Hidden Levels #1: Mr. Boomshakalaka

This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average.

Plus, auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts.

Quote now at progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed, who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023.

Potential savings will vary.

Discounts not available in all states and situations.

Introducing your new Dell PC with the Intel Core Ultra Processor.

It helps you handle a lot, like organizing your holiday shopping, searching for great holiday deals, customer questions, plus planning the perfect holiday dinner.

Luckily, you can get a PC with all-day battery life to help you get it all done.

That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside.

Backed by Dell's Price Match Guarantee, get yours today at dell.com/slash deals.

Terms and conditions apply.

See Dell.com for details.

This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

And I'm Ben Brock Johnson from the WBUR podcast, Endless Threat.

And today we're bringing you the first episode for our new collaborative series called Hidden Levels.

It's about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games.

In the next six episodes, we'll get deep into how games are made and designed.

Everything from the history of the joystick to how nature is faithfully recreated in the digital world to a dispatch from the front lines of the console wars.

So, Roman, when did video games first change your world?

I mean, probably when I was in elementary school in the 80s, the arcade that I went to the most was a small section in a skating rink in Newark, Ohio.

And so I first learned playing video games on roller skates, actually.

that sounds impressive.

How about you?

I think, you know, I didn't have an arcade spot, but one memory that is really strong for me is I had the luck.

My brother actually brought me to Japan when I was 12 years old.

And I was really lucky to do that.

It blew my mind in so many ways.

But I went into a real deal Japanese arcade while I was there.

And it was so incredible.

I mean, the different kinds of games you could play, the sights, really the sounds too.

We are audio people, Roman.

I love sound first and foremost.

And that's what I think of sometimes when I think of video games.

Absolutely.

I'm exactly the same way.

And there's something really special about designing game sounds so that it can cut through the din of all the other arcade games and kind of draw you to the machine.

Do you have a favorite sound that you think of when you think of video game sounds?

I mean, my favorite is there used to be this really big arcade game called Gauntlet that had like four joysticks on it so you can play four different characters.

And one of the sounds that the sort of game announcer said was elf needs food badly elf

needs food badly

or elf is about to die and i think about elf needs food badly every time i'm hungry literally every day of my life since i played gauntlet i think about this game sound

how about you what's what's yours well you know i think of a couple classics for me like the mortal kombat you know scorpion get Get over here.

You know, there was a game I played a lot called Cruising USA that had this kind of ridiculous female passenger voice that was like, yeah, all right, Hollywood, let's go.

Oh, wow.

Redwood.

Ooh, Hollywood.

Radical.

But one that I think of a lot is the Ryuken or Shuryuken Street Fighter 2 sounds of Ryu or Ken doing the like, Ryuken, Shoryuken.

That one, I just, I, I just say that sometimes to myself just to make myself happy.

So, clearly, Roman, as audio podcasters, we love sound and we could go on forever.

Yeah, and the story we have for you today is all about an iconic video game sound.

It's about a high-energy vocal performance that helped spawn an entire franchise.

The first episode of Hidden Levels is brought to us by 99PI contributor James Parkinson.

Here it is.

Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 80s, Mark Tammell was a wonderboy of video game design.

He released a successful game as a teenager and was earning thousands of dollars a month while still living at his parents' house.

By the time he was in his 20s, Mark was working full-time as a developer in Chicago, designing coin-operated arcade games.

Coin op back in those days was always the cutting edge.

It was better than any Super Nintendo, better than a Sega Genesis.

It was really high-powered.

I could put more sprites on the screen, more bullets, more explosions.

And so it was, for me, it was like being a kid in a candy store.

The company Mark worked for was called Midway.

And they were famous for bringing a number of big Japanese games to the US, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man.

And in 1992, they released the iconic fighting game, Mortal Kombat.

But Mark was about to take midway in a very different direction.

Mark was a big basketball fan and in the early 90s he could tell that the NBA was really having a moment, particularly in Chicago.

This was the height of Michael Jordan mania.

