute spot that first aired during the 2001 NBA All-Star Game. In the commercial, anonymous streetballers and NBA standouts like Lamar Odom, Jason Williams, and Baron Davis take turns dancing and working the ball like a yo-yo in the spotlight of an otherwise pitch-black arena.
“We were blown away with how the creative [direction] was all about skills and moves of the players,” Mozell said. “No voice over, no special effects, no acting. Just raw basketball and streetball talent. This was the live version of our game. We wanted the moves in our game to speak for themselves, for the gamer to see them, feel them, and just be in awe of the talent on display. We wanted to talk to whomever was responsible for being able to capture the essence of such skill and talent.”
With the help of EA Canada’s Director of Marketing Glenn Chin, Mozell tracked down the mastermind behind the Nike Freestyle commercial: Jimmy Smith, a creative director at the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. Mozell extended him an invitation to work on Vol. 2.
“I remember when he called,” Smith said. “I’m like, ‘You want me to do the advertising?’ And he was like, ‘No! I want you to help us develop the actual video game!’ And I’m like, ‘Dude. I’m a pinball guy. My sons play, but I’m pinball.’ And he said, ‘No man, we want the culture. We want all of that that you infuse into Nike’s work. We want that infused into the actual video game. We want it to be authentic.’ And I said, ‘Well, I can do that. I can do that all day long.’”
Voice of the Court
Johnny Nunez
Smith had worked on Nike’s streetball-based ad campaigns for the better part of a decade. Vol. 2 gave him an opportunity to apply his streetball knowhow to video games, a medium broader than advertising, and through the process of “collabsporation” he helped select and develop the game’s music, courts, and coterie of fictional streetballers. But easily his biggest contribution was hiring the voice of the game: Bobbito Garcia.
“Bobbito is a legend,” Smith said.
Having worked on dozens of Nike commercials since the mid-’90s, Garcia` flew out to the EA campus for a marathon recording session.
“They booked me, I got up to Vancouver, stayed an entire week, and they gave me like pages and pages of script,” Garcia recalled. “Pages and pages of script. And I looked at them and I told them, I was like, ‘Yo, I have to be allowed to ad-lib here, because this is not how we talk.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, no leash, freak the **** out.’”
Garcia was a man uniquely positioned at the intersection of hip hop and streetball, a DJ and baller himself who co-hosted the famous hip hop radio show Stretch and Bobbito and had been announcing streetball games in New York since 1982.
“I would be in the booth for eight hours, five days in a row, just screaming at the top of my lungs,” he said. “It was a hit in the first 15 minutes, because the dudes were in there laughing. I was just coming up with stupid ****, like, ‘IT’S A PIZZA SLICE WITH NO CRUST!’ Like, just anything, because their whole **** was, ‘Yo, people play this hours and hours and hours, we have to come up with 40 different ways to say the word ‘dunk.’ Because otherwise it’s gonna be repetitive.’ I’m like, ‘There’s only so many ways to say ‘Oh my god, from deep!’ So I added some Spanish, I added some imagination, I added some authentic New York lingo.”
Occasionally, they would step outside to play a game of HORSE, and Bobbito the walking streetball encyclopedia helped the Vol. 2 team identify the names and significance of various moves and regaled them with stories from the streetball canon and from his own experiences.
“Bobbito introduced a lot of the culture and the slang and just the way it works,” Myhill said. “The guy has just got endless crazy stories. The stories weren’t always about streetball, they were about the players and just about the culture and what it’s like living in part of these places. And that really helped us get our head around it. Like, I remember him telling us this one story about this one player who had just bought these new kicks—they were like totally brand new, spotless. And then, he was on a subway and the subway went down, and they had to get everybody out, and the guy had to walk down the tracks, and then his kicks got a little bit dirty, and he never wore them again. Because they had to be ****ing perfect.”
“Essentially, they just wanted to bring some more authenticity to the game,” Garcia said of his role in the game. “No knock on EA, but they’re based in Vancouver. Which has a wonderful playground basketball community, but the writers of Vol. 2 were all, like, hockey players. And I’m not even making that up.”
