NBA Hang Time

NBA Hang Time is a 1996 basketball arcade game developed and released by Midway. Home versions were released for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Super NES, Sega Genesis, and Microsoft Windows. A version for Game.com was announced,^[4] but cancelled.

Hangtime was the third basketball game by the original development team behind the NBA Jam series. The title was changed due to the NBA Jam name being acquired by Acclaim Entertainment, the publisher of the games for the home market. Acclaim’s NBA Jam Extreme was released the same year as Hangtime. Features introduced in Hangtime included character creation, alley oops, and double dunks. A software update known as NBA Hang time was released for the arcades later in the life cycle. A sequel, NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC, was released in 1999.

The theme song “Whatcha Gonna Do?” was produced by rapper M-Doc of Indasoul Entertainment.

Gameplay – NBA Hang Time

The NAB Hang Time is largely the same as the Midway’s NBA Jam games, with some additions. One of the most prominent additions is the “Create Player” feature, which allows players to create a custom basketball player, specifying height, weight, power, shooting, and defensive skills using a limited number of attribute points. Created players can be made more powerful as players earn additional attribute points by winning games.^[5]

The game retains many of the same rules of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, including the two-on-two match ups, statistics tracking, legal pushing and “on fire” mode. Additions to the gameplay include spin moves, alley oops and double slam dunks – a slam dunk performed after one team member in the middle of a dunk passes to the other member. Alley-oops and double dunks can trigger the new “team fire” mode in which both team members are on fire.

NBA Hang Time

Each team now has five members of the roster to choose from. The original arcade version features team rosters from the 1995–96 NBA season, while the home console versions feature team rosters that were accurate to the 1996–97 NBA season. The player can select from any of the 29 NBA teams and match them in four quarters of NBA basketball (three minutes each), with three-minute overtimes if necessary. Just as in the NBA Jam games, the game can keep track of the teams a player has beaten using a player’s created ID and PIN. Optionally, the player can load their created player. Players using their ID face off against a series of NBA teams, starting with the Vancouver Grizzlies and ending with the Chicago Bulls (who were on their way to being NBA champions at the time of the game’s release). After beating all 29 teams, the player faces off against a number of secret characters.

New to the game is a three-digit “combination lock” feature. Similar to the “Kombat Kodes” in Mortal Kombat 3, the feature allows players to enter codes on the Match Up screen that alter the game’s appearance and/or gameplay.

The initial arcade version and the home versions included an NBA trivia quiz at the end of each game played. Answering enough trivia questions correctly in the arcade game originally qualified players for a prize drawing, while on home versions it gives players more attribute points for their created players.

Home versions – NBA Hang Time

Midway released home versions of the game for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, as well as for the previous generation’s consoles, the Sega Genesis and Super NES. Funcom developed the Genesis and Super NES versions.

Los Angeles Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal is not licensed in either version of Hangtime as he was given clearance for NBA Hang Time Showtime: NBA on NBC.

In 2020, Tastemakers LLC, under its Arcade1Up brand, released a 3/4 scale arcade cabinet that included NAB Hang time, alongside its precursors NBA Jam and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition.^[6] Code Mystics developed this version of Hangtime, a largely faithful emulation of the arcade original, but with some players omitted due to issues with licensing.