Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five useful hacks we’ve been able to utilise in basketball video games.

Although “hacks” and “hacking” are terms that have come to be associated with acts that are malicious or unscrupulous uses of technology, they also refer to inelegant yet quick, creative, and effective solutions in programming. Indeed, Al Lowe – the creator of Leisure Suit Larry – described the method of using one background picture and four mostly transparent cells to create the bamboo maze in Leisure Suit Larry 3 as being his favourite hack. Ironically, this means that while many people disdain the term “life hacks”, it’s actually using “hack” in a similar context to software development!

To that point, modding involves hacks; not just the process of breaking into the game files and altering them, but cobbling together solutions utilising functionality that was intended for developer use, or in a way that was otherwise unintended. This list of the most useful hacks in basketball video games is a mixture of values we discovered we could change to mod or unlock content, and hidden or unadvertised functionality that we can make use of. To that end, we could certainly debate as to whether all of them strictly qualify as hacks, but there’s no doubt that they were useful! And so, without any further ado, here are five ways that we’ve been able to cleverly tinker with games.

1. Removing Career Stats in NBA 2K11

A number of factors derailed my attempts to update NBA 2K11 with current rosters. I hadn’t made a current roster for any games since NBA Live 08, so I underestimated the amount of time and effort it would take to add players with far more attributes and tendencies. As my interest in the modern NBA waned, my enthusiasm for making a current roster update followed suit. I was also unaware that overwriting unneeded players was the best procedure for avoiding the Create-a-Player limit. Once I began doing that, I realised that a lot of players would have someone else’s career stats. I noticed other rosters avoided that issue, and wondered how they accomplished it.

As it happens, I discovered the procedure completely by accident, while tinkering with the idea of a historical roster. It turns out that if a player is designated as a Legend/Special Player without their age being flagged as hidden, their career stats will be deleted. My guess is that this mechanism was added so that the developers could quickly and easily erase unneeded data to keep the file sizes manageable. The fact that Allen Iverson’s career stats were blanked out when he was removed from the active roster by official updates lends further evidence here. While I sadly wasn’t able to finish that current roster mod, discovering this hack was still extremely satisfying!

2. Unlocking Pre-Order Teams in NBA 2K12

In a time where microtransactions and Season Passes are major controversies, it’s easy to forget that on-disc downloadable content was once the height of greed and shady practices. Limited pre-order bonuses that are simply locked away in every copy of the game also fall under that umbrella. In a move that foreshadowed a future lack of goodwill, NBA 2K12 offered the ’91 Golden State Warriors and ’02 Sacramento Kings as a pre-order bonus. The catch is that only a limited number of copies came with the unlock code, so unlike modern pre-order bonuses, it wasn’t even guaranteed! Moreover, the offer only applied to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, so PC was left out.

Once again, the content is right there on the disc or digital download for everyone, so it could’ve (and frankly should’ve) been readily available. Fortunately, we have hacks! While poking around in the settings file, it was discovered that the flags for unlocking the ’91 Warriors and ’02 Kings could be changed, allowing everyone to have access to those teams without editing the roster file (or trying their luck with copies on PS3 and 360). Combating greedy practices has become tougher since then, but the hack to get NBA 2K12’s pre-order exclusive teams unlocked for everyone is a reminder that it pays to open up the files to try tinkering with flags and pointers. Speaking of which…

3. Changing Pointers to Files in early NBA Live PC

I have a ton of nostalgia for the early days of NBA Live modding on PC – or patching as we called it back then – but we were undeniably limited in what was editable. Our founders’ editors allowed us to give our created Michael Jordan proper bio data and overwrite players, but there wasn’t much we could do in terms of editing textures and models. Tools such as the EA Graphics Editor and Picture Editor opened up a handful of opportunities, but the art files in those early NBA Live games were finicky to say the least. As a result, art updates for games like NBA Live 96 were extremely rare, though thanks to the efforts of Bobby H, I included some in my Complete Update.

However, we were able to reuse and repurpose original art files in creative ways. By hex editing the exe file, we could change pointers to filenames to reassign the jerseys, logos, and courts. This was put to great effect in the Silly Rosters for NBA Live 95, as the custom team and All-Star logos became suitable stand-in branding for the wacky new squads. Mind you, these hacks weren’t always compatible with Season mode. I managed to change the All-Star court to the Knicks’ floor in my 1998 season roster, but had to change it back as it caused the game to count towards the players’ regular season stats. Still, these were nifty hacks in a time before art updates were common.

4. Unlocking Players for Blacktop

Virtual Currency and in particular the ability to purchase it has changed NBA 2K over the years, and not for the better. On the bright side, we no longer have to use VC to unlock the best players for use in Blacktop! Beyond the potential for greed, the major problem with this approach is that once servers are offline and earning or buying VC is no longer possible, there’s no way to unlock those players. In fact, this was an issue from the very beginning in the PC version of NBA 2K14, since it didn’t utilise VC at all. Thankfully, once we were able to edit the roster files, modders discovered the value we needed to change in order to make those players accessible in Blacktop.

The value in question is ASA_ID. Using RED MC, we can change this value for the locked players to match the ID of a player that’s readily available in Blacktop, thus unlocking them as well. The catch is that these values are supposed to be unique, and duplicate ID numbers will mess up box scores and other records. As such, this hack shouldn’t be used in any rosters that are intended for use with MyCAREER or The Association. However, it’s a viable solution for creating a roster that’s purely for use in Blacktop. Not all hacks provide perfect solutions, but nevertheless, a workaround that isn’t completely ideal is still far preferable to not having a workaround at all!

5. Changing Names to Override Retired Numbers

On one hand, I appreciate that basketball games have come to implement restrictions on jersey numbers in roster editing and NBA-oriented modes. It avoids the issue of duplicate numbers and players wearing numbers that have been retired, both of which happened way too often following trades and signings in franchise modes. On the other hand, roster projects often demand some flexibility in this regard, and there are times you may want to ignore numbers being retired in franchise or career mode play as well. External roster editors have allowed us to assign duplicate or retired numbers as desired, but recent NBA 2K releases have offered an in-game workaround here.

Players can use their own retired numbers on their old clubs. For example, if you take Larry Bird off of one of the historical teams and place him back on the Celtics, he’ll wear #33 because its forever his number in Boston. That alone is a handy feature, but it can also be exploited. If you change a player’s name to that of a player whose jersey is retired, you can assign them the unavailable number, and they’ll keep it even after you change their name back. We can argue over whether in-built mechanics count as hacks, but the point is if you’re making a 1996 roster and need to give Eddie Jones the #25 he wore before it was retired for Gail Goodrich, there’s a simple way of doing it.

Did you know about these hacks and hidden mechanics that we can make use of? What are some other useful hacks in basketball video games? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

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