The Influence of Dr. Funk
Smith and Garcia’s perspectives helped the guys in Vancouver flesh out the essential identity of NBA Street Vol. 2: it collapsed the timeline of basketball, allowing modern NBA stars to square up against old-school legends on the blacktop. But just as important: it challenged the NBA’s supremacy by positing the streetball court as a great equalizer indifferent to designations like “professional” and “amateur.”
In this sense, the game took many of its cues from “Dr. Funk,” a three-part 2001 Nike campaign that Smith had been involved in. One particularly immaculate 60-second Dr. Funk spot takes place in 1975 during the waning seconds of a game at Rucker Park. The crowd clamors for Dr. Funk. Vince “Dr. Funk” Carter steps onto the court and the crowd goes wild. Bobbito Garcia, standing courtside, offers breathless play-by-play as Harlem basketball legend-cum-druglord Pee Wee Kirkland lobs Dr. Funk the ball for a windmill alley-oop at the buzzer to give the Uptowners the victory. Cue Bootsy Collins.
“I think Nike Freestyle captured the core gameplay experience we wanted the gamer to have. Moves that blew you away, yet seemed so simple to execute and would entertain over and over,” Mozell said. “Dr. Funk is definitely more of the cultural vibe and visceral experience we wanted our audience to be immersed in. In one way, it was about combining the magic and awe of the athlete with an experience that was unique to only a few places on the planet, like Rucker Park.”
Dr. Funk underscores the ways in which Vol. 2 bought into New York’s reputation as an outdoor hoops mecca and brought into the fold the mythical elements of New York’s rich streetball history, of the Rucker, the wellspring from which legends are born, of oral histories and eyewitness accounts from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s that blur the line between fable and fact. The physics of Vol. 2 recall the superhuman feats of New York’s streetball kings of yore, like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, who could (supposedly) retrieve a dollar bill from the top of the backboard and leave behind a stack of coins; like Herman “Helicopter” Knowings, who could (supposedly) execute a 720-degree flush from the top of the key; like Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond, who (actually) put up 50 on Julius Erving in one half at Rucker.
Electronic Arts
This Rucker retro-gaze of Vol. 2manifested in the game’s Be a Legend mode, which started in Harlem and culminated with a trip back in time to Rucker ’78 to face off against the trio of Dr. J, Connie Hawkins, and Earl Monroe. It became the game’s unofficial mascot, Stretch Monroe, a Dr. J doppelganger who wore the number 72, a lanky leaper and dunker extraordinaire from East Harlem who was little more than a composite sketch of every uptown basketball O.G.
Making the Soundtrack
Mozell had wanted a 100% hip-hop soundtrack for NBA Street, but he ran into the budget constraints that frequently hamstrung new franchises, so the music was handled primarily by an internal composer. Everything changed with Vol. 2.
“The success of the first NBA Street gave us credibility and freedom to do something relevant and impactful with the soundtrack,” Mozell explained. “By the time Vol. 2was getting ready to come out, the NBA was finally warming up to having hip hop in a video game they were affiliated with.”
Mozell and Smith led the curation effort for a 10-track soundtrack that would ultimately be anchored by Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s 1992 single “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” the song that plays over the main menu and sets the tone for the entire game. Organized around a regal saxophone loop, “T.R.O.Y.” is itself an exercise in nostalgia, a wistful trip down memory lane that delves into intergenerational relationships, asserts a deep connection with the dead, and exists here to underscore Vol. 2’s identity as a golden era throwback. It is the rare song that genuinely never gets old.
“When you work on a project like that, you hear the songs, especially the first one or two, tens of thousands of times, because you keep turning the game on and off to check stuff and make sure things work,” said Myhill. “And I don’t ever get sick of that track. I hear it in my head and it’s like warm, fuzzy feelings. And I’ve never had that with another song in a game. I’ve only wanted to like punch a song in the face, because you’ve heard it 400 times.”
