Wayback Wednesday: Alternate Venues in NBA Live

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 alternate venues that appeared in the Season modes of early NBA Live games.

Whenever I revisit old games, whether it’s to produce a Wayback Wednesday feature or just for my own enjoyment, it’s always a delight to discover – or recall – a detail that I didn’t expect to see. After all, it’s easy enough to forget how long certain features have been around, or the lengths that games went to for authenticity even before the deep modes we now have were feasible. They’re great examples of how those classic titles were the products of developers pushing technology to the limit, while trying to make the best possible basketball game for enthusiastic hoop heads.

As far as the early NBA Live games are concerned, those details demonstrate why EA Sports’ series became the brand leader in the genre, and that being an authentic sim was absolutely the goal. There are numerous examples of this, many of which I’ve discussed in previous retrospectives, but a cool one that flies under the radar is the use of alternate venues in the Season modes of early NBA Live games. It wasn’t necessary to reflect this aspect of the NBA season on the virtual hardwood – especially as it’s easy to miss – so it’s awesome that the games did. Let’s take a look back…way back…

Before we get into their representation in NBA Live, let’s talk about alternate venues. From 1975 to 1995, the Boston Celtics played occasional home games at the Hartford Civic Center (now the XL Center) in Hartford, Connecticut. Similarly, before they came to share the Staples Center/Crypto.com Arena with the Lakers, the Los Angeles Clippers played some of their home games at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim (now the Honda Center) from 1994 to 1999. While Washington was still the Bullets, they played 35 home games at the Baltimore Arena (now the CFG Bank Arena) between 1989 and 1997, as a throwback to the days when the team called the city home.

In addition to those teams having regular alternate venues for their home games, there have been other official games played outside of current NBA arenas. On November 2nd and 3rd 1990, the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz played back-to-back games in Tokyo, Japan; the first time that regular season games for any major professional sports league in the United States were held outside of North America. The NBA returned to Japan for more regular season games throughout the 90s, including some season openers. As such, those arenas in Tokyo and Yokohama could – for a time – also be listed among the alternate venues where teams officially played a home game.

These alternate venues and overseas games came to be reflected in NBA Live. In NBA Live 95 PC’s Season mode, games that took place at alternate venues are listed as being at those locations, rather than their usual home. Specifically, three Celtics home games take place in Hartford, four Bullets home games are in Baltimore, and the Clippers are in Anaheim for six games. Additionally, the Clippers’ two games against the Portland Trail Blazers in Japan are noted as such, though the first game in Yokohama is erroneously listed as being in Tokyo. Incidentally, the console versions of NBA Live 95 don’t list any Season mode games as taking place in alternate venues.

While it would’ve still been historically accurate and a fun detail to include if these alternate venues were simply listed on the schedule screen, NBA Live 95 PC took things a step further. The alternate location was also listed on the pre-game versus screen, and in broadcast-style overlays during gameplay (“Live from Hartford”, “Live from Tokyo”, etc). There were even special voiceovers for those games, introducing them as emanating from their alternate venues. Considering the limitations on CD-ROM and hard drive space, as well as the fact that a full season mode was still a relative novelty in 1995, the developers definitely went the extra mile with this.

Additionally, to make these games further stand out, they took place on a generic court that lacked any branding. Obviously this alleviated the need to include a variety of alternate court designs, but as you can see if you look up footage of Celtics games played at the Hartford Civic Center and Bullets games at the Baltimore Arena, it’s not inaccurate! Clippers games at the Arrowhead Pond did actually see their logo placed on the court, and decals for both the Clippers and Blazers were likewise added to the games played in Japan. The colours of NBA Live 95’s generic court don’t match any of those locations, but it works as a neutral design that all of those teams can share.

Of course, as I alluded to above, it’s actually quite easy to overlook these details. In fact, even if you played a ton of NBA Live 95 PC and other games in the series that included these alternate venues, there’s a good chance that you’ve forgotten all about them, or are hearing about them for the first time! After all, the only way to see that generic court is to play Season mode and either select one of the teams that plays at an alternate location, or one of their opponents for those games. If you used a team like the Houston Rockets – as my cousin and I did in our co-op season – you’d never play a game on that court, as all of their games in 1995 were hosted at their usual locations.

