Wayback Wednesday: Rolling Rosters Back One Year With Mods
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 reflecting on the long-running modding practice of rolling back rosters to the previous season.
Two of the most exciting modding ideas for basketball video games are bringing an old favourite up to date, and winding back the clock in new games with a detailed retro season mod. There’s something truly enchanting about a mod so comprehensive that you almost forget that several years – or indeed, decades – separate the game and the season that the roster mod is set in! In comparison, roster mods that just involve rolling the rosters back one year may seem like a more humble affair, particularly if they’re completely minimalist and don’t include any court, jersey, or logo updates.
And yet, these projects can be immensely satisfying to create and play with! There are reasons that for as long as we’ve been able to meaningfully customise rosters – with or without the aid of external tools – we’ve had the idea of rolling back a game’s rosters to the previous campaign. In short, it’s a combination of some of our favourite aspects of playing and modding basketball video games, to the point where a season needn’t be particularly old or established as nostalgic for us to want to re-create it. It’s a way of changing things up, so let’s look at a popular way to go back, that goes way back!
Obviously, retro season roster mods appeal to us because of the way they combine our nostalgia for a past campaign with the technological advancements of a modern title, giving us the best of both worlds. As such, there’s usually a significant gap between the season and the game in question. After all, nostalgia needs to build up over time, and big jumps generally require a new generation of hardware. However, there has always been novelty and interest in rolling back the rosters much sooner. Roster packs for NBA Live 95 and 96 PC included mods for seasons in the 80s and early 90s, but those games also received 1994 and 1995 season roster “downgrades” respectively.
On the surface, that might seem pointless. While there was plenty of player movement during the 1994 and 1995 offseasons that make rolling the rosters back a significant change, there are also some very familiar lineups. More to the point, NBA Live 95 and 96 PC are very similar in style and quality, so if you were itching to play a season with 1995 rosters and you owned both games, you could simply just fire up the older title. Of course, NBA Live 96 PC does have a few enhancements over its predecessor, including an inactive list, a Free Agents Pool, on-the-fly playcalling, multiple camera angles, and in-game Create-a-Player. There are reasons that you may prefer it instead.
With that being said, you may still want to flash back to the prior season, even if it’s just to replay the postseason since NBA Live 96’s default Playoff brackets are from 1995. Even in 1996, this is something that gamers had interest in, especially if they’d missed out on NBA Live 95, or just preferred the 1995 season for whatever reason. From a retro gaming standpoint now, NBA Live 96 PC’s selection of camera angles and enhanced graphics might make the game more accessible, or it may be an all-time favourite. If so, it could be a prime candidate for retro modding, no matter whether you’re interested in a total overhaul, or just rolling the game’s rosters back one year.
The point is that while bigger changes are seen over a longer period of time and with jumps to a new generation of hardware, there have still been improvements year-to-year that have made certain games a preferable way to play their predecessor’s setting. It’s also generally the easiest minimalist roster mod to create. Barring any big names retiring or leaving to play overseas as the case may be, many of the players that you need are already in the game. This means you have far more to work with out of the gate. Compare this to keeping a game updated into the next season, where there’ll be a bunch of rookies – and possibly a few returning veterans – that will need to be created.
This isn’t to say that rolling back the rosters to the previous year is a quick task. It may not seem like it if most of the stars stay put, but there’s a ton of movement every offseason, which you’ll quickly realise when you refer to the transactions listings on Basketball Reference! You may not have to create a league full of players, but you’ll still be moving dozens of them around, adjusting lineups, fixing jersey numbers, and probably editing some ratings if you do want to be more detailed. Therefore, even if it’s a relatively smaller undertaking than a retro season mod for a much newer title, rolling a game’s rosters back to the previous season is still quite creatively satisfying.
Combine that with any enhancements that make a title preferable to the one that came before it, and you have a worthwhile minimalist roster project! If it’s on PC and the game is moddable, you may go to the trouble of creating or sourcing any necessary face, court, logo, and jersey updates for more authenticity. However, sometimes part of the appeal is in the minimalist nature, especially in the early days when we were far more limited in what we could mod. Also, if a game has the appropriate retro jerseys, they can provide this accuracy. For example, the Pacers having their pinstripe jerseys in NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360 is a detail that can enhance the aesthetics of a 2005 roster.
