In the 1990s the NBA had transitioned from the Lakers vs. Celtics, Magic vs. Bird rivalry years to the Michael Jordan rules the world era of greatness. While MJ would rarely (if ever) be licensed into video games, there were tons of other 90s stars you could select to play as such as Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Shawn Kemp, Scottie Pippen, and more. No game series truly capitalized upon the excessive in your face slam dunks and media insanity of the NBA like NBA Jam. It dropped like a bomb in arcades in 1993 and lured millions of quarters out of the pockets of gamers like me, before releasing kick-ass home console versions and a sequel, NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, shortly thereafter. I loved NBA Jam and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition. They were pretty staple games of my game-playing years, but didn’t match up against what was to come.

In 1996 I had a lot of things changing in my life: I was transitioning from middle school to high school, fully entering my awkward teenage years, and my parents decided my father’s business was doing well enough that we could afford to move from our small home in Encino to a mini-mansion in Holmby Hills (the even fancier part of Beverly Hills). The move was pretty sudden and led to me losing touch with all my Valley friends. Soon enough I was enrolled in a new high school in Santa Monica and my parents connected me with some new kid to carpool to school with.

That summer, as I became friends with this new kid he introduced me to some of his own friends. I slowly discovered they were into video games too and we all began to bond over different games we liked. The arcade was still an active hangout spot for kids then, so we took to it like bees to honey, seeking out classics like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Cruisin’ USA, and the like. One day I discovered there was something new there. It was clearly NBA Jam… but not really. This giant, colorful game cabinet was called NBA HangTime, and it was like NBA Jam on even more steroids. Higher resolution graphics? Check! Alley-oops? Check! Team ‘On Fire’ mode? Check! Create your own player? Check! It was like Midway (NBA Jam’s developer) heard all my silent wishes to make NBA Jam even better and they responded with this wonderfully insane game. It turns out Midway lost the NBA Jam name to Acclaim, but Midway simply changed the franchise name and produced NBA HangTime. Whatever! To a 13 year old kid I didn’t care. I just knew this was awesome and fun, and had all my favorite 90s NBA stars.

I would say one thing that irked me, by no fault of the game itself, was that my poor Lakers were absolute crap. With my hero Magic Johnson having retired a few years prior due to contracting HIV, the best player on the NBA Jam Lakers team was an aging James Worthy. By the time NBA HangTime came out Big Game James had retired too and the Lakers had a bunch of middling players in Cedric Ceballos, Vlade Divac, Anthony Peeler, Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones, and Elden Campbell. <shudder>. As much as I bled Purple and Gold, in order to stand a chance against other arcade players I had to go for better team duos. The Sonics’ Kemp and Payton, the Bulls’ Pippen and Rodman, the Rockets’ Olajuwon and Drexler, or the Spurs’ Robinson and Elliot were often the teams I chose. And I got pretty damn good with them. But everytime I passed by the L.A. Lakers I felt a little sad. “Ugh, why can’t you be good again?!?”

Then came the 1996 NBA Draft. NBA HangTime and the 1996 NBA Draft crossed paths at a special time for me. With previous NBA seasons all these superstars were MEN that I watched in awe, shooting lights out and slam dunking as only ADULTS could. I was just a teenager and I couldn’t fully relate to them, just be impressed and perhaps even in awe of what they could do. Then in 1995 a high school kid named Kevin Garnett made the jump to the NBA and opened the floodgates for the league to take another look at younger talent. While the arcade version of NBA HangTime arrived in April 1996, before that year’s draft, its various home consoles versions and arcade update (dubbed Maximum HangTime) all arrived between late 1996 and early 1997. The draft class of 1996 unleashed the next generation of NBA superstars like Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, Ray Allen, Stephon Marbury, Marcus Camby, and more. Sure, they were all rookies, and their statistics were mostly just okay, but they all had such promise and raw talent, and more importantly to me, they were much younger and closer to my age!

Between the launch of NBA HangTime in the arcade and the arrival of the PlayStation version in early 1997 I saw my Lakers pull off a major coup by signing star center Shaquille O’Neal and trading their average big man Vlade Divac for this young kid named Kobe Bryant. The home console versions would be updated accordingly, putting in most of these new and exciting rookies and instantly making the PlayStation version I bought my go-to version to play! Suddenly, I was excited to pick my Lakers again. Sure, Kobe’s stats weren’t as good as he’d one day have, but this 17 year old kid was already impressing in the NBA, and at just a few years older than me he quickly became my favorite post-Magic Johnson Laker. Due to licensing issues Shaq wasn’t in either the arcade or home versions (he hadn’t been in these games since the first arcade version of NBA Jam) but the create a player mode made it easy to make him and play as a Kobe & Shaq super duo!

