Wayback Wednesday: Regional Exclusives & Late Releases

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 taking a look back at a time when certain basketball video games were regional exclusives, and/or had late releases.

The basketball gaming landscape has changed drastically since our choices were whittled down to just NBA Live and NBA 2K, culminating in a virtual monopoly for the latter. When a handful of developers and publishers were throwing their hat into the ring with hoops games, we received a variety of titles of varying quality, but most brought something interesting to the table. Of course, not every game was available worldwide. While NBA Live and NBA 2K stood as examples of global brands, other games were regional exclusives, usually only released in North America.

On top of that, if other regions did receive a particular game, it might not be until several months later. It may seem like a terrible marketing decision to release an NBA game well after the season has tipped off, but there are titles that have come along quite late in a campaign, even with their domestic release. Indeed, not even NBA 2K and NBA Live have been immune to late releases, if only outside North America. It’s an interesting difference in the way that basketball video games used to be handled, so let’s take a look back…way back…

While I’ll be focusing on NBA games – since they’ve generally been global releases – I will note college basketball games as an obvious example of regional exclusives. Due to different entities controlling the domestic and international licensing rights, NCAA games haven’t been officially released outside of North America. In some cases, this has resulted in games being rebranded, such as NCAA Basketball for Super Nintendo becoming World League Basketball in PAL regions, and the infamous Super Dunk Shot in Japan. Once again though, NBA games provide far more intriguing examples, given that series such as Live, 2K, Jam, Street, and so on, do come out worldwide.

Take the NBA ShootOut series, for example. A first party sports franchise for Sony, the first three games in the series – NBA ShootOut, NBA ShootOut ’97, and NBA ShootOut 98 – were released in both NTSC and PAL regions. However, in PAL regions, the games were renamed Total NBA; a very 90s title indeed! After the 1999 season entry was cancelled, the series returned with NBA ShootOut 2000, but it was now a North American exclusive. As an aside, some sources list NBA ShootOut 2000 as the only game in the series released for PC, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, as even the series’ Wikipedia article contradicts itself when listing all of the entries.

Of course, the NBA ShootOut series was far from the first non-college basketball game to be region-exclusive. All-Pro Basketball for the NES was only released in North America and Japan, meaning that PAL regions missed out. Likewise, Tecmo NBA Basketball for NES was a North American exclusive, though Tecmo Super NBA Basketball was released worldwide. NBA Courtside 2 Featuring Kobe Bryant was only available in North America, despite the first game having a PAL release. And, speaking of sequels that were regional exclusives, NBA Ballers: Phenom was another game that didn’t see a release outside of the United States and Canada.

After NBA ShootOut 2004, Sony ended up revamping and rebranding the game into the NBA series, also known as NBA: Featuring the Life. With the exception of NBA 08, these games were not released outside of North America, in addition to obviously being exclusive to Sony’s consoles. Similarly, the Kinect-based NBA Baller Beats was exclusive to the Xbox 360, and wasn’t available worldwide. NBA Jam 2001 is the only Jam game that didn’t receive a worldwide release, apart from the spinoff College Slam that was NCAA-licensed. NBA 2K2 was the first game in the NBA 2K series to come out on PlayStation 2, but that version wasn’t available in PAL regions or Japan.

Konami also provides us with a couple of interesting examples in NBA Starting Five, released in Japan and North America, and NBA Starting Five 2005, which only came out in Japan. NBA Starting Five 2005 is a particularly noteworthy game that I’ll be covering in more detail at some point. While it has rather poor gameplay, it actually has classic NBA teams including Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics squads from the 80s, years before NBA 2K introduced historical teams with the Jordan Challenge. Being a Japanese exclusive however, that fact flew under the radar for most of us in PAL and NTSC regions. It’s wild to think such a lousy game had such a cool feature!

Living in a PAL region as I do, I didn’t get to play many of the aforementioned regional exclusives growing up, and there are some that I’ve still yet to experience. When I began expanding my collection of basketball video games a few years back, on top of the platforms at my disposal, regional locks were naturally a limitation. Since acquiring a PlayStation 3, a universal adapter for my SNES, and advances in emulation, it’s opened up the possibility to collect NTSC and Japanese releases as well. It means that I can play Super Dunk Shot and the SNES version of NBA Live 98 on original hardware, enjoying an authentic experience not possible on an emulator.

As to why certain NBA games and basketball titles without any licensed players ended up being North American exclusives, I don’t have an official answer. However, we can safely speculate that the former comes down to international licensing rights. Notably, a PAL version of Lakers vs. Celtics for the Sega Mega Drive was cancelled, though finished copies have made it into the wild. This version was reportedly pulled due to an inability to secure international licensing and distribution rights, something that was obviously cleared up for EA Sports’ future basketball games. It does suggest that other publishers might’ve run into similar roadblocks with their games, too.

