Wayback Wednesday: A Tribute to the T-Meter
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 paying tribute to the iconic T-Meter.
While a solid basketball video game may be able to get away with advanced controls that are complex and even contrived, the basics must be well-designed and easy to use. If shooting is clunky, or jumping on defense is useless, or trying to pass to a teammate standing next to you is somehow a chore, then the game is not mechanically sound! To that point, while free throws aren’t something that will (or at least, should) happen on every possession, they are a part of the sport as the result of infractions, and thus a basic skill that needs to be properly represented in video games.
Of course, just as certain titles have botched other fundamental aspects of basketball, developers have devised some bewilderingly terrible ways of shooting free throws on the virtual hardwood. All too often, they were needlessly complicating what should be a straightforward mechanic in the name of creativity, challenge, or trying to represent a shooting motion. What those games should’ve done – and indeed, some did – was to copy what EA Sports were doing with the T-Meter. Dated as it may seem, it remains one of my favourite mechanics for free throws. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Since my introduction to sim basketball games was NBA Live 95, I associate the T-Meter with the NBA Live series. However, the mechanic traces its roots back to the NBA Playoffs series; EA’s forerunner to NBA Live. In Lakers vs. Celtics, free throws were attempted the same way as jumpshots: hold and release the shoot button, with your timing and the player’s statistics determining your success. As a side note, reach-in fouls also resulted in two free throws irrespective of how many team fouls were accrued, though shooting fouls correctly awarded two shots on a miss, and the and-one on a make. In other words, it was a simplified approach to fouls and free throws.
On top of accurately representing shooting and non-shooting fouls, the sequel to Lakers vs. Celtics – Bulls vs. Lakers – introduced the T-Meter. Named as such due to its resemblance to a capital T, the T-Meter made free throw shooting a two-step process. As long-time basketball gamers know, in the first step, a ball bounces back and forth in the horizontal bar atop the meter, representing aim. In the second step, a ball bounces up and down in the vertical bar, representing strength or distance. The goal is to stop the ball in the middle of both bars (or close enough to it), thus correctly aiming your shot. If you’re outside both of the “make” zones, the attempt will miss.
The manual for Bulls vs. Lakers advertised this new mechanic as letting gamers “aim (their) shot just like the pros”, which was a fair claim! As in real life, precise aim let you drill free throw after free throw, but shots that were just slightly off could still rattle, roll, and bank in. Once again, a player’s actual free throw percentage played a role in determining the margin for error. Furthermore, on unsuccessful attempts, the shot would miss according to how it was aimed. Aside from being a realistic touch, it also facilitated the common technique of intentionally missing foul shots, while also aiming them so that a teammate has a better chance of snaring the offensive rebound.
This precision is what set the T-Meter apart from the aiming mechanics in other early basketball games. Such mechanics usually just involved lining up a moving indicator with the rim – a ring, an arrow, or a floating hoop and net – and pressing shoot. While they were effective, the T-Meter’s second step made a huge difference. A foul shot that was perfectly lined up could be too long or too short, catching back iron or front rim accordingly. The added step in aiming also made lucky rolls and bounces feel far less random. And, once again, if you wanted to intentionally miss hard and to the left for the board, it was actually possible with the depth of aiming the T-Meter provided.
Moreover, despite being a two-step process, the T-Meter wasn’t contrived, complex, or prone to slowing the game down. It flowed naturally: the first step represented squaring up the basket and getting ready to shoot, while the second step represented letting the shot fly. Granted, there was some predictability as you knew after the first step whether you’d completely messed up the attempt, but it was still an opportunity to practice your timing on the second step. Besides, if you were controlling a capable foul shooter and were just slightly off on the aim, nailing the distance gave you a good chance of benefitting from a shooter’s bounce or roll, which made it worth a try.
As mentioned, a player’s shooting percentage – and eventually, rating – played a role in the success rate when the aim wasn’t precise. Along with the difficulty setting, it also impacted the process of aiming, as the ball moves slower on the meter for good free throw shooters, and faster for players who are poor from the charity stripe. The speed would also increase the longer you waited to shoot, reflecting rising pressure. In theory, it was much easier to stop the meter in the “make” zones when the ball was going slower. However, sometimes it had the opposite effect, with a slow-moving ball psyching you out, and the rapid bouncing encouraging quick reflexes on the button!