There was something to be said that NBA HangTime was deeper for me that just playing a fun game. The alley-oops and team fire features improved upon the concept of team play (as opposed to the ‘Dammit, get out of my way, CPU player’ irritance of previous entries) while creating a player still gave me the uniqueness I felt I needed more of in my teenage years. The game was also so easy to pick up that even my less sports game enthusiast friends Noz and Justin could play, while deep and intense enough that I’d get into hours long match-ups with my football and basketball crazy friend Jeff (who was much more addicted to playing the awesome NFL Blitz late into the night).

My declarations that Kobe Bryant would be the greatest Laker ever and maybe better than Michael Jordan would be laughed off at the time. After all, he was a 17 year old rookie, just barely older than us, with solid statistics but not even close to better than Cedric Ceballos or Eddie Jones on his own team. Still, I picked Kobe and (sometimes) my own created player and had so much fun that hours passed before we knew it.

But beyond the countless faux NBA Finals match-ups and arguments with my friends over which rookie was the best in the game (Kobe Bryant by a mile, duh!), playing NBA HangTime became a refuge for me during a tough period in my life. Other than making some of the greatest friends, high school was not an easy time for me. My grades varied wildly, I was insanely awkward around girls, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life (or even a plan for college), and my parents’ relationship was deteriorating into a series of angry shouting matches. Moving to the Holmby Hills house led to a lot of financial pressures on my Dad, which didn’t help as his business’s industry started getting hit hard, and the cost of it all tearing my parents’ marriage apart. Playing NBA HangTime in between the emotionally harsh moments at school and at home was like this microcosm where Kobe Bryant and I were beating these huge NBA stars in most of the games we played, and nothing outside of that world could bring me down.

Into the early 2000s, as newer systems like Dreamcast, the PlayStation 2, and XBox came around I still held onto my PlayStation 1 and NBA HangTime, playing it a little less each time as I moved on to newer times. I went off to college, my parents’ separated before beginning a lengthy divorce, and Kobe Bryant went from being the untested rookie in NBA HangTime to the 5 times (and counting) NBA Champion and Lakers legend I knew then he would be. I made new memories, experienced joyful victories and tasted bitter losses, as I moved into my 20s and 30s, but the throwbacks to all night NBA HangTime tournaments with my friends always remained a special part of my difficult teenage years. And even now, as I pick up the PlayStation 1 controller and load up the 19 year old NBA HangTime, it all comes back to me. Sure, the graphics are way less impressive now, the features not as deep, and the gameplay much more choppy, but it still serves as an important cornerstone of my formative teen years.

I was ecstatic to see EA Sports in 2010 take their recent ownership of the NBA Jam license and create a new, high definition version of the legendary game. Although it wasn’t really NBA HangTime, this NBA Jam HD game had more in common with HangTime than their NBA Jam forefathers. It was fast, it was smooth, it was ultra high definition, and other than a new generation of NBA stars including LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose and others, the game STILL had two of my generation’s NBA HangTime stars playing: Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant. Kobe’s just coming out of his prime and won his 5th ring, somewhere I knew he’d always be, and it’s definitely fun to see an old friend again. But it’s clearly something different than NBA HangTime. Maybe it’s because I’m different now, and my life is different, but it’s still fun to relive the past while experiencing the present and wondering about the future. I wonder if teenagers of these recent years will look back on the 2010 NBA Jam with the same reverence as I do NBA HangTime. True, the following major talent drafts would come in 2003 (LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh) and 2014 (Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Dante Exum, Julius Randle), which left the 2010 NBA Jam with the former rookies well established and the next yet to come, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have the same connection NBA HangTime had with me.

So to those parents that say ‘It’s just a video game!’ please know that some of these games are really special to each of us. They remind of certain years in our lives, what we enjoyed and what we feared most then, and the means by which a lot of us gathered together to scream, mash buttons, curse and celebrate together. NBA HangTime (and other great games too) was that for me. Every ‘He’s on fire!’ and ‘Lakers win!’ was a moment of sheer joy for me to relish. And that collection of moments still resonates brilliantly as I look back on this awesome game nearly 20 years later.