In this week's Wayback Wednesday, Andrew reflects on basketball game manuals, and how they contributed to the virtual hardwood experience.
The post Wayback Wednesday: Basketball Game Manuals appeared first on NLSC.
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 basketball video game manuals.
It’s getting harder to reminisce about physical media without sounding incredibly out of touch, and far older than I am. However, as consumers battle corporate giants over digital ownership and bemoan the disappearance of content from streaming services, I believe that more and more people are beginning to understand why many of us have been clinging to physical media for as long as we can. It’s not simply a case of wistful nostalgia, or a refusal or inability to get with the times. While digital media has the advantage of convenience, physical media offers posterity, and tangible ownership.
But yes, there’s also undeniable nostalgia with physical media, particularly video games. There was something special about going to the video store, browsing the shelves for a game to rent, and choosing one that would be yours to play…at least temporarily! Needless to say, it was even better when you bought a game. Not only was there no time limit to the fun, but you also had the box or case to admire. And inside the box or case, depending on the game, there were manuals, maps, charts, and so on. We’d enthusiastically pore over these materials well before we even dove into gameplay, including hitting the virtual hardwood. Let’s take a look back…way back…
There was a time when video games – basketball or otherwise – had much greater need for physical manuals. When games were in their relative infancy, most of them didn’t have cinematic cutscenes to set up the story. That was left up to the game’s manual, which explained the back story in a few paragraphs, or even sometimes in the form of a comic. Similarly, in-game tutorials, control listings, and other onboarding features weren’t feasible yet (and in some cases, would’ve been overkill anyway). Of course, as many retro game reviewers have observed, without the manual, some titles are quite confusing. Sometimes they were necessary for completion, acting as copy protection.
Even if it wasn’t necessary to consult a manual in order to beat or master a game, reading them still prepared us with all of the information about controls, features, modes, basic strategies, and if necessary, setting and story. To that point, they also got us hyped to play. One of the most nostalgic parts of buying games as a young gamer back in the 90s, and even into the 2000s – after admiring the cover art and previews on the back, of course – is reading the manual on the way home. It only increased our excitement, and allowed us to hit the ground running with some knowledge of how the game worked. It immersed us in the game’s world before we’d even fired it up.
The best manuals went into great detail, often including screenshots from the game, sometimes in full colour. Basketball game manuals often opened with a passionate blurb about the NBA and basketball, underscoring how those games were made to celebrate the love of the sport. The manual for World League Basketball – the PAL version of NCAA Basketball for the Super Nintendo – provides a brief history of hoops, beginning with its invention in 1891. In addition to detailed explanations of controls, modes, options, and features, many of the early NBA Live titles provided a basic introduction to the NBA, and various league rules and formats, in their manuals.
While this may seem unnecessary for knowledgeable basketball gamers, it was a useful guide for newer hoops fans, and emphasises the passion that went into those titles. Also, re-reading the manual for NBA Live 96 PC, it’s actually astonishing just how much detail went into explaining all of the rules and gameplay settings! As the years went by, much of that information disappeared from manuals, either leaving it to the in-game onboarding, or simply assuming that gamers would know. The manual for NBA Live 96 PC is jam-packed with explanations for everything from gameplay to options to modes while scattering tips throughout the pages, making it worth a read.
Tecmo Super NBA Basketball’s manual includes a diagram demonstrating the ideal release point for jumpshots, as well as the windows for second best, third best, and worst timing. It also includes profiles of all 27 NBA teams from the 1992 season. Not only was this a fun guide for anyone getting into basketball around that time, but the short paragraphs about each team are nostalgic time capsules to read now. Again, it shows just how much those early sim games were striving for authenticity, even with the technological limitations of the era. They were being made for hardcore basketball fans, or people who were on their way to falling head over heels in love with hoops.
The manual for the PC version of Jordan vs. Bird unquestionably reflects what a labour of love the game was. It opens with a few paragraphs about The Slammer (Michael Jordan) and The Shooter (Larry Bird), and features quotes from both players throughout. As with the NBA Live 96 PC manual, it describes the options and modes enthusiastically and in detail. It also fondly explains the ins and outs of the Slam Dunk Contest and Three-Point Shootout, provides gameplay tips in the words of MJ and Larry Legend, and includes player profiles. It demonstrates the authenticity and attention to detail they were aiming for, which was frankly remarkable for the time.
While we’re on the subject of early PC basketball games from Electronic Arts, the manual for Lakers vs. Celtics also begins with a reflection on the history of the sport, and the titular rivalry. You’ll also find lists of notable stats and records; admittedly they’re there to answer in-game questions for copy protection purposes, but in a way that celebrates the history of the NBA. Once again, shooting mechanics are explained – including the fact that success is based on real life performance – and gamers are encouraged to mimic each team’s actual style on the court. There are also complete roster listings, which were most useful in a time long before Basketball Reference!