Nelly performed in Vancouver one frosty autumn evening with the Clipse and Fabolous during his Nellyville tour. After the show, Nelly and the St. Lunatics paid a trip to the EA campus and “played the crap out of NBA Street.” Nelly promised to pen an exclusive song for the soundtrack, and the Vol. 2 designers rewarded him for laying down “Not In My House” by including all five St. Lunatics as unlockable characters in the game. (Inexplicably, Nelly’s character isn’t as good as Slo Down’s.)
At one point, the Vol. 2 team invited three consultants to the Vancouver campus: Just Blaze, then the hottest producer of the planet, the rapper Jensen “Hot Karl” Karp, and a pre-Get Rich or Die Tryin’ 50 Cent. Canadian border agents turned away 50 Cent on account of his prior felonies and he promptly hopped on the next flight back to New York.
Karp recalled that by the time of his visit, the team had already developed mood boards with “New York street, kind of Rucker-based graphics.” In one meeting, he suggested “T.R.O.Y.” as the game’s theme song, an inspired idea that received the immediate blessing of Just Blaze. “Just Blaze was like, ‘Yes, that is bonkers, yes,’” Karp remembered.
Just Blaze took them down to the studio to lay down original beats for the game. “We spent a million bucks on our studio, it was a money-is-no-expense studio,” Myhill said. “And he just came in and he killed it. I’ve never seen anything like it. He basically threw down the songs in no time at all, like he was inspired from somewhere. It was a crazy, life-changing experience, watching what that guy did.”
“It was always a story from the night before that would have actually inspired a name for one of the tracks,” Mozell said. “I’ll never forget, ‘Plan B,’ one of the tracks in the soundtrack, came about from one of the events of the night before.”
A Product of Its Time
The NBA Street franchise saw two more installments, V3 and Homecourt. While popular, they didn’t quite retain the intangible qualities and subtle details that made Vol. 2 so special: the Curtis Mayfield Superfly font, the old-school uniforms, the use of old Blue Note album covers as the basis for the game’s entire color scheme. V3moved away from the retro premise of Vol. 2 and moved closer to the aesthetic of AND1 and modern streetball.
“I think the art style helped liberate you from having a completely believable performance,” Myhill said of Vol. 2. “But if you look at NBA Street 3, we went a little bit more photoreal. We didn’t do that street-shading effect on the skin, and it looked a little bit less painterly or iconic and graphic. So then, if a player moves really snappily, it’s kind of ****ty, because we’re actually putting skin textures and trying to make this look photorealistic. So then you got to slow everything down so it looks better, but then it kind of plays ****tier.”
Like albums and films, video games are the product not only of their collaborators, but of a specific time and organic chemistry that can’t be easily replicated. The designers of Vol. 2 have since enjoyed successful careers at various companies in the video game industry, but they remain friends and reminisce often over Vol. 2, a painstaking project that they characterize today as a labor of love.
“We truly loved the product,” said Gibbons. “We loved it, and we lived it. We were younger, we didn’t have families.”
I have in my possession both Vol. 2 and NBA 2K18, the basketball video game of record. Vol. 2 is the better game. Playing to 21 points in Vol. 2 versus playing timed quarters introduces a different vibe from 2K18, suffusing the basketball gaming experience with a timeless, elegiac, and joyous playground innocence. Playing a game of 2K18 is intense, immersive, and entertaining, but sparks no such joy; it is much more likely to spark a heart attack. And while 2K18 succeeds in capturing the precise movements and dynamics of an NBA game and the idiosyncrasies of each player’s style, it is ultimately an overproduced quagmire that attempts to hold the gamer captive through pregame national anthem and studio halftime analysis. The 2K18 main menu flashes a quote from Kyrie Irving that reads, “Basketball isn’t a game, it’s an art form.” This is the de facto tagline of a game that itself takes no artistic liberties, but rather seeks to recreate the broadcast experience as faithfully as possible.
“A traditional sports game is trying to be broadcast TV,” Mozell said, “so it has to keep up with and get ahead of what of broadcast TV can do. It’s a hectic experience. It’s produced that way. And what’s very interesting is that even 15 years ago, one of our mantras was to be anti-broadcast. But we had to create our own vocabulary and our own visual presentation that didn’t feel like TV and kept you on the court, and kept the ball in your hand.”
