NBA Hangtime

About NBA Hangtime

NBA Hangtime (1996) is Midway's two-on-two arcade basketball game from the original NBA Jam team, renamed after Acclaim kept the Jam name, adding created players, alley-oops and double dunks.

NBA Hangtime in Depth

Play is largely the same as Midway's NBA Jam games, keeping Tournament Edition's two-on-two match-ups, statistics tracking, legal shoving and "on fire" mode. New moves include spin moves, alley-oops and double dunks, in which one player passes mid-dunk to his teammate, and alley-oops and double dunks can trigger "team fire", setting both players alight. Each of the 29 teams has five players to choose from, with 1995-96 rosters in the arcade and 1996-97 rosters at home, and matches run four three-minute quarters.

The headline addition is "Create Player", which builds a custom player by spending a limited pool of points on height, weight, power, shooting and defence, with more points earned by winning. Using an ID and PIN, players work through every NBA team from the Vancouver Grizzlies to the Chicago Bulls, then face secret characters, though Michael Jordan does not appear because Midway did not pursue his image rights. A three-digit "combination lock" on the match-up screen, like Mortal Kombat 3's Kombat Kodes, unlocks changes to the game's look and play, and an NBA trivia quiz after each game once qualified arcade players for a prize draw.

Making NBA Hangtime

Hangtime was the third basketball game by the team behind NBA Jam; the name changed because Acclaim, the home publisher of the Jam games, had acquired it and released NBA Jam Extreme the same year. Computer and Video Games called the arcade version "the real, and quite worthy, successor to NBA Jam TE", and Next Generation said it had "all the playable qualities of NBA Jam, plus a slew of perks". Midway released home versions for the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, with Funcom handling the Genesis and SNES ports and High Voltage Software a Windows version, while Saturn and Game.com versions were cancelled. The ports drew mixed reviews, most critics feeling they offered too little over NBA Jam: GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann said players had "seen it all before", while GamePro and IGN enjoyed the N64 version and its create-a-player mode. The PlayStation version was faulted for loading and slowdown. NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC followed in 1999, and Arcade1Up released a cabinet including it in 2020.