Whatever happened to college basketball video games?

College Basketball games became a normal part of the video game ecosystem during the 16-bit era, with both the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis featuring entries. Nintendo itself even published NCAA Basketball, developed by Sculptured Software, on the SNES in 1992. EA created Coach K College Basketball in 1995 using their NBA Live engine, which would transition into the NCAA March Madness/NCAA Basketball series. Sony’s 989 Sports briefly made PlayStation-exclusive games with NCAA Final Four, while 2K’s ESPN College Hoops transitioned into College Hoops 2K during the ’00s. These eventually all died out, just like EA’s college football series.

Unlike with college football, college basketball didn’t vanish primarily because of increased licensing costs, but a lack of sales. Matt Brown, founder and primary contributor to Extra Points, is in the business of college sports business, and broke the story of EA Sports College Football 25 development—he has also been at the forefront of the college basketball revival. As Brown tells The A.V. Club, “The college basketball games were discontinued before the college football games, not because of player likeness lawsuits, but because they weren’t selling. College basketball is far more of a niche product in the US than college football. 2K is working to create a new college basketball product, but with the market far less certain than with college football, major developers are moving with caution.”

As Brown reported in 2025, both EA and 2K submitted proposals for the revival of a college basketball video game following the success of EA Sports College Football 25, and the rights to licensing for it, with the College Licensing Company (CLC) preferring EA’s much larger proposal that would include every Division I basketball program—men’s and women’s—out of the gate, as well as likenesses for as many as 8,700 players—they just needed to opt-in and earn Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) cash for doing so. 2K, unsatisfied with this, reached out to some schools independently from their proposal, making EA’s dream of a unified game an impossibility thanks to the licensing issues that move created.

So, now we wait for 2K to produce…something. All we know for sure is that it won’t approach the scope of EA’s proposal. As Brown tells it, “[2K] didn’t commit to the full D-I slate in their proposal to CLC, and they haven’t committed to the full D-I slate in the press releases, and they haven’t committed to the full D-I slate in my conversations with their licensing team.” In 2K’s proposal from 2025, it suggested 130 teams max within five years of its first standalone game, which will release at a time still TBD—possibly within the next couple of years. College basketball isn’t college football, though, nor is it neatly split into subdivisions: 130 teams is a fraction of the whole, as there are 365 men’s programs and 363 women’s. UMass might very well be in whatever 2K comes out with at some point; Merrimack, maybe not.

So, here we are in 2026, with the Final Four approaching and no college basketball game on the market—just some college basketball DLC for NBA 2K26, a black hole of commodity fetishism where a video game should be. Thanks to 2K circumventing the CLC’s proposal, it might take the better part of a decade—if ever—for us to get the full slate of Division I college basketball at our fingertips, to be able to play as those teams that might never otherwise sniff a national championship in the real world. That’s depressing, but it fits with the state of basketball video games in 2026, at least. Merrimack’s dreams of a national championship remain as elusive in the video game world as they do the real one.