Speaking of the Xbox 360 version of NBA 2K6, both it and NBA Live 95 PC are prime examples of the benefits of retro roster mods, but particularly rolling rosters back a single season. Those two games were the first releases on their respective platforms, thus there’s no previous season title to dust off if you’d prefer to play that campaign. Even with the minimal amount of modding that’s possible on Xbox 360 and in that generation of PC versions of NBA Live, we can still essentially create our own NBA 2K5 (sans ESPN presentation and branding), or “NBA Live 94”. There’ll be some inaccuracies, but the rolled-back lineups will still provide a fresh experience.
In a similar vein, a couple of NBA Live games over the years have stood in for gaps in the series. When NBA Live 2002 remained exclusive to consoles due to the team at EA being spread too thin to produce a PC port, we naturally continued to update NBA Live 2001 in its stead. After NBA Live 2003 was released though, we also rolled back its rosters to the 2002 season, again creating our own unofficial version of NBA Live 2002. Yes, we’d already done that with NBA Live 2001 – in fact, a pirated version of the game made the rounds as a fake NBA Live 2002 PC – but re-creating the previous season in NBA Live 2003 took advantage of Freestyle Control, and other additions.
When roster editing was patched into NBA Live 18 post-release, it afforded us many opportunities to customise the game, including rolling back the rosters to 2017. Since NBA Live 17 and The Drive to NBA Live ultimately never saw the light of day, once again this allowed us to fill a gap in the series. While we did still have an outstanding 2017 season release in NBA 2K17, it’s still fun to be able to play with those lineups in an eighth gen NBA Live title. It’s just a shame we don’t have roster sharing in NBA Live 18. As I said, rolling a game’s rosters back to the previous season is a minimalist project compared to many other mods, but it’s still a massive undertaking to complete!
Mind you, if you’re not making a roster for public consumption, then completion is at your discretion. I’ve come to really enjoy tinkering with the rosters in games that I revisit, creating makeshift retro teams and other minimalist projects that can be put together reasonably quickly. To that end, if I just want to play the 2017 NBA Finals in NBA Live 18, I only need to edit the rosters for the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors. With the Fantasy Teams mode in NBA Live 10, I can throw a 2009 season matchup on the floor with basically no roster editing (though a couple of jersey numbers may be incorrect). It’s added another layer of enjoyment to my retro gaming.
I’ve taken it a step further with games like NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360, fully rolling back the rosters to 2005 using players who are available by default, and creating a handful of missing players so that every team at least has a complete 12-man lineup. On top of being a makeshift ESPN NBA 2K5 for 360, it’s both novel and scratches a creative itch because like all roster projects, it’s making the game something it wasn’t intended to be. And yet, despite inaccuracies with the schedule and players’ experience, to say nothing of a Free Agent Pool filled with the Class of 2005 rookies, it basically works as intended! Cobbling together that roster has essentially given me two games in one.
Needless to say, with more effort and ambition, we can take our favourite games back even further; especially on PC, where more comprehensive modding is feasible. It’ll take longer, but we can roll NBA Live 06 PC back to the 2002 season. We can turn NBA Live 2003 into NBA Live 98 on steroids. There’s a surprising amount of players left over in NBA 2K11 that facilitate older season mods. These are all fun ideas, but there’s a unique charm in taking a game back one season. It’s the ability to play with rosters that are still fairly contemporary relative to the game in question, while taking advantage of new features and gameplay mechanics that you wish you had last year.
I’d suggest that’s why we’ve been rolling back rosters in games even before seasons are in the distant past, and enough time has elapsed to truly make them nostalgic. Of course, there are seasons that were instant classics, with lineups throughout the league that we can’t get enough of playing with. Games set in that year may not be all-time great releases though, so there’s value in bringing that season into a newer title; even if it’s one that came out the very next year! Throw in the ability to stand in for games that were never released or exclusive to certain platforms, and there’s tremendous value in this minimalist modding endeavour. If you’re a retro gamer, keep it in mind!
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