Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five basketball games that you may not be aware that we can mod.

When we were founded as the NBA Live Series Center all the way back in 1996, the focus of our modding community was naturally the NBA Live releases on PC. When NBA Live went console-only and NBA 2K came to PC, we turned our focus to that series. Basically, we’ve primarily focused on the brand leader that’s releasing on PC, but we’ve long been open to supporting mods for other games as well. There haven’t been as many of those releases – at least not around these parts – but modders have branched out into other titles, such as johnz1’s efforts for NBA Jam: On Fire Edition.

To that point though, there have been some other hoops titles over the years that can be modded. A focus on NBA Live and NBA 2K, and the general lack of popularity of these games, are the main reasons we haven’t seen fit to mod them. Nevertheless, they can be tinkered with to some extent, even if it’s simply renaming players. With more and more enthusiasm for retro basketball gaming and modding nowadays, there might be niche interest in furnishing them with a simple mod or two. Even if there isn’t quite enough interest to warrant any major public releases, the knowledge that we can mod these overlooked games could always spice up our retro basketball gaming sessions!

1. Slam ‘N Jam

Before the NBA Courtside series, Left Field Productions developed a couple of sim-arcade hybrids in the style of Konami’s NBA Give ‘N Go. The first game, Slam ‘N Jam ’95, was released for the short-lived 3DO, while the sequel Slam ‘N Jam ’96 Featuring Magic & Kareem came out on PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and PC (which dropped the ’96 from the title). It wasn’t NBA-licensed, with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar being the only real players. However, the format of its Season mode and the 29 teams were clearly inspired by the contemporary NBA, while Magic and Kareem’s teammates resembled a few other players from the Showtime Lakers.

In that sense, it was far less of an obvious knock-off NBA game than Super Dunk Shot a few years earlier! There isn’t much we can do about the deliberately different jersey colours for the not-NBA teams – at least as far as I can tell – but we can edit the players by opening a file called ROSTER using a hex editor. In addition to renaming players – which does involve matching the length of the original text, and potentially using some creative abbreviations here and there – it appears that we can modify their jersey numbers, ratings, and potentially even their appearance and other data! It’ll take some experimentation to map out all of those values, but it has modding potential.

2. Michael Jordan in Flight

Like Slam ‘N Jam ’96 Featuring Magic & Kareem, and so many other 90s basketball video games endorsed by players, Michael Jordan in Flight featured a roster of fake players alongside the titular star: in this case, His Airness. The game sees MJ heading up a Wilmington squad (while wearing Bulls-like red jerseys) in a 3-on-3 tournament against regional teams that are randomly assembled from the pool of fictional players. Of course, glancing at all of those players’ portraits, bios, and skills, it isn’t a stretch to suggest that some of them are based on actual players, past and present. With that in mind, one might be inspired to mod some real names into Michael Jordan in Flight.

Once again, hex editing is the method here. This time, the file to look for is bb.dat. It contains the players’ names, nicknames, and scouting reports in plain text that can be easily overwritten as long as the length of the original text is matched (spaces to blank out letters are fine). As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change heights, weights, and abilities, so making an accurate roster would seem to be impossible. Since the squads aren’t set aside from Michael Jordan playing for Wilmington though, you can pick the player whose portrait, bio, and scouting report is the closest match, and replace their name accordingly. It’s not much, but it does make it another PC game we can mod.

3. NBA Action 98

Much as NBA Live shares a lineage with EA’s NBA Playoffs series, NBA 2K traces its roots back to an earlier release from Visual Concepts: a game titled NBA Fastbreak ’98 on PlayStation, and NBA Action 98 on Sega Saturn and PC. To that end, there were attempts to mod the PC version, and potentially tip off a scene to rival NBA Live 98 modding. This resulted in the creation of an external roster editor, which like the NBA Live 98 Toolkit, allowed for customisation that the in-game functionality didn’t provide. In fact, a couple of current roster updates for NBA Action 98 from March and August survived, and they’ve been preserved in our Downloads section.

Now, the roster editor is quite limited compared to the Toolkits and other utilities that our founders made for NBA Live PC, but it still allows us to rename players, change bio data, and alter lineups. If nothing else, it can be used to rename the Roster Player “1 Guard” on the Chicago Bulls to Michael Jordan, assign him #23, and switch him with Ron Harper so that he’s starting at shooting guard. That alone makes the Bulls more fun to play with! Issues may be encountered in modern Windows, but a virtual machine is a viable workaround. Visual Basic 6 is required and some other missing files may need to be tracked down, but it’s indeed possible to mod NBA Action 98.

4. College Slam

Since I’ve covered some titles that allow players to be renamed with external tools, let’s take a look at one that has that function in-game! Acclaim’s spinoff to the NBA Jam series, College Slam, attempts to replicate the same high-flying excitement at the collegiate level. The core gameplay is solid, quarters have been replaced by halves, Tim Kitzrow is on the call, and there’s even the ability to call timeout and substitute players. Alley-oops could also be thrown, and the On Fire mechanic was retained. However, as a North American exclusive full of fictional players, College Slam didn’t achieve the same worldwide popularity and pop culture relevance as NBA Jam had.

That’s no surprise and was always going to be the case, but fans of college basketball can potentially make it more interesting by renaming the players, and even changing their ratings. Notably, each player has a maximum attribute cap, which means you can’t just give them a nine in every category. It also suggests that similar caps were used as guides in NBA Jam Tournament Edition, which would explain some of the unusual attributes that left certain players noticeably overrated or underrated. In any case, not only does College Slam include player customisation, but there are also ROM hacks for the Super Nintendo version which mod the roster in greater detail.

5. NBA Inside Drive 2000

This article, and my previous Friday Five about games that I wish we could mod, are topic ideas that I’ve had for a few years now. NBA Inside Drive 2000 was originally on the latter list, but then I recalled that there’s a plugin for the EA Graphics Editor that adds compatibility with the game’s files. That led me down a rabbit hole back in 2022 in which I searched for long-lost Inside Drive 2000 mods; a journey I recounted for Wayback Wednesday. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in tracking down any mods or tools for NBA Inside Drive 2000, but I was able to confirm it had enjoyed a short-lived modding scene. So yes, technically, it’s a game we’ve been able to mod!

Sadly, unless we can recover those tools – and perhaps a few mods to demonstrate some techniques and provide templates – we won’t be modding NBA Inside Drive 2000 anytime soon. Well, I suppose someone else could come along and create a roster editor and other tools, but that seems highly unlikely! We still have the plugin for art files and for anyone who’s keen, it might be worth investigating roster saves and other files with a hex editor to see if there’s anything that can be easily changed. It’s a long shot and I’m not expecting any developments here, but it’s still worth noting that NBA Inside Drive 2000 PC is indeed among the games we’ve been able to mod.

Do you remember being able to mod these games, and have you ever given it a try? What are some other basketball video games that we can mod, but not a lot of people talk about these days? Let me know in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Games You May Not Know You Can Mod appeared first on NLSC.