Because it was straightforward and more effective than basically any other method of shooting free throws, the T-Meter is a feature that survived the massive revamp from NBA Showdown to NBA Live 95. It remained a staple of NBA Live for years, though it did undergo a few changes. Not every T-Meter displays the windows for the “make” zones, though experienced gamers still came to learn just how far off the middle they could be with their aim. In NBA Live 96 PC, the design of the T-Meter was changed to a cross, with the goal of stopping the ball in the middle of the intersecting bars. The general principle remained the same though, and so the T-Meter name was retained.
Indeed, the moniker remained even as NBA Live 2004 revamped the concept again. From NBA Live 2004 to NBA Live 06 on PC and the sixth gen consoles, the T-Meter was moved to the backboard. Instead of stopping a ball in the middle of two meters, we now had to stop a line moving left and right, and then one moving up and down, to intersect a rectangular “make” zone behind the rim. It was the same basic idea, though with less ambiguity regarding the margin for error. As with the traditional T-Meter, the speed of the lines and the size of the rectangle varied according to the skill of the player, and the chosen difficulty setting. It was a generally well-received change.
With NBA Live keeping the T-Meter right through to the mid 2000s, you might think that other games would adopt a similar mechanic. Bizarrely though, so many of them kept trying to reinvent the wheel with meters that were cumbersome and confusing, or controls that were clumsy and complex. Free throw shooting in early NBA 2K games is woeful, from using the triggers to line up the two big arrows with the rim, to ESPN NBA 2K5’s ridiculous method that involves holding the analogue sticks to perfectly surround a bouncing ball when it’s in the middle of the meter. The fact that it’s so difficult to succinctly explain speaks volumes about how awful that mechanic was!
Considering that so many other games failed to devise a better mechanic for free throw shooting than the T-Meter – from sticking to outdated concepts, to NBA 2K’s weird ideas, to not even having a meter or method of aiming – it was surprising and disappointing when EA Sports abandoned its own great innovation. NBA Live 06 for Xbox 360 brought in right stick free throw shooting, which involved moving the stick down and then straight up in a swift motion. It was meant to simulate the action of shooting, but it was too easy to mess up the aiming, timing, or both. NBA Live 07 and 08 tried to refine the method and add on-screen tips, but still fell short of the T-Meter.
That method was discarded in NBA Live 09 and 10, in favour of simply holding shoot as a meter filled on the backboard, and releasing it when it reached the “make” zone. It was an improvement, but nevertheless lacked precision and depth. NBA Elite 11’s attempt at moving shooting to the right stick was ill-advised, but it did work well for free throws, essentially combining a simplified version of the right stick method with the T-Meter. Unfortunately, NBA Elite 11’s failure tainted any good ideas associated with it, and so NBA Live ended up following NBA 2K’s example with release timing, along with Green Releases for guaranteed makes for jumpshots and free throws alike.
It’s a perfectly serviceable concept, and outside of shot aiming in NBA 2K17, it’s my preferred shooting mechanic over the past couple of generations. However, when it comes to free throws, I still believe that the T-Meter is the best method we’ve had. I’ve seen people refer to it as outdated, but I’m not sure that I agree. Yes, it feels like it should be outdated because of its age and simplicity, but as far as depth, precision and accessibility, no method since has truly improved upon it. Like right stick dribbling and three pass buttons, it’s a solution that was not only a huge improvement when it was new, but has stood the test of time. The T-Meter could absolutely work today!
The perception of it as an old and outdated mechanic is the only real barrier here, and admittedly that would be hard to shake. Regardless, the T-Meter is one of the most important innovations to controls and mechanics in basketball video games. Many games tried to implement their own creative takes on free throw shooting, but none of them were as good as a concept that was introduced way back in 1992, and served EA Sports’ hoops titles well for multiple generations. Even if the T-Meter never returns, I love seeing it and using it again when I’m retro gaming…even if I do sometimes botch the timing thanks to rust! Call it outdated if you will, but I say it’s yet to be topped.
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