The Chicago Bulls were about to clinch their first championship three-peat, and the popularity of the league was at an all-time high.

And Mark Tammell decided he wanted to capture the high-flying, razzle-dazzle energy of professional basketball and put it in an arcade game.

He called his new creation NBA Jam.

By the fall of 1992, NBA Jam was almost complete and Mark Tammell and his team decided to test out their new game at an arcade in Chicago called Dennis's Place for Games.

They rolled in a 400-pound cabinet, put in the chip with the NBA Jam code and turned the machine on.

Then Mark sat back to watch how the customers in Dennis' Place would react.

He says that back then, there was a pretty simple way to gauge whether a coin-op game was going to be successful.

You could usually tell in the first couple of hours.

In the op business, if you can get somebody to put quarters in, reach into their pocket, go to the cash machine, the change machine, and put money in, you know, that's like really telling.

It's very democratic, whether you like it or not.

And as Mark watched, the customers at Dennis's place voted with their quarters.

They crowded around the NBA Jam cabinet, shouting, cursing, fighting for the joystick.

It was bedlam.

There were fist fights, you know, people gambling, the coin doors were jammed up with money, you know, when somebody would do a big dunk and the backboard would smash into pieces.

You know, they'll literally, you know, scream and run around the arcade.

You know, it was awesome.

I remember exactly how wild this game was.

Growing up in Australia, I didn't have access to live NBA games on TV, but NBA Jam was the next best thing.

It quite literally brought the excitement of the NBA to my fingertips.

And I think there were a few different elements that drew kids like me in.

For one thing, NBA Jam just looked good.

It might be hard to believe now, but for kids like me who grew up on games like Pac-Man, NBA Jam was a whole new world.

This was the dawn of digitized graphics, which meant that for the first time, designers like Mark could make avatars that looked and moved like actual people.

You know, we would take videotape and run it through a digitizer that would, you know, create frames and we'd put it on the screen.

And it was like, wow, you know, look at that.

That's, you know, a photograph right there on my computer screen.

At first, Mark recorded video of amateur players he found on local courts throughout Chicago to run through the digitizer.

But when he finalized the official licensing deal with the NBA, he did some minor digital surgery.

Then we basically chopped the heads off of all of our local athletes and then generated the heads of all of these NBA superstars to paste on top.

Which meant I could play the game as a real-life basketball star, or at least the head of one.

I could be Scotty Pippin, Hakeem Elijah, or Shaquille O'Neal.

But the realism ended there, because the gameplay was pure fantasy.

At times, NBA Jam felt more like Mortal Kombat than basketball.

There were no fouls, no out of bounds, and the players were like superhumans.

They leapt into the the rafters for sky-high dunks and shot impossibly long-range three-pointers.

When a player made three baskets in a row, the ball burst into flames and he became unstoppable for the next several possessions.

But I think there was one element in particular that made NBA Jam stand out from all the other games in the arcade.

It was an iconic sound that cut through all the bleeps and bloops and drew people to the NBA Jam cabinet like moths to a flame.

Even if you didn't play the game growing up, you might have heard this sound.

From downtown,

launches a shot and

he's on fire.

I'm talking about the voice of the game's announcer.

Today, voice acting is a key component of most video game productions.

But back in the 1970s, there were no voices in video games at all.

High-quality audio recordings were just too large to fit on the the sound chips of arcade machines.

The earliest voices heard in video games were digitized using a technique called speech synthesis.

Basically combining short sounds or syllables to form complete words.

These synthesized voices were a clever solution to the problem, but they didn't exactly sound realistic.

The space-themed shooter StratoBox was the first game to attempt this.

As you find at alien ships, a very unnatural sounding narrator would shout a handful of distorted phrases.

Believe it or not, the narrator there was saying lucky and very good.

One of the first games to use true recorded voiceover was Dragon's Lair in 1983.

They managed to do this using laser disc technology.

The team didn't have the budget to hire actors, so much of the voice acting was done by the animators and the production staff.

Please save

Like, really, really bad.