NBA Live 96 PC likewise recognised alternate venues in its Season mode schedule, but there was a bug. Instead of taking place on a generic court, all of these games were hosted on the Vancouver Grizzlies’ home floor. A vague memory of facing the Clippers on the Grizzlies’ court during my Bulls season in NBA Live 96 PC led me to investigate this bug back in 2020, and confirm that it’s an issue whenever games take place in an alternate venue. The bug affects both the Clippers and Bullets, though once again, if you don’t select either of those teams in Season mode, or one of their opponents for those games hosted elsewhere, you’ll never encounter that problem.

I’m not sure how I overlooked the different location on the schedule screen and didn’t make the connection back in the 90s, but it was fun to investigate and get an answer all these years later. The issue was fixed in NBA Live 97 PC, with games at alternate venues now taking place on a generic EA Sports court. Personally, I feel the generic court in NBA Live 95 stood out a bit more with its unique colour scheme and lack of branding, but the EA Sports court still allows those games to feel different. Having those generic courts in the game also opened up some modding possibilities, though changing court assignments wasn’t as easy as it would later become with DBF files.

Although the Clippers continued to play a handful of games at the Arrowhead Pond through to the 1999 season, NBA Live ceased to host those matchups on a generic court after NBA Live 97. It may have been an oversight, or perhaps it was considered unnecessary with fewer games being played at alternate venues, and only one team in the league still having a semi-regular home away from home. Whatever the case, you won’t find alternate venues in NBA Live 98 or NBA Live 99’s Season modes. This hardly ruins the experience – especially with so few games played elsewhere by that point – but it’s always unfortunate when a nifty detail is dropped from hoops games.

I was curious to see if some other games from the same era also recognised alternate venues in their Season modes. At the risk of another “Rasheed Wallace in Atlanta” oversight, it appears that only NBA Live went to the trouble of implementing those different locations as part of its Season mode schedule. Furthermore, while the Super Nintendo releases of NBA Live unsurprisingly didn’t reflect those alternate venues, the PlayStation versions took a cue from the PC and did. In fact, the PS1 version of NBA Live 96 fixes the bug from the PC release, featuring a green and blue generic court. The PS1 version of NBA Live 97 features an EA Sports floor similar to PC.

Since 1999, it’s become rarer for teams to play official games outside of NBA arenas, apart from international locations intended to promote the league in foreign markets. The Celtics have returned to the renamed XL Center for preseason games in 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014, but haven’t played a regular season game there since April 1995. To that end, it hasn’t really been necessary to represent neutral locations and their courts in NBA video games since the 90s. Considering the level of detail in the aesthetics of modern titles, a generic court arguably might also be more distracting than delightful nowadays, assuming a game couldn’t include the authentic designs.

That makes the alternate venues in the NBA Live games of the mid 90s yet another time capsule of the era; a throwback to when teams would play elsewhere without being unexpectedly displaced. To reiterate an earlier point, it’s a great example of how the developers went the extra mile to include details whose absence would hardly ruin a game, yet their presence was appreciated by hardcore NBA fans. Of course, as I also noted, it was easy enough to miss depending on your choice of team. That only makes me appreciate the developers’ efforts even more, as there’s a reasonable argument that a rarely-used detail that many gamers may well never see isn’t worth implementing.

And yet, they added it! Not to devolve into some grumpy old man grumbling, but it does highlight the difference between games designed to be the best sim possible that appeals to hardcore hoop heads, and games designed for mass appeal with a focus on wider gaming trends; the whole “Fortnite with Basketball” approach. Alternate venues were a detail that probably only the biggest sim heads would appreciate, and to that end, I love that those old NBA Live games bothered to do it! It’s the little things that truly make a game special – then and now – and it’ll always be a joy to find examples of developers striving for authenticity during the early days of the virtual hardwood.

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