Wayback Wednesday: NBA Live 96 on the Road

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 reminiscing about the time that I took an NBA Live 96 PC season on the road.

I don’t need many excuses to nostalgically reminisce about 1998! As tumultuous as our teenage years can be, it was an exciting time for my younger self. In the NBA, there was The Last Dance for the Chicago Bulls. It’s the year that I became a fan of professional wrestling, with the Attitude Era and Monday Night Wars in full swing. The Simpsons was still in its golden age. I also made new friends that would end up impacting my life more than I could’ve ever expected. Oh, and I also became an uncle at 13 when my nephew was born in January (my brother is 16 years older than me).

Indeed, it’s my nephew that inspired this walk down memory lane. More specifically, he got married earlier this month, and he and his wife are expecting a daughter, so I’ll soon be a great uncle. On top of being proud of and happy for him, it’s also a reminder of how time flies, as it seems like only yesterday that we were waiting to meet him! Thinking about how those 27 years sometimes seem like they went by in a blink, I’ve recalled how a trip to attend his christening produced a basketball gaming memory: playing NBA Live 96 PC on the road. Let’s take a look back…way back…

Back in 1998, I didn’t have the means to play NBA Live 98. There’s no way that the PC version would ever run on our aging 486 DX2/66, and the Super Nintendo version wasn’t released in Australia. I’d discovered the NLSC and roster modding the previous August though, which led to me creating a 1998 season roster for NBA Live 96. And so, that was how I played along with The Last Dance, making trades and adjusting lineups to reflect what was happening in real life. Even though I ultimately didn’t finish that season and the save file is sadly long-lost, it’s one of my all-time favourite basketball gaming experiences, as it represents the pinnacle of my hoops fandom.

Because it took a while to put together my roster update, the real 1998 campaign was well underway by the time I began my virtual season. Naturally, I was eager to play the game as often as possible so that I stood a good chance of getting through an 82-game season on 12-minute quarters. As such, I was unenthusiastic about the prospect of missing a weekend of gaming due to travelling interstate to attend my nephew’s christening in May. Admittedly, it was a self-centred mindset – this was an important family event, after all – but in my defense, I was a teenager! As it turned out though, I was indeed able to hit the virtual hardwood and continue my season that weekend.

On top of convincing my folks to let me take my Nintendo 64 on the trip, I packed a handful of my favourite PC games in a CD carry case, one of them being NBA Live 96. Funnily enough, I wasn’t actually expecting to be able to play any of them, but I couldn’t shake the paranoid idea of something happening to my collection while we were away. Mind you, they could’ve just as easily been damaged or stolen while at the motel we were staying at, but hey, I’m not going to try to explain the rationale of my teenage self! I also packed a small selection of backups on floppy disk; it was 1998, after all. This included the latest version of my NBA Live 96 1998 season save file.

Following the service, we spent the rest of the day at my nephew’s grandparents on his mother’s side. They graciously allowed me to set up my N64 for a few games of Goldeneye 007, and also gave me free run of their PC. I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity like that – especially since their Pentium desktop was far superior to the PC we were pushing to its limits – so I installed NBA Live 96 and copied my season file from my backup disk. Next up on the schedule were the Orlando Magic, a team that featured a couple of new faces in Bo Outlaw and Mark Price. Because it was still early in the season and I was mimicking real life, Scottie Pippen was inactive for me.

Thanks to the fact that I kept a journal back then – and because I saw fit to write about exciting things like playing NBA Live 96 PC – I can actually provide some stats and other details in addition to what I can remember off the top of my head! With Pippen inactive and Randy Brown starting in his place, it turned out to be a tough game. It didn’t help that Michael Jordan had an off-night – most likely the result of me trying to force the issue with him – but it was former Bull Horace Grant that turned the game into a dogfight. Grant poured in 50 points – 19 more than he ever scored in an actual NBA game – and added 11 rebounds as the Magic made me work for every bucket.

As a result, the game came down to the wire. Randy Brown – of all players – made a couple of clutch free throws in the waning seconds to seal a 133-130 victory. Even though it wasn’t MJ’s best game of the young season, I noted that I managed to raise his free throw percentage on the year by going 4/4 from the line, and that he held a four point lead on Karl Malone in the scoring race with an average of 32.7 ppg. I also wrote that Dennis Rodman’s 12.4 rebounds per game were fifth-best in the league, and about two boards behind the leader (most likely Charles Barkley). I recall going out of my way to snag rebounds with Rodman to get him the crown by the end of the year.