You must recover all the energy immediately, Mega Man.

But where is Dr.

Wiley?

That's a good question.

Just one more page and I would have finished this book.

Die, monster.

You don't belong in this world.

Captain Wesker, where's Chris?

Stop it.

Don't open that door.

Yeah, that wasn't going to cut it for NBA Jam.

This new basketball game was going to need a voice that could match the high-octane style of the gameplay and cut through the noisy commotion of an arcade to draw people in.

Someone with a distinctive delivery that would keep people dipping into their pockets for more quarters.

They needed this guy.

So firstly, can I just get you to introduce yourself, please?

Hi everyone, Tim Kitzer from NBA Jam Boom Shaka Locker.

That was very loud.

Tim Kitzero was not a famous actor back in the early 90s, and he certainly didn't grow up with dreams of becoming a voice actor for an iconic video game.

But he'd always been a showman.

He was one of seven children and he was the entertainer in the family.

He says his goal at dinner was to get milk to come out of someone's nose.

One of my heroes is Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand voices, Looney Tunes.

So when I was younger, I often did cartoon voices like Underdog, the Simon Myers Initiative says underdog must die.

Or

Droopy Dog.

There's a telephone butch.

It's a dame.

When she says butch, she's so unselfish.

Tim got into theatre in high school and went on to study acting at Purchase College, where he crossed paths with some heavy hitters.

My roommate was Stan Tucci.

Vin Rain was in the, so a lot of big names came out of that place.

But Tim's career didn't take off quite like those two.

He spent the 80s as a jennyman actor, bouncing between cities like New York and LA, looking for work.

And eventually, he wound up in Chicago.

He trained with the comedians at Second City while auditioning auditioning for commercials and playing the drums in a local band.

His career felt like it was stuttering, until it took a very unlikely turn.

Of course, the way the world works, sometimes, you know, you have one plan and then it goes another way.

It all started because a couple of Tim's bandmates worked in Midway's pinball division.

They often needed people to record little bits of voiceover.

and they knew that their drummer Tim was pretty good at impressions.

One day, they asked him to help out with a Gilligans Gilligans Island pinball game.

So I was hired to do Mr.

Howell from Gilligans Island.

Maybe I can buy a new thingy for my yacht.

Over time, Tim became a regular voice on Midway's pinball games.

They did the Twilight Zone attack from Mars.

This is an emergency broadcast.

The Earth is being invaded by flying saucers from Mars.

The Shadow, World Cup soccer, NBA pinball, you know, or Fast Break, whatever.

It was just, it was just going in and having fun.

And actually, this time I was getting paid for it.

Being a voice actor for pinball was a fun side gig, but not much more than that.

Tim never felt like it had the potential to be an actual career.

I really had no idea what I was doing, you know, getting into that business.

I knew that I loved playing pinball, but pinball, as I said, 15 games later, you know, I still didn't know much about the industry, still couldn't play worth a lick.

It was just a fun, extra gig for extra money, extra beer money.

Meanwhile, Mark Tamel and the NBA Jam crew were putting the finishing touches on their brand new basketball game.

They'd signed the licensing deal with the NBA and figured out the gameplay and the graphics.

And at a certain point, they started to think about the sound.

A guy named John Hay handled just about every aspect of the audio for NBA Jam.

He wrote the game's deeply 90s soundtrack.

And in order to make the game sound more lifelike, he went out and recorded all these basketball sounds in the wild, like balls being dribbled or sneaker squeaks on Hobby floors.

But Mark Tommel and John Hay knew that one of the most important sonic elements was the voice of the game's announcer.

They wanted a commentator who would make the game come alive and sound like the way the NBA sounded on TV.

Mark even thought about hiring an actual NBA commentator, but they didn't have the budget.

Luckily for them, an affordable alternative was kicking around the office, drinking beer with the pinball guys.

I used to just get regular calls because every, you know, every couple of months there was a new pinball game and it's like, let's go to Tim.

And so this felt no different to me.

The recording studio was located in Midway's pinball factory.