It is also significant that Vol. 2 predates the attachment between game console and internet. The commitment of 2K18 and most modern sports games to a slavish verisimilitude enabled by the internet is a blessing and a curse. When John Wall gets sidelined with arthroscopic knee surgery IRL, you’re stuck with Tomas Satoranksy at point guard in the game. Eschewing 2K18 and opting to instead play Vol. 2 allows one to flee Satoranksy’s oppressive reign and revisit a simpler time in life and in video game technology.
For me, a forlorn Sonics fan, Vol. 2 allows me to revisit that ennobling era when Vladimir Radmanovic roamed the hardwood—an era I could not fully appreciate in its time, but which now overwhelms with emotion my digital age, Sonic-less sang-froid when proffered to me. Vol. 2 has, in fact, changed–it is no longer old-school vs. new-school, but older-school vs. old-school. The nostalgic element has multiplied. 15 years later, it still feels fresh and exhilarating. It is the feeling of Radmanovic breaking his foes’ ankles in quick succession before levitating to the hoop for a triumphant Honey Dip. A more pure representation of the joy and expressive elements of basketball has never been made, and likely never will be.
Danny SchwartzMay 2, 2018
Here’s the story of the unlikely people who made Vol. 2—and why nothing has come close since.
It’s been a decade and a half since Electronic Arts released NBA Street Vol. 2, the last truly great basketball video game. Even 15 years later, the game’s sense of style and spirit (and not to mention its soundtrack) have never been matched. Sure, new technology has granted us games like NBA 2K and its hyper-realistic graphics and gameplay—but realism was never the point of Street Vol. 2. It framed basketball not simply as a sport played in identical, sanitized arenas across the country, but as a vital civic institution with its own history, music, and sense of place. It paid homage to basketball as spectacle, as art, as cultural lynchpin.
The gameplay was fluid, dynamic, fast-paced—each game a 3-on-3 sprint to 21 points by 1s and 2s at streetball courts located around the United States. Vol. 2 did not seek to faithfully capture regulation basketball, but rather the everyday soul of the sport. There was no fouling, no out of bounds. (There was goaltending.) When you went to dunk, your player was temporarily subject to lunar gravity, and he glided to the rim like a ballerina, like Jumpman.
It was the sounds of the game that truly animated each moment, not only the grunts of the players and jangle of the ball slicing through steel net but the noises that came from beyond the court. A handful of onlookers aahed and oohed in earnest from the sideline. Choice cuts of ‘90s and early ‘00s hip hop—Dilated Peoples, MC Lyte, Erick Sermon and Redman, a custom pack of Just Blaze beats—blasted at block party levels. Real-life streetball emcee Bobbito Garcia a.k.a. DJ Cucumber Slice served as one-man commentary team/hype man, and he strained to be heard above the din, extolling every block (“Protect the nest!”), steal (“Oh, he boofed it on you, money!”), and handle (“Do you need a straw with that shake?”).
The gentle learning curve and responsive touch of the controller forgave novices. Vol. 2 did not believe in delayed gratification; it took little practice to be able to cross up your opposition halfway to Guatemala or posterize him like Blake Griffin did Kendrick Perkins. The game incentivized you to drive to the hole and acrobatically soar to the hoop, to make use of the dozens of tricks and dunks at your disposal, with the prospect of accumulating enough trick points to serve your adversary a soul-crushing Gamebreaker. When you triggered a Gamebreaker, you were no longer an actor but a spectator having an out-of-body experience, bearing witness to your own legend unfolding in real-time. Instant nostalgia—that was Vol. 2 in a nutshell. The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of NBA Street Vol. 2, GQ spoke to the unlikely people who made it—a team of Canadian “hockey players” who went into the project with little collective streetball knowledge. They did their homework, became “eager disciples of street basketball religion,” and paid tribute to the fertile, hallowed grounds of Rucker Park at 155th Street in Harlem.
