NBA Jam

Players choose an NBA team, each with two or three superstar players or at least their digitized faces, and play a side-scrolling basketball game, split into four quarters each new 3:00 quarter is a buy-in. Players can also enter their initials to keep track of their progress, which encouraged repeat business. In addition to high-flying dunks and rainbow three-pointers, players can push each other to the ground without being called for fouls -- much like Midway's earlier game, Arch Rivals.

If any one player scores three consective baskets, he or she is considered "on fire", a fire animation accompanies each shot, the person's Turbo meter does not diminish, goaltending is never called, and his or her accuracy goes way up. This continues until a player on the opposite team scores a basket, or until the computer decides the hot streak has gone on too long.

There are 13 confirmed player codes:

Big Head: Hold Up-Turbo-Steal at 'Tonight's match up'.

Powerups:

Tank Mini-Game: Hold all buttons for all four players and press Down on all four joysticks at the 'Tonight's match up'. Keep the controls held until the mini-game begins.

Since Mark Turmell is a Detroit Pistons fan, he sweetened the arcade code to give them a slight advantage over their regional rivals, the Chicago Bulls. Turmell said in an interview, "If it boiled down to a last second shot, forget about it - the Bulls would never score."

NBA Jam was the first licensed sports coinop video game ever. Originally, the NBA was not keen on the idea, as they did not want the wholesome NBA logo to be seen in seedy coinop locations like bars or strip joints. However, once the Midway team showed them some preliminary footage of the game, they were thrilled and gave it a green light. The success of Jam paved the way for future officially-licensed sports arcade games.

During its original arcade run, NBA Jam earned profits of 1 billion dollars - roughly three times the take of the movie Jurassic Park

The high-flying dunks were performed by Willie Morris Jr., a bouncer at a Chicago club. Morris has returned to do motion capture-video tape work for Midway's other two basketball games as well.

Due to his separate and expensive licensing agreement, Michael Jordan is not in the game, and has not appeared in any Midway basketball coinop to date.

The game was a big hit with the players themselves - Shawn Kemp and Shaquille O'Neal own or owned machines. After the success of the first game, Gary Payton sent his photos to Mark Turmell and asked to be put into the next game.

The addition of the designers as secret players was merely an injoke with the design staff, but ultimately became a huge part of the games appeal and earnings. "We had to chop the heads off the models we videotaped to put the real NBA plauyers heads on," said Turmell in a 1994 interview with SLAM magazine. "So we thought, Shoot, we might as well paste our own heads on there, too. It was supposed to be just for us when we played at home or in the office. We did not intend for it to become a selling point. But it did." Turmell's own secret character is tall, - "I'm as fast as Spud Webb and I can shoot as good as Pippen."

There were rumors about the cheerleaders being playable characters in the original Jam. On the record, Turmell said they are in there, but their codes were intentionally complex and their existence did not please the NBA, so the information has never been released. To date, no valid codes to play as female characters have been found. However, there are cheerleader codes for NBA Jam TE.

Since the name NBA Jam is owned and controlled by the NBA, Acclaim later aquired the license and made a 3D coinop version, NBA Jam Extreme, which was not successful. Acclaim still uses the Jam name for its line of home console NBA games.

The original NBA Jam cabinets with the ver 1.0 code contains a secret Battlezone-style that can be played without using money. This secret was deemed unethical by many of the video game magazines of the time and magazines like EGM and Gamepro were specifically asked not to publish this code. Both magazines agreed and to this date it is the only video game code that is considered taboo by the press. (No longer.)

This minigame was removed in the next update of the machine code.

The cabinet shipped with a large closeup of a basketball and a huge NBA logo as the sideart. There are multiple control panels, most of which look like the floor of a basketball court. Some have the NBA Jam logo printed on them along with Pass-Shoot-Turbo over the buttons and red or blue in the circle at the foul lines, while some are just a plain court with white lines. NBA Jam Tournament Edition may have shipped in some of these cabinets as well, but a separate dedicated cabinet also existed for the upgrade.

The NBA Jam hardware became the cornerstone for Midway's action sports games. This cabinet can be upgraded to NBA Jam Tournament Edition, NBA Hangtime or Maximum Hangtime, Open Ice 2-on-2 Challenge, NFL Blitz and its two upgrades, and NBA Showtime NBA on NBC. Blitz and Showtime use 49-way joysticks. This cabinet will also run 4-player JAMMA boards by other manufacturers e.g. Captain America, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and many more.

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There are seperate connectors on PCB for the third and fourth player controls. The same hardware is used for this games as in other games of this era, like Mortal Kombat. A seperate audio board is required for sound.