It was a giant, noisy space with lots of workers and hundreds of pinball machines.

But all the way in the back, there was a little five foot by five foot vocal booth.

They called it the meat locker.

It was kind of a depressing little place, but it was cozy.

It was like our little world.

It was just the sound guys, you know, not much bigger than a household giant refrigerator and a little window for me to see John.

So yeah, although it was kind of dingy and dark and small and everything else, it was home and you know, that's where some of the best

best work was ever done.

Mark and John worked to brainstorm a library of words and phrases they needed Tim to record.

First, they needed the names of every player in the game and a few different takes for each so that it wouldn't sound repetitive.

Then they started compiling a list of all the different things that happened in a basketball game that Tim was going to need to react to.

Just like a TV announcer, he needed to say something every time there was a big dunk or a three-pointer or a block shot.

John Hay wrote lines for each category, some of them taken directly from NBA broadcasts.

When Tim Kitsero finally got into the booth, he decided he wanted to model his delivery off of veteran NBA announcer Marv Albert.

Albert was the the most famous basketball commentator in the world at the time, and he had a flamboyant, energetic style.

You know, jump-off point was realizing that to me, Marv Albert compared to other sports broadcasters, he brought that extra energy.

And I knew that I wanted to emulate that.

But Tim was going to be Marv Albert turned up to 11.

Marv Albert with a splash of Mortal Kombat.

To get in the right headspace, Tim would visualize high-flying dunks and channel that energy into his performance.

So that's where I kind of got that timber, that tone that, you know, that NBA Jam had, based off of like what I heard and then just making it my own.

We're rejected.

He's hitting up.

He's on fire.

Well, I mean, Tim's, I mean, he's amazing.

He's a genius.

This is Mark Timmell again.

He says that Tim didn't stick to the script.

Right away, he started getting creative.

He's so quick-witted.

You know, he's always willing to, you know, iterate and improve and take feedback.

And when Tim went into the studio, he would

just add lib.

And it was magic, you know, immediately.

But Tim had to improvise within constraints.

The arcade machines at the time still didn't have a lot of memory, so his catchphrases needed to be short, like half a sentence.

Or even just a single word.

As for the game's most famous catchphrase, Tim doesn't take credit.

The exact origin story is a little murky, but Tim believes it was a suggestion by John Carlton, one of the game's artists.

He'd been listening to the funk group Sly and the Family Stone.

And on the song, I Wanna Take You Higher, there's a chorus where they sing, Boo Shaka, Laka, Laka, Boo, Shaka, Laka, Laka, Bow, down,

I wanna take you high.

But it was, they were just like, boo, shaka, laka, laka, boo, shaka, laka, locka.

They weren't saying boom, shaka, laka.

They were saying boo shaka laka laka, boo shaka, laka, boo, shaka.

Whatever.

Actually, the song goes boom laka laka.

But you get the point.

So he just said, said, hey, John, tell Tim to say boom shock locker.

Once again, this is the story that I heard.

I'm there, but I don't remember it.

But I do remember vaguely John just saying to me, say boom shock locker.

And I just said, what does that mean?

He goes, I don't know, just say it.

And I went, boom, shock a locker.

And I said, is that it?

And he goes, yeah, do a couple more.

Boom shakalaka.

Ooh, boom, shaka locka.

He went, yeah, that's probably good.

All right, moving on.

The recording sessions for NBA Jam were done in around 20 hours, and when Tim was finished, he didn't think it was a big deal at all.

As far as he was concerned, this was just another gig, like Gilligans Island Pinball.

Little did he know that those 20 hours would change the course of his life, and from that point forward, he'd be known to the world as Mr.

Boom Shaka-Laka.

After the success of their test night at Dennis's Place for Games, the NBA Jam team was confident that their game was not a dud.

But still, Mark Termel had this lingering worry that the game wouldn't translate outside of Chicago.

After all, he could see the back-end data showing which NBA teams people were choosing to play with.

So I knew looking at the stats that the Bulls were just dominant.

Everybody was picking the Bulls.