Open Court
Electronic Arts
NBA Street Vol. 2 was created over the course of two years at EA’s Vancouver campus by a team led by producer Wil Mozell. A veteran of five NBA Livegames and a holdover from the first NBA Street team that had since dispersed, Mozell embraced the blank slate by building a team of individuals largely unfamiliar with the formula and legacy of sports video game production. Some had never worked on any video game before; Mozell’s search for a new art director led him to Kirk Gibbons, a “zen master” who had once won national championships with the UC-Santa Barbara surfing team and had developed several digital basketball products for Nike. The members of the Vol. 2 team set about diligently educating themselves on the history of streetball and hip hop; they pored over books, documentaries, and AND1 mixtapes and visited New York City’s most venerated streetball courts.
“We steeped ourselves in the culture as much as some white dudes on the west coast of Canada could,” said Adam Myhill, the game’s technical art lead.
TRENDING THIS VERY SECOND
“I was really into Jadakiss and Nas at the time,” said Gibbons. “I kind of joke that I’m a method art director, I was just listening to hip hop non-stop when I was making that game.”
Inspiration struck early in the form of the Nike Freestyle commercial, a two-and-a-half-minute spot that first aired during the 2001 NBA All-Star Game. In the commercial, anonymous streetballers and NBA standouts like Lamar Odom, Jason Williams, and Baron Davis take turns dancing and working the ball like a yo-yo in the spotlight of an otherwise pitch-black arena.
“We were blown away with how the creative [direction] was all about skills and moves of the players,” Mozell said. “No voice over, no special effects, no acting. Just raw basketball and streetball talent. This was the live version of our game. We wanted the moves in our game to speak for themselves, for the gamer to see them, feel them, and just be in awe of the talent on display. We wanted to talk to whomever was responsible for being able to capture the essence of such skill and talent.”
With the help of EA Canada’s Director of Marketing Glenn Chin, Mozell tracked down the mastermind behind the Nike Freestyle commercial: Jimmy Smith, a creative director at the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. Mozell extended him an invitation to work on Vol. 2.
“I remember when he called,” Smith said. “I’m like, ‘You want me to do the advertising?’ And he was like, ‘No! I want you to help us develop the actual video game!’ And I’m like, ‘Dude. I’m a pinball guy. My sons play, but I’m pinball.’ And he said, ‘No man, we want the culture. We want all of that that you infuse into Nike’s work. We want that infused into the actual video game. We want it to be authentic.’ And I said, ‘Well, I can do that. I can do that all day long.’”
Voice of the Court
Johnny Nunez
Smith had worked on Nike’s streetball-based ad campaigns for the better part of a decade. Vol. 2 gave him an opportunity to apply his streetball knowhow to video games, a medium broader than advertising, and through the process of “collabsporation” he helped select and develop the game’s music, courts, and coterie of fictional streetballers. But easily his biggest contribution was hiring the voice of the game: Bobbito Garcia.
“Bobbito is a legend,” Smith said.
Having worked on dozens of Nike commercials since the mid-’90s, Garcia` flew out to the EA campus for a marathon recording session.
“They booked me, I got up to Vancouver, stayed an entire week, and they gave me like pages and pages of script,” Garcia recalled. “Pages and pages of script. And I looked at them and I told them, I was like, ‘Yo, I have to be allowed to ad-lib here, because this is not how we talk.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, no leash, freak the **** out.’”
Garcia was a man uniquely positioned at the intersection of hip hop and streetball, a DJ and baller himself who co-hosted the famous hip hop radio show Stretch and Bobbito and had been announcing streetball games in New York since 1982.
“I would be in the booth for eight hours, five days in a row, just screaming at the top of my lungs,” he said. “It was a hit in the first 15 minutes, because the dudes were in there laughing. I was just coming up with stupid ****, like, ‘IT’S A PIZZA SLICE WITH NO CRUST!’ Like, just anything, because their whole **** was, ‘Yo, people play this hours and hours and hours, we have to come up with 40 different ways to say the word ‘dunk.’ Because otherwise it’s gonna be repetitive.’ I’m like, ‘There’s only so many ways to say ‘Oh my god, from deep!’ So I added some Spanish, I added some imagination, I added some authentic New York lingo.”
