NBA Jam Revival
As a basketball-loving kid in the 90s, I was of course obsessed with NBA Jam when it came out. I was never any good at the game, but I loved the visuals, the incredible moves, and of course, the announcer. I still can’t play it to this day, I constantly press shoot when I want to pass (and vice-versa), and games inevitably dissolve into shoving matches, which I usually lose. The only version I did master was the Gameboy version, which brings me to my latest artwork.
The Gameboy’s graphics did NBA Jam’s gameplay no favours. It was more like you were playing with stick men - players were indistinguishable from each other on the court.
However, what interested me more was the player portraits on the team select screen. They did not disappoint.
Simple enough to not be huge, but big enough to be recognisable, they were perfect (well, mostly… but I’ll get to that). I had recently watched “The Reignman and The Glove” on NBA TV, and I was inspired to make something Supersonics-related. So I recreated the player select screen in my favourite blue-pink palette.
Awesome, love it. Then I wondered what it would look like if I tried it with team colours (green & yellow).
I love how this came out. Then I got to thinking, I could make a pretty neat little collection of the most exciting teams of the 90s. To me, there were 4 teams in the 90s that were known as “cool”. Not necessarily the best, but just exciting to watch: Seattle, Chicago, Orlando and Charlotte.
I realised this wouldn’t be as simple as the Sonics one, where I just recreated the original art in different colours. See, if I wanted to make the Bulls and Magic complete, they would have to include Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal. Due to licensing issues, these guys weren’t included in NBA Jam, and I’d be damned if I was gonna replace them with BJ Armstrong and Horace Grant! So I went to work and created my own portraits in the same style.
I think I did pretty well here! It took a lot of image editing but I got them in the same style. I had to make up their stats, but I think I stand by them. A few of the stats in the game were a bit wonky anyway… They only gave Penny a 3 for dunks?! Had they even seen him play??
Anyway, the last team to do was Charlotte - great, both Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning were in the game, so just a straight conversion, right? Well Alonzo looks good, and Larry looks… hmmm, I’m pretty sure that’s not LJ.
He looks more like The Rock than Grandmama… time for a redesign.
Here’s my design:
A vast improvement, if I do say so myself! My next step was figuring out what to do with these designs. I may make one or two of them into bead pictures, but for now I decided to make them available in my store as sticker sheets. If you’re an ageing basketball fan like myself, or you just like cool pixel art designs, please take a look! I made my pink and blue palette available, as well as the team colour editions.
Update - the first bead picture has been created!
