Wayback Wednesday: The Missing Steal Button in NBA Live PC

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 why there was no steal button in the early NBA Live games on PC.

As a young basketball gamer back in the 90s, I grew up with some true classics. They weren’t perfect of course, and there were aspects of those games that confused and annoyed me. Over the years, as I’ve come to learn more about video game design and the hardware that allows us to play games, certain choices and limitations have made a lot more sense. That includes why the early NBA Live games on PC didn’t have a steal button, unlike their Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and PlayStation counterparts. I touched upon the reason when I discussed the history of keyboard controls, but the matter deserves a deeper dive via a video essay. Let’s take a look back…way back…

For anyone who has always wondered about the lack of a steal button in those early NBA Live games on PC, I hope that was illuminating! For those of you who started playing PC basketball games with a later title, I’m sure you’re glad that you didn’t have to deal with that limitation! As for me, it was satisfying to go back and get some answers that I could share with the community all these years later. Thanks as always to my fellow retro gamers for your support of Wayback Wednesday, and be sure to subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel for more basketball gaming content, from video essays and retrospectives to highlight reels and Dee’s weekly Top 10 Plays.

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