Occasionally, they would step outside to play a game of HORSE, and Bobbito the walking streetball encyclopedia helped the Vol. 2 team identify the names and significance of various moves and regaled them with stories from the streetball canon and from his own experiences.
“Bobbito introduced a lot of the culture and the slang and just the way it works,” Myhill said. “The guy has just got endless crazy stories. The stories weren’t always about streetball, they were about the players and just about the culture and what it’s like living in part of these places. And that really helped us get our head around it. Like, I remember him telling us this one story about this one player who had just bought these new kicks—they were like totally brand new, spotless. And then, he was on a subway and the subway went down, and they had to get everybody out, and the guy had to walk down the tracks, and then his kicks got a little bit dirty, and he never wore them again. Because they had to be ****ing perfect.”
“Essentially, they just wanted to bring some more authenticity to the game,” Garcia said of his role in the game. “No knock on EA, but they’re based in Vancouver. Which has a wonderful playground basketball community, but the writers of Vol. 2 were all, like, hockey players. And I’m not even making that up.”
The Influence of Dr. Funk
Smith and Garcia’s perspectives helped the guys in Vancouver flesh out the essential identity of NBA Street Vol. 2: it collapsed the timeline of basketball, allowing modern NBA stars to square up against old-school legends on the blacktop. But just as important: it challenged the NBA’s supremacy by positing the streetball court as a great equalizer indifferent to designations like “professional” and “amateur.”
In this sense, the game took many of its cues from “Dr. Funk,” a three-part 2001 Nike campaign that Smith had been involved in. One particularly immaculate 60-second Dr. Funk spot takes place in 1975 during the waning seconds of a game at Rucker Park. The crowd clamors for Dr. Funk. Vince “Dr. Funk” Carter steps onto the court and the crowd goes wild. Bobbito Garcia, standing courtside, offers breathless play-by-play as Harlem basketball legend-cum-druglord Pee Wee Kirkland lobs Dr. Funk the ball for a windmill alley-oop at the buzzer to give the Uptowners the victory. Cue Bootsy Collins.
“I think Nike Freestyle captured the core gameplay experience we wanted the gamer to have. Moves that blew you away, yet seemed so simple to execute and would entertain over and over,” Mozell said. “Dr. Funk is definitely more of the cultural vibe and visceral experience we wanted our audience to be immersed in. In one way, it was about combining the magic and awe of the athlete with an experience that was unique to only a few places on the planet, like Rucker Park.”
Dr. Funk underscores the ways in which Vol. 2 bought into New York’s reputation as an outdoor hoops mecca and brought into the fold the mythical elements of New York’s rich streetball history, of the Rucker, the wellspring from which legends are born, of oral histories and eyewitness accounts from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s that blur the line between fable and fact. The physics of Vol. 2 recall the superhuman feats of New York’s streetball kings of yore, like Earl “The Goat” Manigault, who could (supposedly) retrieve a dollar bill from the top of the backboard and leave behind a stack of coins; like Herman “Helicopter” Knowings, who could (supposedly) execute a 720-degree flush from the top of the key; like Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond, who (actually) put up 50 on Julius Erving in one half at Rucker.
Electronic Arts
This Rucker retro-gaze of Vol. 2manifested in the game’s Be a Legend mode, which started in Harlem and culminated with a trip back in time to Rucker ’78 to face off against the trio of Dr. J, Connie Hawkins, and Earl Monroe. It became the game’s unofficial mascot, Stretch Monroe, a Dr. J doppelganger who wore the number 72, a lanky leaper and dunker extraordinaire from East Harlem who was little more than a composite sketch of every uptown basketball O.G.
Making the Soundtrack
Mozell had wanted a 100% hip-hop soundtrack for NBA Street, but he ran into the budget constraints that frequently hamstrung new franchises, so the music was handled primarily by an internal composer. Everything changed with Vol. 2.