And so in the back of my head, I thought, maybe this is a Chicago thing.

When the game went live across the country, Mark flew to LA to see how it played there.

He went to an arcade in Worstwood, where NBA Jam had just been installed.

And I walked in and I just watched and it was the same bedlam that I had seen in Chicago except that the players were picking the Lakers.

And so it really was that moment where I said to myself, wow, you know,

this is going to happen in every NBA city at the very least.

And this is going to happen around the country.

And sure enough, that's exactly, you know, what happened.

NBA Jam was picked up by arcades all around the country.

And city after city, people happily forked out their hard-earned quarters in order to rain down three-pointers with Detliff Shremp while dunk from half-court with Clyde Drexler.

If there was one group of people who seemed to love the game most of all, it was NBA players.

On his days off, Miami Heat star Glenn Rice would wait in line at the local arcade just to play NBA Jam as himself.

Gary Payton, a a point guard with the Seattle Supersonics, demanded to know why he hadn't been included in the game.

He even sent personal photos to Mark Tomel that he could use to make Payton's avatar.

And then there was Shaquille O'Neal.

We got contacted from the distributor in Orlando and said that Shaq wanted to buy two games.

Shaq wanted one NBA Jam machine for his own house and another for the Orlando Magics team jet.

They brought one of the NBA Jam cabinets onto the jet

and it traveled with them on the road and they would wheel it up into Shaq's hotel suite and the players instead of going out and partying or clubbing, they would go in and just play and play as each other.

Even the opposing team would come in the night before the game or after the game and play.

In 1993, NBA Jam was the talk of both the arcade world and the world world of professional basketball.

But back in Chicago, Tim Kitsero still hadn't played the game.

So I asked John, I said, hey, where can I, you know, go see, you know, NBA Jam?

Tim went to a nearby arcade and walked up to a cabinet that he assumed was NBA Jam.

But it turns out it was a different basketball game, one of their competitors.

And Tim was not all that impressed by the announcer.

It would be like, nice shot.

4-2.

He makes it.

I was like, what the hell is wrong with that guy?

And I walk over, you know, watch the NBA Jam, go, he's on fire from downtown, not tonight, you know, whatever.

And I was like, wow, that guy's pretty good.

And it was clear that the kids in the arcade agreed with him.

They were absolutely loving NBA Jam.

And that was like, you know, this moment I went, wow, this is something.

This is like, you know, made the equivalent of being, you know, someone from like, you know, a group that hears their song on the radio for the first time.

It's like, this is a hit.

And I got kind of charged, but I couldn't resist sometimes just by accident, didn't think about it, but I'm watching and I would start to say like, rejected, ugly shot, get that stuff out of here.

Boom shock of life.

And someone turned around.

Hey, man, you sound like the dude in the game.

I go, dude, I am the dude.

It is.

It is you.

NBA Jam went on to become a bigger hit than anyone ever expected.

To use an arcade term, it was a quarter muncher, devouring coins like a hungry hippo.

In its first year, NBA Jam made $1 billion in revenue, one quarter at a time.

I was out at Midway in their lunchroom, and there was an article on the board, you know, just like a Xeroxed article that said, NBA Jam surpasses, breaks all records, makes a billion dollars in quarters first year.

And I just said, who wrote this?

This is funny.

I just absolutely convinced it was someone just having, you know, some fun to kind of like prop up the team and, you know, give them some confidence like yeah NBA Jam's a great game but had no idea in reality the game made a billion dollars and that was the moment my brain went wait a minute I made 900 what

it's impossible to say whether or not the game would have been successful without Tim Kitzero but his contribution is undeniable In 1994, a version of NBA Jam was released for the Super Nintendo.

At that time, home consoles had a lot less memory than arcade cabinets, and so certain elements had to be stripped from the game to make it small enough to fit on a cartridge.

In the end, they cut the music, but retained the sound effects and Tim Kitrow's iconic voice.

As new versions of the game got released, Tim was able to renegotiate for better compensation.