Instruction booklets for arcade basketball games didn’t go into as much detail about the history of the NBA or the sport, and there were obviously fewer Xs and Os to cover as well. However, flipping through the manual for the Nintendo 64 version of NBA Hangtime, it concisely explains all of the basics of the game’s simplified and action-packed representation of basketball, along with some useful tips. As in the original NBA Jam and NBA Jam Tournament Edition, NBA Hangtime displayed additional tips in-game after the first and third quarters, but reading the manual was a good starting point. Once again, it also got you hyped up for a session on the court.
Unfortunately, as I noted, basketball game manuals became progressively thinner over the years. The manual for NBA Live 96 PC is 53 pages; granted, a couple of those are contents and credits, but as I mentioned, the rest of the pages are packed with info on just about everything you need to know. Just ten years later, the manual for NBA Live 06 PC was only 13 pages long. It does have complete control listings and some short descriptions of the game modes and key features, but it could’ve gone into far more detail. Even the big new feature that year – Freestyle Superstars – is explained in four sentences that barely delve into all of the different classifications and their movesets.
Of course, leaving detail out of game manuals made it easier to sell official strategy guides, and indeed there have been a few such publications for basketball games. Less cynically, with more people having access to the internet, online manuals and tutorials were convenient and increasingly popular. They cut down on printing costs, and could also be updated if an error was found, whereas a misprint in a physical manual was permanent. Also, they’d presumably be safer than a printed manual, which could be misplaced. The irony here is that many of those resources that games directed us to were on official sites that have since been taken down, and thus are now lost anyway!
As someone who has fond memories of reading detailed manuals from cover to cover, one of the most disappointing instruction booklets that I’ve encountered is the one for NBA 2K8. Not only it is shorter than 20 pages in length, but it barely explains the game’s controls. Considering that NBA 2K was still using the clunky original version of Isomotion for its dribbling controls, they really needed to include more detail. In fact, the manual doesn’t even explain how to throw an alley-oop! A user over on the GameFAQs boards even noted how lacking the instructions were when they helpfully posted a complete rundown of all the dribbling moves, and other advanced controls.
Although I’m mostly reminiscing about printed instruction booklets here, I will also mention that the PC versions of NBA Live have included a handful of supplementary manuals on the disc. This includes deeper guides to Franchise/Dynasty mode, from explanations of the salary cap and free agency to team building advice. It was easy to overlook these guides if you just jumped straight into the games, though shortcuts to those documents were added during installation. They’re not quite as nostalgic as taking the manual out of the box and reading it in the car ride home from the store, but they were certainly handy, and represent the developers going the extra mile.
These days, physical manuals for basketball games are basically nonexistent. Instead, if we do pick up the disc version of NBA 2K, we’re directed to a link on the official site where we can download a PDF. This is certainly environmentally-conscious and logical given that more and more people are opting for digital purchases, though I was amused to discover that the URL provided in the case of the PlayStation 5 version of NBA 2K24 is actually incorrect! Google will get you to where you need to go for the manuals of various Take-Two titles, but it’s safe to say that the expectation nowadays is that we don’t need physical instruction booklets like we did all those years ago.
That’s the industry trend, and it’s hard to argue against. Between in-game help screens and control listings, practice modes, and YouTube tutorials, physical manuals are no longer necessary. Digital manuals also make sense for digital copies. Nevertheless, in their heyday, game manuals were both useful and fun, making them nostalgic now. I love leafing through old basketball game manuals and seeing the explanations of basic plays, team and player profiles, and the overall enthusiasm for the NBA. You’d read them over and over again, not necessarily because you needed a refresher, but simply because you loved basketball so much that you just couldn’t ever get enough of it!
There’s no indulging that love of hoops with the manual for NBA 2K24. Half of it is a list of the controls, while the rest is warranty information and legalese. There are no strategies, no charts for MyPLAYER Builds, no profiles that hype up the stars of today. It’s a reference sheet more than a manual. It’s all that’s needed, but to that point, those old basketball game manuals went above and beyond, even as the games were becoming more sophisticated. There’s passion there – heart and soul – that added to the experience of buying and playing a new game. Even if they’re a relic that no longer has a use, I appreciate the effort that went into those tomes of the virtual hardwood.
To that end, just like firing up the games themselves, basketball game manuals are fun to pull out and read all over again today. Not only is there a big hit of nostalgia in the time capsules that are the team and player profiles, but sometimes I will encounter a tip or control that I’ve forgotten about! A great example is inbounds playcalling in the Super Nintendo version of NBA Live 95. Flipping through manuals for this article reminded me of that, and some other handy hints that had slipped my mind. It’s proof that old games were often more sophisticated than we may recall! Moving forward, I know I’ll be making re-reading those manuals a bigger part of revisiting the classics.
The post Wayback Wednesday: Basketball Game Manuals appeared first on NLSC.