“The success of the first NBA Street gave us credibility and freedom to do something relevant and impactful with the soundtrack,” Mozell explained. “By the time Vol. 2was getting ready to come out, the NBA was finally warming up to having hip hop in a video game they were affiliated with.”
Mozell and Smith led the curation effort for a 10-track soundtrack that would ultimately be anchored by Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s 1992 single “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” the song that plays over the main menu and sets the tone for the entire game. Organized around a regal saxophone loop, “T.R.O.Y.” is itself an exercise in nostalgia, a wistful trip down memory lane that delves into intergenerational relationships, asserts a deep connection with the dead, and exists here to underscore Vol. 2’s identity as a golden era throwback. It is the rare song that genuinely never gets old.
“When you work on a project like that, you hear the songs, especially the first one or two, tens of thousands of times, because you keep turning the game on and off to check stuff and make sure things work,” said Myhill. “And I don’t ever get sick of that track. I hear it in my head and it’s like warm, fuzzy feelings. And I’ve never had that with another song in a game. I’ve only wanted to like punch a song in the face, because you’ve heard it 400 times.”
Nelly performed in Vancouver one frosty autumn evening with the Clipse and Fabolous during his Nellyville tour. After the show, Nelly and the St. Lunatics paid a trip to the EA campus and “played the crap out of NBA Street.” Nelly promised to pen an exclusive song for the soundtrack, and the Vol. 2 designers rewarded him for laying down “Not In My House” by including all five St. Lunatics as unlockable characters in the game. (Inexplicably, Nelly’s character isn’t as good as Slo Down’s.)
At one point, the Vol. 2 team invited three consultants to the Vancouver campus: Just Blaze, then the hottest producer of the planet, the rapper Jensen “Hot Karl” Karp, and a pre-Get Rich or Die Tryin’ 50 Cent. Canadian border agents turned away 50 Cent on account of his prior felonies and he promptly hopped on the next flight back to New York.
Karp recalled that by the time of his visit, the team had already developed mood boards with “New York street, kind of Rucker-based graphics.” In one meeting, he suggested “T.R.O.Y.” as the game’s theme song, an inspired idea that received the immediate blessing of Just Blaze. “Just Blaze was like, ‘Yes, that is bonkers, yes,’” Karp remembered.
Just Blaze took them down to the studio to lay down original beats for the game. “We spent a million bucks on our studio, it was a money-is-no-expense studio,” Myhill said. “And he just came in and he killed it. I’ve never seen anything like it. He basically threw down the songs in no time at all, like he was inspired from somewhere. It was a crazy, life-changing experience, watching what that guy did.”
“It was always a story from the night before that would have actually inspired a name for one of the tracks,” Mozell said. “I’ll never forget, ‘Plan B,’ one of the tracks in the soundtrack, came about from one of the events of the night before.”
A Product of Its Time
The NBA Street franchise saw two more installments, V3 and Homecourt. While popular, they didn’t quite retain the intangible qualities and subtle details that made Vol. 2 so special: the Curtis Mayfield Superfly font, the old-school uniforms, the use of old Blue Note album covers as the basis for the game’s entire color scheme. V3moved away from the retro premise of Vol. 2 and moved closer to the aesthetic of AND1 and modern streetball.
“I think the art style helped liberate you from having a completely believable performance,” Myhill said of Vol. 2. “But if you look at NBA Street 3, we went a little bit more photoreal. We didn’t do that street-shading effect on the skin, and it looked a little bit less painterly or iconic and graphic. So then, if a player moves really snappily, it’s kind of ****ty, because we’re actually putting skin textures and trying to make this look photorealistic. So then you got to slow everything down so it looks better, but then it kind of plays ****tier.”
Like albums and films, video games are the product not only of their collaborators, but of a specific time and organic chemistry that can’t be easily replicated. The designers of Vol. 2 have since enjoyed successful careers at various companies in the video game industry, but they remain friends and reminisce often over Vol. 2, a painstaking project that they characterize today as a labor of love.
“We truly loved the product,” said Gibbons. “We loved it, and we lived it. We were younger, we didn’t have families.”
