Wayback Wednesday: NBA Live 99 For Christmas ’98
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at my Christmas of 1998, which included receiving NBA Live 99 for the Nintendo 64.
It’s Christmas Eve, so I hope that you’re enjoying the holiday season no matter how you spend it! To that point, I appreciate you checking in with us for some basketball gaming content. When I glanced ahead in the calendar and was reminded that this week’s Wayback Wednesday would fall on the night before Christmas, I naturally began thinking of what would be a suitably festive topic. I’ve previously reflected on the inclusion of the special Christmas jerseys in various games, and other ways that Christmas has been represented on the virtual hardwood.
This year, I’d like to share something a bit more personal, specifically memories of my Christmas in 1998. We all have years in our lives that are significant to us for one reason or another. Whether they were wonderful, terrible, or otherwise shaped the person we are today, those years stick in our minds. 1998 was a memorable year for me, and for mostly positive reasons. To that end, my Christmas of 1998 capped off a great trip around the sun, and also happened to deliver a new basketball video game: NBA Live 99 for the Nintendo 64. Join me as I take a look back…way back…
In some ways, 1998 was a bittersweet year for my teenage self. The Last Dance had been an incredible ride as a Chicago Bulls fan, but it was also…well, the last dance for my favourite NBA team! I was holding out hope that rumours of their demise – or at least Michael Jordan’s retirement – were greatly exaggerated. Of course, that hope was snuffed out in early 1999! Nevertheless, I’d been able to witness something special. Between NBA Action, the Games of the Week, and finally having regular internet access, I followed along with the season much closer than ever before. Even with the lockout and the end of the dynasty, 1998 is one of my favourite years in basketball.
It was also the year I finally played organised hoops. Before then, I’d only played at school and with friends. All the same, when my high school was looking to assemble a team for a junior competition, I jumped at the opportunity to try out. Those pick-up games with my friends had allowed me to develop some skills and experience, but as it also turned out, a certain degree of overconfidence! Competing against people who had played organised basketball was unsurprisingly very different, and I didn’t make the cut. However, inspired by MJ, I decided that I’d use it as motivation, and joined a team in my local junior league. I went on to play for that team throughout high school.
That was one of several ultimately positive changes and experiences that I had during 1998. On top of getting into competitive basketball, I also made some new friends and gravitated towards a new social circle. I’d encountered some bullying my first year of high school, but between those new friends and a growth spurt that saw me reach six feet by the time I was 14, that kind of petered out! Sure, there was the usual teenage angst and dramatic high school politics, but Year 8 turned out to be much better than Year 7. Looking back, I can recognise 1998 as the year I began to gain confidence and take some of the first serious steps towards becoming the person that I wanted to be.
And, once again, it was a great year for my hobbies and interests, new and old. In addition to following along with a memorable NBA campaign and watching my team win it all for the third straight year, 1998 was when I got into professional wrestling, right in the thick of the Attitude Era and Monday Night Wars. I’m sure it won’t be a surprise to hear that a majority of my birthday and Christmas gifts in 1998 were either basketball or wrestling related! They included books, home videos, memorabilia, a Michael Jordan jersey, and a couple of Nintendo 64 games. I received WWF War Zone for my 14th birthday, while NBA Live 99 was one of my Christmas presents.
While neither WWF War Zone nor NBA Live 99 are widely considered to be two of the all-time best games of their respective genres – if nothing else, the N64 version of NBA Live 99 is definitely weaker than the PC and PlayStation releases – I have a ton of nostalgia for both titles. War Zone was a way of combining my newfound love of wrestling and the WWF with my well-established hobby of gaming. Meanwhile, NBA Live 99 was the first NBA game set in the current or upcoming season that I’d bought or received since picking up NBA Live 96 PC in early 1996. Granted, it had to launch with final 1998 season rosters owing to the lockout, but it was still a brand new game.
As much as I loved (and still love) NBA Live 96 PC, it was a thrill to play with what was then a modern basketball game, with all the bells and whistles that came with the jump to true 3D and more powerful technology. Actual player faces, detailed jerseys and courts, play-by-play commentary…sure, they’re all extremely primitive by modern standards, but it was still an enormous leap over a game ported from a 16-bit console! I’ll admit that I felt a twinge of envy whenever I saw file additions for NBA Live 98 or NBA Live 99 on the NLSC. I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them for a couple more years, but with NBA Live 99 for N64, I still felt like I was getting with the times.
Mind you, despite all of the advancements in the 5v5 gameplay compared to NBA Live 96, on Christmas Day 1998, I spent most of my sessions with NBA Live 99 in the Three-Point Shootout. It was a novelty after all, since I didn’t have a chance to play it in NBA Live 98 PC owing to my family’s aging desktop. However, I did play some exhibition games as well, and replaced Roster Player on the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan; of course, at that time, there were no 1999 season rosters to update the game with! I was generally impressed by the gameplay, too. It didn’t make NBA Live 96 totally obsolete to me, but I did prefer it to Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside.
Now, in all fairness, I was 14 and still very much in my “fanboy of the things that I enjoy” phase. I had a hard time getting into sim games that did things differently to NBA Live, so it’s no surprise that I preferred NBA Live 99 to Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside. With that being said, even though revisiting games has opened my mind and I can now better appreciate NBA Live’s competitors, many of those early games did err by trying to be different in a way that wasn’t an improvement. These days, I can dust off NBA Courtside and quite enjoy it, but NBA Live 99 is easily the better game across the board; even the Nintendo 64 version, which is the fairer comparison.
