---
title: 'NBA Jam: The Book'
type: Book
date: 2020-12-16
rating: 8
author: Reyan Ali
genre:
  - Non-Fiction
year: 2019
status: Finished
image: nba-jam-the-book.jpg
tags:
  - book
colorSortKey: [0, 115, 7]
---
 I’ll be honest, I was shocked at how good this book was. I bought it on a lark (who doesn’t love NBA Jam?) and when the name of the publisher is _Boss Fight Books_ you go in with somewhat lowered expectations. I thought it was going to be a hundred pages of pablum and maybe some fun facts.

Instead, it’s a meticulously researched story — centered around NBA Jam but really about the rise and fall of Midway, its publisher — and a thesis on what made the game so particularly popular. The thesis is that it was a confluence of four things:

1. The deafening howl of basketball's growing popularity; 2. The strong marketing push, powered largely by once-in-a-lifetime licensing; 3. A firecracker group of technical talent with strong chemistry; 4. Arcade technology finally maturing enough to handle two-on-two.

The book is fun and I honestly would have loved to learn more about the macroeconomic factors _after_ NBA Jam (it devoted a chapter each to Acclaim and Midway's demises and EA's rise) and less about the individual programmers involved, which is less a comment on the book and more that I'm much more interested in this overall industry's early days than I realized.

(Insane statistic, by the way: NBA Jam created $1 billion dollars in revenue. _In quarters._)