Wayback Wednesday: My 1998 Season in NBA Live 96 PC

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 my season in NBA Live 96 PC, playing with a 1998 roster update.

I’ll readily admit that sometimes it’s difficult to get my head around the fact that it’s been over 25 years since The Last Dance came to an end. To put it into perspective, in 1998, that would’ve been the equivalent of looking back at the New York Knicks’ 1973 championship season! It doesn’t feel like such ancient history when your own nostalgia is involved, and as a Chicago Bulls fan, the 1998 season is naturally quite memorable for me. Those memories also involve the virtual hardwood, as it was during the 1998 season that I made my first roster updates for NBA Live 96 PC.

It was also one of the first seasons that I tried to play along with in a video game. Not in NBA Live 98, mind you. Unfortunately, our family’s aging PC couldn’t handle that game, as I found out firsthand when I tried running the demo! Instead, I used NBA Live 96 PC and my aforementioned 1998 season roster update. Although it was ultimately another season that I didn’t complete, it’s nevertheless one of my favourite basketball gaming experiences, thanks to all of the effort that I put into it beyond simply playing the games. Let’s take a look back…way back…

Needless to say, before I could play the 1998 season in NBA Live 96 PC, I had to finish creating my roster update! I’m not sure exactly when I finished that opening night roster, as the dates on the files reflect updates and fixes that I made after the season ended. However, I believe it was ready sometime in November. What I do remember is discovering that I’d made a typo when entering Kurt Thomas’ stats for the 1997 season, which caused him to average over 100 ppg! Not only did I have to quickly fix the roster, but I also elected to restart the season. I’d only played a game or two, so it wasn’t too painful to start over and pretend that the gaffe never happened.

After that, my Season was finally underway, as I assumed control of the defending champion Chicago Bulls. Because I was keen to bring the 1998 season to NBA Live 96 PC – not only through releasing a roster update for the community, but also in my own gaming – I began the year by doing something I’ve never done before or since on the virtual hardwood: I lost on purpose! I’d changed a couple of games around in the Bulls’ schedule in my roster update, so that their opener was against the Celtics; just like the real 1998 season. For that added touch of authenticity, my Bulls also lost that first game to Boston. And yes, thanks to the error with Kurt Thomas, I did it twice!

While that was certainly an unusual decision on my part, I did have the good sense to not try mimicking the result of every single real game from there on out. I knew that I’d have to diverge from the real results to some extent, up to and including winning the championship even if the Bulls didn’t (though that outcome seemed unfathomable to my teenage self!). However, I decided that I’d represent real injuries and trades in my virtual 1998 season, so I had Scottie Pippen out of action for the first half of the year. I also copied many of the lineups that the Bulls had run with early on, including giving Randy Brown the starting nod alongside Michael Jordan and Ron Harper.

Because Season mode in NBA Live 96 PC allows you to modify the rosters for CPU-controlled teams, I extended this approach to the rest of the league. I was able to have John Stockton and Keith Van Horn miss the first few weeks of the season as they’d done in real life. When Karl Malone was suspended for a game after he knocked out David Robinson with an errant elbow, I took him out of the Jazz’s lineup. Whenever a player was traded, signed, or released, I accounted for the move in tandem with the roster updates that I was releasing. The exact dates didn’t always line up, and I’m sure that a few players were out of the lineup for too long, but I enjoyed the realism of it.

In fact, that’s why I began including a document with my 1998 season roster updates for NBA Live 96 PC, listing all the trades and lineup changes you’d have to make in order to mimic real life. I’m sure I’m not the only person who liked the idea of doing that, and hopefully that document helped a few people who were using my rosters to keep their Season games up to date. These days it would be easy for everyone to find that information themselves, but back then, we didn’t have the same resources at our disposal. Even now, I’d like to think that such a document would be useful, since it’d save gamers the time and effort of researching that info and compiling a checklist.

As I did with the NBA Live 95 PC season that my cousin and I were playing, I had a section on the NBA Live Domain covering my 1998 season in NBA Live 96. Once again, I’m glad that I held onto those files in my archives, as they preserve some of the specific details and results from that season that I’ve forgotten in the years since! I did get slack with the updates though as the standings are accurate through 66 games, yet I did actually play as far as the first round of the Playoffs. At 52-14, my Bulls were atop the East at that point – and doing better than their real life counterparts – but the Seattle SuperSonics had the slight edge overall, with a league-best record of 54-12.

Thanks to NBA Live 96 basing simulated statistics off a player’s numbers from the previous year – if they had them – the league leaders were fairly accurate across the board. I had MJ averaging 33.4 ppg which was somewhat higher than what he was posting at that point of his career, but it still wasn’t an outrageous number. That’s not to say that I avoided unrealistic moments, as he did score 105 points in a game against the Hawks. That was something I did to keep things fresh late in the season, and also because as a teenager, I wished MJ had broken that record! He was also averaging 2.7 bpg; far from realistic, but that was due to blocks being too plentiful in NBA Live 96.

