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 mods that I’ve wanted to make for NBA Live 96 PC over the years.

As I’ve said before, NBA Live 96 PC is one of my all-time favourite basketball video games. Indeed, it’s one of the very first basketball video games that I owned, and the title that led me to discover the NLSC and modding way back in 1997. As such, even though other titles have surpassed NBA Live 96 in my personal rankings, I have great affection and nostalgia for it. Those fond memories come rushing back whenever I fire it up for a retro gaming session, or pick up the tools to tinker with it once again. In short, it’s brought me a great deal of joy over the years, and continues to do so.

Of course, when it comes to making NBA Live 96 mods, I do have a few regrets. That includes criticism of my efforts to update the game for the 1998 season all those years ago, but some of my biggest regrets with NBA Live 96 are the mods that I didn’t get to make. In some cases I made some preliminary preparations for a project, or even managed some early progress on a mod, only for it to fall through. Obviously, I could still probably attempt some of these projects as I’m all for creating fun mods for my own sessions with NBA Live 96, but it’s hard to justify that much work for such an old game. Nevertheless, here are five NBA Live 96 mods I’ve always wanted to make.

1. Australian NBL Rosters (Circa 1998)

Unfortunately, my hometown no longer has a team in the Australian NBL. It stings, not only because I’d love to be able to attend some games, but also because the league actually started here! In any case, my father did take my cousin and I to a few games back in the late 90s. Granted, even in its golden age the NBL wasn’t on par with the NBA – there’s a reason that Acie Earl came over here and played like David Robinson – but it was still awesome to see professional basketball live. At one of the games we attended, we received a program that included roster listings for the entire NBL. With the internet still in its relative infancy in the late 90s, this was an excellent resource!

I’d already begun honing my NBA Live 96 roster modding skills, including changing text strings through hex editing. To that point, in addition to overwriting players with the roster editor, I knew how to change team names. Sure, the logos would be wrong and there was nothing I could do about the audio, but in the early days of NBA Live modding, that wasn’t an issue. My cousin and I started working on a 1998 NBL roster after coming home from that game, but the project quickly fell apart. It was going to be a lot of work, but more to the point, finding information that wasn’t listed in that program was still tough at that time. These days, such a project would be more viable.

2. 1987-88 Season Mod

I love NBA history! When I was getting into basketball in the mid 90s, coverage of the NBA was far more respectful of previous generations of players. And so, even if we believed that the current era was the best, there was none of this “plumbers and dentists” talk that shills who never played ball and benchwarmers turned “analysts” are now paid to bleat. And so, it was fascinating to read about the players of the past, and to watch highlights and recaps of famous games and series. Unsurprisingly, on top of creating 1998 season mods for NBA Live 96, I became interested in making a retro roster as well. The original NLSC roster packs were also a big inspiration here.

At one point, I landed on the idea of creating a 1988 season roster. It felt suitably retro at the time, with younger versions of players I knew such as Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Charles Barkley, as well as older players I admired such as Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Although online resources were still scarce, I had a useful reference in the 1995 edition of Microsoft Complete NBA Basketball! Of course, it didn’t list the final season rosters or year-by-year transactions, so it quickly became apparent that accuracy would be difficult. It was also a huge undertaking, and despite my enthusiasm for NBA history, I ended up prioritising current roster mods.

3. 2020s Season Mods

Because I’ve sunk countless hours into maintaining current roster updates for various NBA Live games over the years, I can’t completely shake the idea of updating an old favourite. There’s an undeniable novelty to bringing the modern NBA to an old game that you and others in the community still enjoy. It’s why I dabbled with the idea of a current roster for NBA 2K11 when there was still a bit more interest in updates for it. Much to my dismay and embarrassment, several roadblocks ended up putting an end to those efforts before I ever managed a public release. Had I chosen to update an older NBA Live game that I was more familiar with, I might’ve had more success.

Then again, maybe not! In recent years, I’ve also toyed with the idea of updating an old PC game such as NBA Live 95 or NBA Live 96 with current season mods. In fact, a 2026 season update remains on my list of potential modding ideas to consider! It’d certainly come together quicker than a mod for a more advanced game, and I wouldn’t have to worry about art updates. At the end of the day though, I’m not as enthusiastic about the modern NBA as I once was, and that makes it rather difficult to get properly motivated to create such a huge mod. I won’t rule out the idea completely – even if it’s just cobbling together a couple of teams to play with – but it’s not a priority for me.

4. All-Time All-Star Rosters

Towards the end of my time actively making roster mods for NBA Live 96 PC, I was considering projects other than current season updates. Retro rosters were always an option, as were projects inspired by the Legends and Champs rosters that our founders made for later games. One idea that came to mind was an All-Time All-Star roster, in which I’d replace all of the NBA teams with some of the best East and West squads throughout history. I used to be a huge fan of the NBA All-Star Weekend and the All-Star Game before a generation of unmotivated players turned it into a complete joke, so it seemed like a fun way to stage classic showdowns in one of my favourite games.

Although it would obviously still be a fairly large undertaking, there were definitely some advantages to the idea. With so many perennial All-Stars throughout history, the number of unique players that I’d need to create was far smaller than the average retro roster mod. The basic player models would make it easy to quickly add players while giving them an appropriate appearance. I even knew how to assign the All-Star logos and jerseys to the NBA teams for more authenticity! With that being said, it was still a lot of work to create a mod for a game that most people had moved on from, and I too was beginning to leave behind. However, the general concept is one I’ll keep in mind!

5. Dream Team Rosters

Let’s wrap things up with another concept roster that ultimately fell through, again mostly due to the workload and declining interest in NBA Live 96 mods. In addition to the All-Time All-Star rosters, I also considered creating a roster featuring the USA Dream Teams, the Australian Boomers, and other international squads. Such rosters had been made for other games, so once again I thought it’d be fun to bring the idea to a game that had already been solidified as one of my all-time favourites. Once again, the amount of work it’d require was a concern and thus a factor in me abandoning the idea, but there was also another key drawback that deterred me from pursuing it.

As hard as I tried, I couldn’t import the Dream Team’s logos into NBA Live 96’s files. Indeed, Bobby H – who did actually succeed in creating new team logos for my 2001 season Complete Update for NBA Live 96 – didn’t have any luck either. Even though we were used to more minimalist updates that ignored outdated or incorrect branding, it was tough to get excited about the whole idea after the possibility of custom Team USA logos fell through. I’m all for minimalist modding – even to this day – but since the purpose of a Dream Teams roster was to go beyond previous mods for NBA Live 96 with some accurate logos, the project no longer felt worth all the time and effort.

Long-time basketball gamers, what are some of your favourite mods for NBA Live 96 PC? What are some mods you wish that you or someone else in the community made for one of your all-time favourite basketball games? Have your say 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 NBA Live 96 Mods I’ve Wanted To Make appeared first on NLSC.