NBA Jam (Arcade)

Combine gameplay similar to Arch Rivals with digitized graphics a la Mortal Kombat, over-the-top dunks, an equally over-the-top announcer, some silly secret characters, and an NBA license, and you get NBA Jam.

Sub-Page#

Prerelease Info

Unused Graphics#

This "NBA Jam Session" logo can be found in the UG18/UJ18/UG23/UJ23 graphics ROMs. This was in consideration as an early title for the game, so this logo may have been intended for the title screen.

Immediately following the above logo is this front-facing basketball hoop. Originally, when performing certain actions, it was planned for the camera to change angles to face the hoop head-on. This graphic appears to be a remnant of the idea, and ended up being used in the Starring screen of the sequel.

Unused Palettes#

At 581F4 and 582D0 in the Version 2.0 interleaved UG12/UJ12 program ROMs, these yellow and green skin color palettes can be found. In the file PALS.IMG in the source code, the yellow skin color has the name FL_B_p, while the green skin color has the name FL_G_p. The B and G in these files are extremely likely to stand for Bart Simpson and Godzilla, respectively, as they were at one point planned to be included as secret players.

Hidden Copyright Notice#

During the hidden tank game, you can trigger a copyright message. The actual message is encoded in rom and not visible in plain text. As a side effect, you also win the tank game. Hold P1/2 sticks right and P2 but 1&3 (turbo+pass) down. This was likely added to use in any court cases against bootleggers that may have removed the visible plain text/gfx copyright string(s) from the roms.

"NBA-JAM"
"COPYRIGHT-1993"
"MIDWAY-MANUFACTURING-COMPANY"
"ALL-RIGHTS-RESERVED"