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 things in basketball video games that became retroactive Easter eggs.

Can there be such a thing as retroactive Easter eggs? After all, by definition, Easter eggs in video games and other media are deliberately placed with the intention of being found; even if takes a long time. To that point, there have been many secrets in video games that remained hidden for decades, but they were always present. In that sense, there’s nothing retroactive about them. Of course, when it comes to fictional works, reveals and ret-cons can certainly turn minor details into retroactive Easter eggs by giving them new meaning and importance.

Similarly, future events can re-contextualise content in basketball video games, as well as associated materials such as preview media. When we look back at them with the benefit of hindsight, they become retroactive Easter eggs. Even when they’re not exactly hidden and there’s a straightforward explanation for their presence – and there generally is – they’re now far more exciting to find. And so, if you enjoy revisiting old basketball video games as I do, you’re basically guaranteed to encounter retroactive Easter eggs, from forgotten cameos to amusing coincidences. Indeed, on top of many old favourites holding up superbly, these are great reasons to dust off some classics.

1. Coincidental Foreshadowing

There’s a natural desire to seek out patterns and connections as we try to make sense of this crazy, unpredictable world of ours. From patternicity and Apophenia to the supposed predictions of Nostradamus and The Simpsons, we try to connect the dots whenever major events occur. To that end, I’m not suggesting that developers possess the ability to see the future! However, when real life ends up imitating games, we do get some retroactive Easter eggs. A good example of this is the Fantastic Journey in LeBron: Path to Greatness in NBA 2K14. In broad strokes, its story beats predicted his career path after 2014, including leaving the Heat and returning to the Cavaliers.

Mind you, that could also be classified as a bold prediction that just happened to come true. When it comes to Easter eggs that retroactively became nods to the future, a fun example can be found on the back of the NBA Live 96 PC box. One of the preview screenshots features the Orlando Magic taking on the Los Angeles Lakers. Shaquille O’Neal – the game’s cover player – famously left the Magic to sign with the Lakers in the 1996 offseason. Unlike Path to Greatness, I doubt that anyone was trying to make a prediction there. It was just a preview featuring the cover player’s team and another popular club. Once again though, with hindsight it becomes an amusing coincidence.

2. Future NBA Players Making Cameos Via EuroLeague Teams

The inclusion of the EuroLeague teams in NBA 2K14 through NBA 2K17 obviously expanded the game’s content beyond the NBA. With a handful of former NBA players now playing for the featured clubs, a few familiar faces ended up making their first official appearance in a video game in several years. In a way, those cameos could be seen as Easter eggs; well, as much as readily-available bonus content can count as an Easter egg, anyway! For those of us who weren’t following the EuroLeague, it was still an enjoyable surprise to see them. We also got a glimpse of players who went on to play in the NBA, and those appearances have thus become retroactive Easter eggs.

For some players, those early EuroLeague cameos came right before their jump to the NBA. Following their appearance in NBA 2K14, Nikola Mirotic and Joe Ingles both made their NBA debuts during the 2015 season. If you were to go back and peruse those EuroLeague rosters nowadays though, the name that’s bound to leap out at you is Luka Doncic. You’ll find him deep on Real Madrid’s bench in NBA 2K16, with an Overall Rating of 58 and a generic cyberface. Bewildering as that may seem, keep in mind that many of the EuroLeague players didn’t have proper likenesses, and Doncic was also a 16-year-old rookie prospect. All the same, it’s certainly bizarre to see now!

3. Debuts in Games Long Before the Real NBA

While the aforementioned EuroLeague players are technically examples of this as well, I’m talking about players who were part of the NBA rosters. There have been quite a few players who were included in games long before they made their NBA debut. Sometimes, it’s a case of an injury forcing them to miss what should’ve been their rookie season. However, the more interesting examples are the players who made it into games because they were drafted or signed as free agents, but ended up being released after the rosters were finalised, and spent the season playing elsewhere. It’s always entertaining to find players in games where they ultimately weren’t needed.

Depending on when the rosters were finalised, these players may still be on a team, but many have been Free Agents. Either way, their inclusion was always welcome. In addition to being another real player that could be signed in franchise mode to fill out a roster – I’m sure a lot of players became Virtual Hardwood Legends this way – it was useful for anyone keeping an older game up to date with a current season mod. They were one less player that needed to be created, plus they already had assets such as a cyberface, portrait, and PA/commentary audio. Their inclusion in those games wasn’t originally remarkable, but when we revisit them today, they’re retroactive Easter eggs.

4. Phantom Stints in Various Basketball Games

I’ve covered over 100 phantom stints in my Friday Five series recalling players who only appeared on certain teams in games. It’s obviously trivia that I find particularly enjoyable, because it both supports and contradicts the notion of basketball video games being interactive almanacs. On one hand, there’s accuracy in placing those players on teams they never tallied a single minute for. They were officially on the roster at the time, so video games should reflect that. On the other hand, it means that video games aren’t always a completely reliable resource as far as documenting team lineups and players’ careers, since the context of any phantom stints will be missing.

Still, that’s what makes them such fun retroactive Easter eggs to discover! When a game is released – or even when an official roster update comes through to reflect a trade or signing – we don’t necessarily know that a certain player won’t ever play for the team they’re on. It’s been fascinating to go back and comb through the rosters of countless games – with a huge assist from David L – and find so many phantom stints. There are some really interesting stories behind many of them, from Michael Redd’s restricted free agency in 2002 to the cancelled Robert Horry/Sean Elliott trade. All basketball games capture a snapshot in time, but some are particularly intriguing.

5. Fictional Team Names That Became Real

Between pre-named custom squads and unlicensed games that were doing their best to get around trademarks, several hoops titles have featured fictional team names. The ones in Super Dunk Shot are infamously hilarious. However, a number of names that have been used by fictional video game teams have been subsequently adopted in real life. When the Seattle Supersonics relocated to Oklahoma City and rebranded as the Thunder, they chose a name that happened to match a custom team in NBA Full Court Press. Super Dunk Shot’s Orlando Miracle matches the name of the WNBA team that became the Connecticut Sun, and next year will become the revived Houston Comets.

Speaking of the Houston Comets, that name was used as a stand-in for the Rockets in Ultimate Basketball for NES, seven years before they became a founding WNBA club. Pat Riley Basketball features a team named the Dallas Wings, beating the team formerly known as the Detroit and Tulsa Shock to the punch by some 26 years. It’s not altogether surprising as there are some common themes and popular monikers when it comes to naming sports teams, so such coincidences were bound to happen eventually. Nevertheless, it results in retroactive Easter eggs when you spot the names of real teams being used for fictional clubs in video games developed years earlier.

Do you enjoy finding retroactive Easter eggs while retro gaming? Can you recall any other examples similar to these? 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 Retroactive Easter Eggs in Basketball Games appeared first on NLSC.