Of course, since it was the Nintendo 64 version, I didn’t truly come to appreciate NBA Live 99 until I got it on PC. To be clear, I’m undoubtedly nostalgic for the N64, and I believe that it’s underrated at times because people focus so heavily on some of its key weaknesses, without giving it credit for its strengths. At the same time, there are valid criticisms of the console that I completely agree with! The combination of technical limitations and the design of its controller meant that it wasn’t the ideal platform for certain genres. There may have been enough buttons on the N64’s controller to map all of the necessary functions, but their layout made the controls feel uncomfortable.
Sim basketball games and fighting games definitely suffered in trying to adapt to the N64’s controller layout; though ironically, the N64 version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy is one of my favourite games in that series. Admittedly, that could be because the N64 was the fifth generation console I owned, so I was determined to enjoy the games I played on it, adjusting to the controls as necessary. However, by that point I was old enough to be critical of my interests, and some games were disappointing. I do have some favourites on the N64, but even back then I realised that I didn’t enjoy games such as Donkey Kong 64 and Super Mario 64 quite as much as their predecessors.
Similarly, the Nintendo 64 version of NBA Live 99 ultimately didn’t become an all-time favourite. Once again, I didn’t truly appreciate NBA Live 99 until I played the PC version, which benefitted from superior tech, the series’ first multi-season mode, official patches, and of course, our modding community. On Christmas Day in 1998 though, none of that mattered! I didn’t mind that there was only a single season mode. I was fine with outdated rosters, because 1998 had been such a special season, and the league was in limbo anyway. Also, although Antoine Walker is one of NBA Live’s least popular cover players, I had no problem with him being the face of the game.
In fact, it was really cool seeing a virtual Employee Number Eight shimmy across the screen at the end of its intro! Sure, it’s not as iconic as the full motion video intros on PC or some of the later basketball game intros created in-engine, and those early 3D models certainly aren’t aesthetically pleasing now. In 1998 though, after a couple of years of making the best of a sim basketball game that was showing its age, it did feel like stepping into the future; or at the very least, finally being up to date. I don’t say that to disparage NBA Live 96, and these days I actually prefer retro titles to the latest NBA 2K, but in 1998, I was keen on having a fresh experience with NBA Live 99.
When I reflect on Christmas 1998 and other memories of childhood and adolescence, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, I’m grateful to my parents. We were far from wealthy, but we were comfortable, and I was always treated on my birthday and at Christmas. Second, when I think of the joy that I felt unwrapping NBA Live 99 and that Michael Jordan jersey on Christmas Day in 1998, I’m reminded of how I greatly dislike the cynicism around nostalgia. It’s easy to paint it as being stuck in the past and unhappily yearning for youth and perceived better times – and sure, it can be – but it’s a reductive view. It assumes that there can be no good reasons to ever reminisce.
For me, my nostalgia and fond memories are reminders that my hobbies and interests are worth enjoying. Through the ups and downs of life, I can say that I’ve had some wonderful times. Just because I reminisce, it doesn’t mean that I don’t see more good times ahead! Indeed, reflecting on how Christmas has felt so fun and special – and the goodwill of the season – makes me eager to continue experiencing and spreading that cheer. For the people who scoff at nostalgia, I hope that some day, they’ll be able to reminisce fondly about their passions. Not to sound condescending, but to never feel fondness for or attachment to anything seems far more miserable than being nostalgic!
Obviously, I’m luckier than others when it came to having had a good childhood and fun presents on special occasions. There are people who had it much tougher, or for whom Christmas is a difficult time. I don’t mean to downplay that, and my heart goes out to those people. I will push back on the armchair psychoanalysts judging anyone for indulging nostalgia, though. Again, for me, gratitude is a big part of it. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to experience joy at Christmas. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to enjoy the evolution of basketball games. I’m grateful that hoops and gaming made me feel better during the bad times, and also made the good times even more wonderful.
That’s what I think of when I recall getting NBA Live 99 for N64 on Christmas in 1998. No, it didn’t become an all-time favourite; in fact, to my regret, I traded in my original copy some years later. Still, I’ll always remember the joy of unwrapping it, and the fun I had playing it for the first time, laying on our lounge room floor in the air conditioning on a scorching Australian Christmas Day. There are many reasons why video games become nostalgic and special to us, even if we wouldn’t necessarily rank them as the best, or even just a personal favourite. 27 years ago, NBA Live 99 was just what my basketball-crazed teenage self needed to cap off a memorable 1998.
Wishing you all Merry Christmas and Seasons Greetings! However this year has been for you – whether it was as joyful and memorable as 1998 was for me, or if it turned out to be a rather tough one – I hope that you’re happy and healthy this holiday season, and that 2026 will be better than 2025 either way. As for me, I’ll be enjoying a recent Christmas tradition of playing an assortment of favourite old video games, especially some that aren’t normally in the rotation. In light of reminiscing about that fantastic Christmas that put a bow on a special year in 1998, I might just have to revisit NBA Live 99 for Nintendo 64, and put those Chicago Bulls on the floor for another dance.
The post Wayback Wednesday: NBA Live 99 For Christmas ’98 appeared first on NLSC.