Although I was previously rather critical of my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96, it did produce fairly realistic results in my Season game, especially since I was going to the trouble of accounting for all the trades, injuries, and lineup changes. I was also able to update the All-Stars in time for the midseason classic. However, I got too clever in trying to swap the All-Star court with the Knicks’ arena, so that the game would be played in New York. It worked, but also resulted in it erroneously counting as a regular season game. Thus, I had to undo that change, re-load my save, and re-play it. The East won as MJ led the way with 48 points, breaking what was then a record.

Glancing back at the box score for that All-Star Game though, I was reminded that Jason Kidd and Tim Duncan didn’t play. It highlights one of my pet peeves with the All-Star Game in NBA Live (and sometimes NBA 2K as well) over the years. The rotation logic is no different to a regular game, so there’s a good chance that the last couple of players on the bench won’t see any court time. In a real All-Star Game of course, unless there’s a very late scratch due to injury – as with Karl Malone in 2002 – every player will at least enter the game once and play a few minutes. Incidentally, virtual Kobe didn’t impress in this reality, with just four points on 2-for-11 shooting!

I’m not about to reproduce my game recaps here, as they’re definitely not my best writing! Reading them back however, I’m reminded of some exciting, hard-fought clashes. These include a 99-98 victory over the Vancouver Grizzlies after a clutch three by Scottie Pippen, and a blunder in crunch time – having MJ and Pip on the bench due to foul trouble, and not stopping the clock to get them back in – that saw the Cleveland Cavaliers hand me a 106-105 loss to end a long winning streak. Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley were also in a tight race to top the league in rebounds, resulting in a furious effort to pad The Worm’s numbers in order to snare the crown.

Beyond the fond memories and efforts to maintain coverage of my adventures on the NBA Live Domain, the fact that I literally took my 1998 season in NBA Live 96 PC on the road demonstrates just how enthusiastic I was about it. I brought the game CD-ROM with me when my folks and I visited my brother, as well as a copy of the season save file on floppy disk; just in case I’d have a chance to play it! I did in fact get that opportunity, playing a game against the Orlando Magic on my former sister-in-law’s parents’ PC. I copied the updated save file back to disk, and picked it up again once I got home, one step closer to completing The Last Dance on the virtual hardwood.

Given all the trouble I went to – creating a roster update, keeping the rosters updated in my season save, playing a full season on 12-minute quarters, maintaining a recap on my NBA Live fansite, and even playing a game on vacation – it’s ironic that I didn’t see the season through to the end! As I mentioned, I did reach the Playoffs, and from memory, played at least a couple of first round games against Shawn Kemp and the Cavaliers. I’m guessing that it fell out of the rotation as other games captured my attention. As for how the save file was lost, it likely happened when our old 486 finally gave up the ghost, with my backups on floppy disk also being misplaced.

If I still had that save file, I would absolutely dust it off today and finish The Last Dance! Indeed, I’m even tempted to simulate the season and try for some closure, as I did with my NBA Live 2002 Sacramento Kings Franchise; another save carelessly lost to time. It wouldn’t quite be the same, of course. As I’ve said before, closure is what we make it on the virtual hardwood. Even though I didn’t finish that 1998 season in NBA Live 96 PC, it was still a blast. I still made it through the regular season, and created a memorable experience by incorporating real events into the campaign. It also went hand-in-hand with learning the ropes as far as maintaining roster updates.

Reminiscing about that 1998 season in NBA Live 96 also brings back memories of what basketball gaming as a whole was like in the 90s. Back then, not all of us were able to get the latest game every year. Technology was rapidly improving as the 3D era got fully underway, so if you were stuck with an old PC as I was, games like NBA Live 98 that required a dedicated 3D graphics card were out of the question. It’s why a few of us continued to update the older games that we could still run on an aging PC. That still happens in our modding community of course, but these days it’s also done due to preference and nostalgia, and not just an inability to run the latest games.

Mind you, even if our family had upgraded to a new PC earlier than we did, I still think I would’ve spent time with NBA Live 96 and that 1998 season. It remains one of my all-time favourite basketball video games, and as one of the very first hoops titles that I owned – and didn’t just frequently rent from the video store – it secured a place in my heart very early on. The fact that I was willing to jump through so many hoops to play NBA Live 96 PC, including boot disks and even repairing a scratch on the CD-ROM, suggests that I would’ve remained committed to finishing that 1998 season, even if I’d had the opportunity to play NBA Live 98 and NBA Live 99 much sooner.

It’s strange that despite the significance of The Last Dance, I’ve tended to create 1996 season mods in future games. Perhaps it’s because I’ve already had my 1998 season playthrough as it was happening, and of course, 1996 mods do pay tribute to NBA Live 96! In any case, while games such as my NBA Live 06 Dynasty or NBA 2K14 MyCAREER better represent dedication to achieving completion, my 1998 season in NBA Live 96 PC is nevertheless one of the basketball gaming experiences that I’ve been the most passionate about. It channelled and enhanced the enthusiasm of a young basketball fan, during one of the most memorable seasons and eras in NBA history.

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