It may well have come down to cost and projected financial risk. Any publisher who was confident that their NBA game would sell well overseas, and had the money and clout to secure the necessary international licensing agreements, obviously ended up releasing their games worldwide. It might’ve been too expensive or risky for games that held a much smaller market share to compete with global brands such as NBA Live and NBA 2K, and thus they focused on the domestic market where the league was most popular. The local popularity of basketball and projected sales are the likely factors behind certain non-NBA hoops games not being released in PAL regions.

So, what about late releases? For a long time now, basketball games and other genres alike tend to launch on the same day worldwide, with digital copies unlocking at midnight local time (or whatever time zone you set your console to, to speed things up). There was a time when virtual hoopers had to wait anywhere from a week or two to a number of months to get their hands on a new game. In some cases, the season would be halfway over before a game was released in your region, or for your console of choice! Looking back, these differing release dates undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of specific games in certain regions, or conversely, the lack thereof.

For example, as late as NBA 2K8, PAL regions were receiving the latest 2K game up to a month or more after North America. To put it into perspective, NBA 2K7 came out in North America for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Xbox 360 on September 26th, 2006. Australia didn’t receive it until October 20th, while Europe got the Xbox version a week later on the 27th, and the other versions on November 3rd. The PS3 version meanwhile launched on November 13th in North America, and April 27th in PAL regions! Such delays were standard right up until NBA 2K9, when at long last there were only a few days between the North American and worldwide releases.

In addition to brand loyalty and distaste for the dribbling controls, these late releases absolutely contributed to my reluctance to get into the NBA 2K series. For me back then, it was the game that came out months after the season began, long after I’d either grown fond of the latest NBA Live release, or returned to an earlier favourite. NBA Live was the brand that was reliably being released in Australia and in time for the season every year, so I had little incentive to look elsewhere for my virtual hardwood fix. I wouldn’t be surprised if it affected its initial popularity elsewhere too, until it overtook NBA Live in sales and reception, and presented itself as the premiere brand.

With that being said, the NBA Live series has had its own late releases. NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 PC were released months after their console counterparts, which was to their benefit as it allowed them to feature more up-to-date rosters. Quite infamously in our community, NBA Live 2001 PC was pushed back until February in North America, and March in Europe; years later, we discovered that it was the result of the development team being downsized. NBA Live 15 was pushed back a few weeks, hurting its reputation before it was even released. It would’ve always had a tough time contending with NBA 2K15, but the delay certainly didn’t help matters.

Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside is perhaps the most egregious example of a game released late in the season. Set during the 1998 campaign with rosters accurate of February, it was released in North America on April 27th and in PAL regions on June 10th; halfway through the NBA Finals! It did benefit from the lack of basketball games on Nintendo 64 however, and was a new take on sim basketball for 1998 as the league headed into a lockout. The North American-exclusive sequel was released in November 1999, around the beginning of the 2000 season. NBA Courtside 2002 was another late release though, not coming out in PAL regions until May that year.

The first three NBA ShootOut/Total NBA games were also released as the regular season was entering its final weeks, and a couple of Konami’s games such as ESPN NBA 2Night and ESPN NBA2Night 2002 were likewise midseason releases. It’s no surprise that these series never gained the same traction as NBA Live or NBA 2K, which more often than not had a domestic release prior to the season they were set in, or during the first couple of weeks of the campaign. As with regional releases and console exclusives, they remained niche, even if they were solid games that were enjoyed. It’s no surprise that NBA Live and NBA 2K were ultimately left standing.

Still, while it may not have been a viable marketing strategy in the long run, it’s unfortunate that we don’t get a few more NBA games with release dates staggered throughout the season. While long-running series such as NBA 2K and NBA Live (if it ever returns) should tip off a season of NBA gaming, it’d be fun to get a new game around February or March, after the flagship titles have been out for a few months and we feel like something different. A digital-only release that aims for a hybrid sim-arcade style in the vein of NBA in the Zone, or offers a more traditional experience in contrast to the big brands, would be a wonderful throwback to the days of alternatives.

As for regional exclusives, while it isn’t an ideal scenario for the enthusiastic hoops gamer, it’s been fascinating to learn about them all these years later, and get my hands on some of them. If you weren’t in a PAL region, it’s not something that you would’ve encountered nearly as often, with a bigger library of games at your disposal. Some games did have late releases in North America too however, which is impossible to imagine happening now. It’s a sign of how the gaming industry has changed over the years, becoming mainstream and profitable. We don’t need to see any more regional exclusives, but there’s definitely room for alternatives that drop a few months later.

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