With the game in the books, I saved my season and copied the file to the floppy disk. Once I was home, I overwrote the now-outdated save on our PC, and continued the season with the next game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, now featuring Shawn Kemp. Obviously, it wasn’t a tremendous amount of progress – just one game that I probably would’ve played that week anyway if I hadn’t been able to do so over the weekend – but there was still novelty in taking NBA Live 96 on the road like that. Again, I wasn’t expecting to even have the opportunity to play it on the trip! I only took those game CD-ROMs and backup disks with me for my own peace of mind.

From a technological standpoint, it was also a satisfying process to successfully take my PC gaming on the road like that. These days, it would be a much simpler affair. Between laptops, digital games, and save files being stored in the cloud, playing a title remotely and synchronising your progress between devices takes very little effort or in-depth knowhow. I wouldn’t say that what I did with my NBA Live 96 season was incredibly difficult; especially for someone who’d been tinkering with computers for a few years at that point. Still, between knowing how to install games and which files to back up, and carting around the CD-ROM and floppy disk, it was a far bigger effort!

Looking back at taking my NBA Live 96 season on the road for a weekend, a couple of things stand out. The first is of course my enthusiasm for the game and my 1998 season. I’m sure I could’ve made it through the weekend without playing that game, but I jumped at the opportunity when it presented itself. In turn, that speaks to how updating NBA Live 96 for 1998 kept the game fresh, and alleviated any frustration with being unable to play a newer title. Granted, not having a good enough PC gave me little choice but to turn to modding to make the most out of what I had! However, I have no doubt that it helped solidify NBA Live 96 as one of my all-time favourites.

I’ll confess that the second thought that comes to mind isn’t quite as positive. While this is a fun basketball gaming memory for me, that’s not what that weekend was all about. It was about my nephew and family, not my hobbies and basketball fandom. Reflecting on it now as an adult, I definitely appreciate the generosity and grace of being allowed to disappear into another room to play a game, rather than take part in family activities. I don’t want to be too hard on my younger self here. Once again, I was a teenager with all the usual moodiness and self-interest that brings, at a family event with no one else my age to socialise with. Still, I acknowledge the immaturity.

Considering that I was going to the trouble of backing up my NBA Live 96 season to the extent that I could take it on the road to play, it’s weird that I ended up losing it. We did finally get a new PC in 2000 after that venerable 486 DX2/66 gave up the ghost, at which point I picked up NBA Live 2000. My guess is that with a new title to play, I didn’t see myself returning to that NBA Live 96 season, and so didn’t bother copying the file when I reinstalled the game. Or maybe I did, and then inadvertently deleted it at some point. As for the floppy disk, it may have been mistakenly thrown out, or deliberately discarded if I decided that I no longer needed those backups.

Unfortunately, even with my predisposition for retro gaming, at times I’ve definitely underestimated my desire to return to old favourites and pick up where I left off. Of course, before I had the convenience of external hard drives, my backups weren’t as comprehensive as they are now. Between hard drive crashes, careless deletion, and failure to preserve those floppy disks, I’ve lost quite a few of my saves and other files from the 90s and early 2000s. I’ve certainly learned my lesson, though I wish I could still dust off my 1998 season in NBA Live 96 and a couple of other saves today. Then again, there’s no reason that I can’t start over fresh, and even fix up that roster a bit!

Given that I’ve played literally thousands of games on the virtual hardwood over the years, it’s impossible to remember every single one in detail. There are some moments and games that stand out though, and this is one of them. After all, it’s the only time that I’ve continued a season in a basketball video game away from home, and using someone else’s PC to boot! I may have fallen short of finishing that season, but it was still satisfying to play as much of it as I did. It undoubtedly helped me to indulge my love of basketball at the peak of my fandom. As for that game against the Magic, it may not have been my best performance, but it’ll always be one of my favourite wins.

(I’d like to think that I’ve grown up and become a better and more caring uncle, too. Congratulations again, J and C!)

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