And while NBA Jam didn't make him rich, the game changed the course of his career and his whole approach to video game voice work.

It went from this side gig he did for beer money to a viable career.

I wasn't

going into a room of 20 people who look like me to do a Bud Light beer commercial or a cheesy sitcom

audition or an extra part in a movie.

This was people saying, We want Tim because Tim delivers the goods.

Off the back of NBA Jam, Tim became the voice of other Midway sports titles, like NFL Blitz,

Midway Prevent, NFL Bliss,

NHL Hits, Welcome to Boston, Takeouts

and Let's Do it, and MLB Slugfest.

And now sit back, it's time to play ball!

By this stage, the technology had improved to the point where there were really no limits on how much voiceover you could include in video games.

And with the freedom to get as wild as he wanted, Tim delivered some truly outrageous baseball banter.

Hey, here's my Jimmy.

Famous people, dead or alive, all-star team.

On the mound, I got Abe Lincoln.

Why?

Abe Lincoln, he's got these beady eyes, that little drifter beard.

He's intimidating.

What do you got?

I put it out.

With Slugfest, I wrote, you know, all the creative color commentary.

So that was actually the most exciting part of my career.

I was not only making really good money, I was writing and basically in charge of the content.

So I was given the opportunity to basically create the whole world.

Tim Kitzrow is not the most important voice actor in video game history, but his performance at NBA Jam is certainly one of the most beloved.

And his role in the game's success set an important precedent for how voice acting can elevate a video game and bring it to life.

In the decades that followed, game developers began to invest more and more in vocal performances.

and sports game companies started spending money to hire real-life announcers to do commentary.

In fact, one of the most famous video game franchises of all time is named after an announcer.

Welcome to Madden NFL 2000, the new millennium of football.

And Tim's influence wasn't limited to video games.

It fed back into the sport of basketball itself.

Over time, NBA Jam catchphrases like he's heating up have become part of the general basketball vernacular.

And if you turn on a game today, it's pretty obvious that many basketball commentators grew up playing NBA Jam.

Oh my goodness, feeling like NBA Jam here early.

Clippers all dumped right into the ramps now.

Jabs right, moves left, attacks the paint, leads it out for the cutting box.

And he'll dunk it over the top of Loxon.

Brandon Boston.

Boom, shakalaka.

Boom, shackalaka.

Yeah, boom, shackalaka.

Yeah, boom, shack and locker!

Oh!

Boom's back in the locker!

Come home!

The rebound!

At the buzzard!

At the buzzard!

It's good!

Article makes it effortless to create a stylish, long-lasting home at an unbeatable price.

Whatever your personal style may be, Article offers a curated range of mid-century modern, coastal, and scandy-inspired pieces that not only shine on their own, but also pair seamlessly with nearly any other article product.

Their carefully selected collections feature high-quality, meaningful pieces that will stand the test of time.

There is no filler.

Every item is chosen for its craftsmanship, design, and lasting value.

My house is like an Article Furniture longitudinal study.

I sleep in an Article bed.

My wife Joy works at, and we eat at an Article dining room table, and we sit in Article chairs.

And it has been this way for years and years and years.

All the furniture I've ever gotten from Article is still in service and performing at its peak.

Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout.

That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.

Great design is invisible until you start noticing.

Have you ever wondered why that street layout makes walking so pleasant, or maybe why that font choice makes reading so effortless?

Meet Claude, the AI design for problem solvers who want to understand the why behind great design.

Claude helps you dive deeper into the design choices you can't stop coming back to.

See why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

And try Claude for free at claude.ai slash invisible.

The moment you realize your business needs to hire someone new, you pretty much have to hire that person like yesterday.

So, how do you find amazing candidates fast?

It's easy, just use Indeed.

With Indeed-sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can stand out and reach the people you want faster.

I ran my own business for most of my adult life, and hiring is one of the hugest things that you have to take on when you run a business.

Doing outreach and waiting for people to come back to you, all that stuff is so painful.

I wish there was a podcast ad telling me about Indeed back then.

