I will never forget the first time I started up NBA2K11. It began with a brief recap of the formidable career of Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, and then all of a sudden I found myself standing behind the man himself, in the tunnel of some cavernous basketball arena. “Are you ready?” he turns and asks; well hell no I’m not ready MJ–I don’t even know which button passes the ball! Nevertheless, he runs out the tunnel and I follow, the scene unfolds into a screaming hyped-up crowd, and it quickly dawns on me that I am on the court with Jordan for Game 1 of the 1991 NBA Finals between Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles Lakers and “our” Chicago Bulls. It is a sublime moment.

NBA2K11 is filled with moments like these. It has been lauded from all corners of the sports gaming world–”a love letter to basketball,” “the best sports game ever made” and many other well deserved accolades. It encompasses not only a solid rendition of the NBA as it exists in the current day, but a remarkable look at the league from twenty years ago, as seen through its added Jordan modes.

Having lived in Chicago during much of that era and witnessed every one of the Bulls games included in NBA2K11, I was of course very interested in how my memories would translate into this video game version of those unforgettable events. In addition to its modern-day league content, 2K11 features the “Jordan Challenge,” ten highlight games from various points in his career, in which the player is called upon to replicate the memorable performances MJ pulled off against some of the greatest NBA players and teams of all time. This portion of the game is somewhat unprecedented–Jordan was always very protective of his likeness and licensing, and hadn’t permitted their usage in a video game for decades. Player licensing in general is a tricky thing these days, especially with retired players no longer under the umbrella of existing league agreements, and the work put into acquiring the rights not only for Jordan but the other teams and stars from his era had to have been quite substantial. In the end, it is well worth it.

One thing that really amazed me was the level of detail involved in recreating the style of each individual player. The Bulls center in those days, Bill Cartwright, was an tall imposing figure whose main role was to grab rebounds and throw his elbows around in a threatening manner toward his opposition,
but he also was known for a particularly ugly looking free throw shot. He would fully extend his arms straight up over his head, and then just sort of flip the ball toward the net. Needless to say, for all his tenacity under the boards, he was not known for having a high free throw percentage as a result of this method. In one of my first 2K11 games, he drew a foul and went to the line, and I thought of this as a test moment–would they recapture his unique shooting form here? And sure enough, he goes up there and hangs the ball way up in the air and flings it harmlessly against the rim, just like twenty years ago. (Game mechanics wise, it is difficult to determine when to release the shot button during this animation, making your chances of success about as high as Cartwright’s actual in-game average, so it works out perfectly.)

Playing 2K11′s current NBA season teams, I found this level of shooting realism for jump shots and free throws extended to every player in the game, even the obscure bench players. In a sense, this should not be surprising to see in a title for which 2K Sports releases a new and more polished iteration every year, but I still found it impressive, and was especially pleased to see that it worked this way not only for the classic Bulls teams, but for all the 90s-era players on their rival teams as well, just as I remembered them.

I have always felt that a good sports game should be as much a teaching tool as a simulation; if you don’t know much about a sport or a league, playing the game should illuminate a lot of its nuances. One of our old roommates was notorious for his dislike of American gridiron football, for example, until he picked up a copy of the annual Madden release for his PS3. Soon after that, he became a fan of the sport, and was able to identify the best teams and players and understand the basic football formations and strategies. One day some of us were watching a game on television, and as he passed through the room he looked at the screen and said “Oh that guy is good, he’s really fast…what they need to do is throw the ball down the sidelines as far as they can, and let him outrun his defender and catch it way down the field,” as succinct a description of the receiving style of Randy Moss as any I’ve heard from the Sunday afternoon TV sports pundits. NBA2K11 succeeds admirably in this fashion; if you know the game of basketball already, you will find the players responding just as you would expect, and if you’re not an NBA fan, playing the game will reveal the individual strengths and weaknesses of each player
and team in a very organic way.

For the RPG types among us, the “My Player” mode is well done. You create a player from scratch much like in the Fallout games or etc, then control them exclusively ingame as you try to improve their stats and attributes, hoping to turn them from bench-warming substitutes into starters and eventual NBA champions (2K11 will let you play up to twenty seasons of content per player, so there’s plenty of replayability). There are even post game interview sessions with a Bioware-esque dialogue tree in which you can elect to spout anything from the most safe and generic of sports cliches to obnoxiously self-serving douchebaggery. A variation of this mode I enjoyed greatly is unlocked by completing the ten objectives of the Jordan Challenge: you assume control of a young Michael Jordan, teeming with raw talent but low in basketball awareness, and are able to “draft” him into any modern team you choose, alongside the Kobes and LeBrons of today…an endlessly fun rewrite of history, as you develop MJ from a rookie into a champion all over again.

While the Jordan era content was the major selling point of this game for me initially, I soon found its “NBA Today” features to be just as compelling. It would pull up a list of games happening in the NBA that day, and allow you to drop in and play through any of them, with commentators giving halftime reports that reflected actual scores and performances from around the league. One could keep up with everything happening around the NBA just from playing the game. Even the ingame play-by-play guys responded accurately to current events; I played a Mavericks game during a time when the real life team was on a six game win streak, and at the beginning of the game they noted to my astonishment that “the Mavs are going for seven in a row tonight.” This was a long way from the days when I dropped out of college to play NBA Jam!

I ended up playing the entire 2K11 season along with the Dallas Mavericks, a historically star crossed franchise if ever there was one, in existence for 30+ years but never coming close to an NBA title. As my local team, I’ve followed them ever since their inception, and seen them fall short over and over. This year looked different for the Mavs, however, as they found a nice balance of young players and veterans and built a squad that played the type of solid defense that is necessary for going all the way in the NBA. Although they had setbacks here and there throughout the campaign, 2011 turned out to finally be their year, and they won their first championship in franchise history, making NBA 2K11 more of a special experience personally as I played through each step of the way with them ingame.

NBA 2K11 is, at this point, an “old” title in the quickly moving world of modern videogaming; 2K Sports is already touting its upcoming release of NBA2K12, featuring new support for the waggle-control gimmicks of current gen consoles. 2K11′s “NBA Today” server feeds are now turned off, with roster updates frozen in time at the beginning of the 2011 playoff season. I might still end up getting 2K Sports’ next NBA version, but 2K11 will always have a place on my hard drive as a living historical document: an interactive window into my favorite era of basketball that goes much deeper than Youtube videos or my well worn VCR tapes, as well as a keepsake of the year when my favorite team finally broke through and won it all.