I have in my possession both Vol. 2 and NBA 2K18, the basketball video game of record. Vol. 2 is the better game. Playing to 21 points in Vol. 2 versus playing timed quarters introduces a different vibe from 2K18, suffusing the basketball gaming experience with a timeless, elegiac, and joyous playground innocence. Playing a game of 2K18 is intense, immersive, and entertaining, but sparks no such joy; it is much more likely to spark a heart attack. And while 2K18 succeeds in capturing the precise movements and dynamics of an NBA game and the idiosyncrasies of each player’s style, it is ultimately an overproduced quagmire that attempts to hold the gamer captive through pregame national anthem and studio halftime analysis. The 2K18 main menu flashes a quote from Kyrie Irving that reads, “Basketball isn’t a game, it’s an art form.” This is the de facto tagline of a game that itself takes no artistic liberties, but rather seeks to recreate the broadcast experience as faithfully as possible.
“A traditional sports game is trying to be broadcast TV,” Mozell said, “so it has to keep up with and get ahead of what of broadcast TV can do. It’s a hectic experience. It’s produced that way. And what’s very interesting is that even 15 years ago, one of our mantras was to be anti-broadcast. But we had to create our own vocabulary and our own visual presentation that didn’t feel like TV and kept you on the court, and kept the ball in your hand.”
It is also significant that Vol. 2 predates the attachment between game console and internet. The commitment of 2K18 and most modern sports games to a slavish verisimilitude enabled by the internet is a blessing and a curse. When John Wall gets sidelined with arthroscopic knee surgery IRL, you’re stuck with Tomas Satoranksy at point guard in the game. Eschewing 2K18 and opting to instead play Vol. 2 allows one to flee Satoranksy’s oppressive reign and revisit a simpler time in life and in video game technology.
For me, a forlorn Sonics fan, Vol. 2 allows me to revisit that ennobling era when Vladimir Radmanovic roamed the hardwood—an era I could not fully appreciate in its time, but which now overwhelms with emotion my digital age, Sonic-less sang-froid when proffered to me. Vol. 2 has, in fact, changed–it is no longer old-school vs. new-school, but older-school vs. old-school. The nostalgic element has multiplied. 15 years later, it still feels fresh and exhilarating. It is the feeling of Radmanovic breaking his foes’ ankles in quick succession before levitating to the hoop for a triumphant Honey Dip. A more pure representation of the joy and expressive elements of basketball has never been made, and likely never will be.
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Top 5 best games of all time... idc
BukHumYai
formerly trill bill
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Stretch Monroe >>>>
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The game you played if you were trash on 2K
- 156,884
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- Oct 13, 2001
Folks weren't even on 2K that heavy yet.
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- 43,402
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- Oct 10, 2013
Stop
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My first online play experience was playing street vol 3 on PS2. Absolutely horrible lol.
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Take your L and keep it pushing pa
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Lol nope.
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Let me know What am I stopping?
2K was still an underground king at that time. Most folks still played Live at that time.
And it was still a wild assumption from the jump.
People only played Street because they were trash in 2K?
Street was an iconic game
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Again, stop. Stick to bumping old thread
Never said any of this too (stuff you added). You’re just trying really hard on a Tuesday morning
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This was the wave along with Vol. 2
When 2K dropped the year after for $20 that's when the shift began
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No, saying only people trash in 2K played NBA Street is trying too hard.
But Ok.
Good luck finding someone to co-sign that foolishness
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Yup, that’s what I said. Bye now
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Yea, that got things moving but I would say the NBA 2K7 demo is what turned 2K into the force they are today.
This was the wave along with Vol. 2
When 2K dropped the year after for $20 that's when the shift began
That being the first "real" 2K on the XBOX 360.
mrtarheel
Supporter
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I see no lies. Best basketball game of all time
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Loved both the original and volume 2. Online play wasn't relevant back then so I'm picturing me and my friends sitting around playing the OG for hours on end for dollar bills and IOUs 
Always loved the NBA Jam, Blitz, Street type games
Always loved the NBA Jam, Blitz, Street type games
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Why can't we go back!
Make gaming great again!