There's no need to wait any longer.

Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.

And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash invisible.

Just go to indeed.com slash invisible right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.

Indeed.com slash invisible.

Terms and conditions apply.

Hiring.

Indeed is all you need.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

Squarespace is an all-in-one all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online, whether you're just starting out or growing your business.

Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid.

Showcase consultations, events, and more with a customizable website built to attract clients and grow your business.

Plus, get paid faster with professional invoices and easy online payments.

And with their collection of cutting-edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their brand or business.

I built a couple of websites with Squarespace, and their templates are beautiful, they're easy to work with, and they work great off the shelf.

But you can customize them so that your website looks like it was made by and for you and your business.

Check out squarespace.com/slash invisible for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code Invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

We are back with Hidden Levels in our first first episode, Roman Mars.

Ben Brock Johnson.

We have been talking NBA Jam, and the vocal performance is really just one of the most distinct things about the game because NBA Jam has all these other quirks.

And these quirks really make this game legendary.

It has so many hidden design details, exactly the kind of stuff we're talking about in this series.

Let's talk about a few of these hidden design details.

You game?

Absolutely.

All right.

So James Parkinson in the story, he talked about how the game wasn't the most realistic depiction of basketball, even though they were using this new technology to capture people, maybe not super realistic.

Sure.

I mean, the ball caught fire, so that rarely happens in a basketball game.

But yeah, I get you.

Right.

So if you knew where to look in this game, you could also unlock secret players who were not athletes, at least that I know of.

So Bill Clinton is one example.

Al Gore is another.

Oh, I had no idea.

What other examples are there?

George Clinton could also be unlocked as a character.

All the Clintons are represented.

All the Clintons, man.

George Clinton.

That's right.

And he was a character named P-Funk.

That was in the tournament edition of the game.

You could also access one of the people who we heard from in the episode who made NBA Jam.

We don't think of programmers as ballers necessarily, but all the programmers were playable in the game, and that includes Mark Turmel, who we heard from earlier.

Was he particularly good at the game as a player?

It may shock you to learn that he was practically unstoppable.

I mean, you know, that's what I would do.

Same.

That's awesome.

Same.

So here's another interesting sort of secret Easter egg in the game, Roman.

It's called Super Clean Floors, which if a player activated this, the basketball court would become very slippery and the players players on the other team would fall over all the time.

I actually remember, I remember being the target of this and playing the game, and it basically renders the game impossible for you.

It's, it's crazy.

I mean, they put so many fun and clever things into this game.

It's like, it's awesome.

Yeah, it is awesome.

And here's one that is awesome, but only if you're a Detroit Pistons fan.

Okay.

Going back to our buddy Mark Turmel, the programmer, the unstoppable player in the game and also programmer of NBA Jam, he was a Pistons fan and he hated the Chicago Bulls.

So a few years back, Turmel confirmed something to Sports Illustrated.

If you were playing the Pistons against the Bulls in NBA Jam, it was a close game, the game was programmed so that the Bulls literally could not score a last second shot to tie or win the game.

That is diabolical.

I mean, this is like, especially in a time period of the 80s and 90s when the Bulls were this like huge dynasty.

Like Michael Jordan was, you know, the goat.

And I'm sure everyone wanted to play as the Bulls.

And to think that they couldn't win if they played against the Pistons is hilarious.

It's really funny, but also you couldn't play as the goat.

So for years, Jordan would not license his name to NBA video games.

He wanted to retain his likeness rights, of course.

So you could play as Scotty Pippen, Horace Grant,

decidedly less exciting.

And some basketball games, no offense, Scotty and Horace, but some basketball games actually had a a generic player, 99, instead of Jordan, later on.

So you could play kind of as generic Bulls player, which you could imagine as being Jordan.

Yeah, you could pretend 99 was 23.

Okay, so Roman, here's a final example of the amazing strangeness of NBA Jam.

There is actually

a game.

inside of NBA Jam, the game, that has zero amount to do with basketball.

So you could just break out and play another game.

Totally different game, but it's one you might recognize.

So in the arcade version of NBA Jam, you could access this second game where you play as a tank and have to drive around these different kind of three-dimensional geometric obstacles.

And I think you might recognize it.

So here's what it looks like.

Here's a playthrough on YouTube.

Take a look.

Totally, because this is a game that was inside the aforementioned skating rink in Newark, Ohio.

And this looks almost exactly like Battlezone.

I mean, like, Battlezone had these vector graphics that I thought were absolutely gorgeous.

In fact, if I were to create a game today, it would all be vector graphics, to tell you the truth.

But it looks so much, yeah, it looks, it's a, it looks like Battlezone.

Battlezone is a favorite of mine as well.

I don't know how you would play this game on roller skates, Roman, because Battlezone had those like two joysticks that you had to move.

But like you said, like it looks like a game that is designed now, if that makes sense, even though it's so old.

There was this legendary cheat code in NBA Jam that allowed for this.

And to access this second game that was kind of a Battlezone reference, both players would have to hit X, Y, Z, and pull down their joysticks at the same time.

And then you could actually get into this tank game, which was really just an homage to Battlezone.

That is so cool.

And everyone using their joystick and buttons in this way brings us nicely to our next episode, where we're actually talking about video game controllers.

That's right.

Next time on Hidden Levels, one of the most elemental parts of video gaming, whether or not you're on roller skates, we are diving into the history of the joystick.

There's a kind of direct manipulation quality to it.

Do you want to move forward on a screen?

Press the stick forward.

Do you want to move backwards within the environment of the screen?

Pull the stick backwards.

That is next time on Hidden Levels from 99% Invisible and Endless Threat.

This episode was produced by James Parkinson, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, original music by Swan Real, Jamila Sandoto, and Paul Vitkas.

Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vikas.

Fact-checking by Graham Haysha.

This story was adapted from James Parkinson's podcast, Gameplay.

You can find a link to that show on our website.

The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Barube.

Hidden Levels was created by Ben Brock Johnson from a low runner fever dream with power-ups and cheat codes thanks to the team at 99pi and Endless Thread.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR.

The rest of our team, tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious co-host Amory Siebertson, managing producer Summita Joshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Frannie Monaghan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski.

And for 99% Invisible, Kathy 2 is our executive producer, Kurt Colstades, the digital director, Dwayne Hawes, our senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Bash Madon, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and Me Woman Mars.

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor.

We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

We have another episode of Hind hind levels on friday see you then

no you're right

okay

here it goes

boom shakalaka

this episode is brought to you by the cosmopolitan of las vegas las vegas is magical at night when the sun sets las vegas transforms and at the heart of it all is the cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, a luxury resort destination where bold experiences unfold.

Sip a martini inside the chandelier, discover hidden speakeasies, striking art, and unforgettable views of the Bellagio fountains and the Las Vegas skyline from your terrace suite.

From restaurants to cocktail lounges and high-energy nightlife, every moment invites indulgence.

It's not just a hotel stay.

It's an only in Vegas experience.

Book your stay now at thecosmopolitanlosvegas.com.

Do you know Buffalo, New York?

Sure, they're famous for their wings.

More than that, it's a city with character.

Their waterfront is for making waves.

You can kayak right through the city and zipline among reimagined grain silos.

Buffalo is the kind of city where vintage finds, patio beers, and colorful murals all share the same block.

You can discover modern masterpieces in a museum that's a work of art and beautifully restored architecture with stories to tell.

And if you're the type to ask for directions, be ready.

Someone might just walk you there and point out hidden gems along the way.

It's a city where history somehow feels brand new, where your favorite meal might come from a corner bar.

In the community, it's tightly knit, but that fabric includes you too.

Now you know, that's Buffalo for you.

Learn more at visitbuffalo.com.

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie.

And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home.

Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own.

So you need all your jobs done well.

For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter.

From plumbing to electrical, roof repair, to deck upgrades.

So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well.

Hire high-quality pros at Angie.com.