The Four Pillars of Heaven are Toshiaki Kawada, Kenta Kobashi, Mitsuharu Misawa, and Akira Taue. The four wrestled for All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) in the 90’s, defined the King’s Road style of pro wrestling, and were considered the best of the best. This series will steal this concept whole cloth and apply it to video game genres. For the first entry we take a look at the four games that define the four major North American Sports. This is Four Pillars: Sports Games.

Tecmo Bowl, NHL ‘94, MVP Baseball 2005, and…? On a recent episode of the Stone Age Gamer podcast, Kris and I talked about MVP baseball 2005 as a part of the 10, 20, 30, 40. For those of you who don’t listen to the show, the segment is all about games that came out 10, 20, 30, and 40 years ago. In the course of that discussion we started to talk about the games that defined their respective sports.  For football, for baseball, for hockey it was easy. While a discussion on those games may be a blog post for another blog post, the games listed above are generally considered to be the standouts for their respective sports. But for basketball, well basketball is a different story. There are a lot of great basketball games. We're talking Arch Rivals, Double Dribble, NBA Live (some of the time), the 2K series. But what game really defines the sport? What game could we consider to be the pillar? I'm not going to lie, I waffled between two choices. There are two basketball games in particular that I love. Two games that I think a lot of other people love as well. Those two games are NBA Jam Tournament Edition and NBA Street Vol.2. And after giving it some thought, after playing both games again, for me the game that stands out, the pillar, is NBA Street Vol.2.

There was a time, a long time ago now it seems, when sports games were allowed to be fun. You had things like NFL Blitz, MLB Slugfest, the Mutant League games, Punch-Out, NBA Jam, and a ton of other sports games that were just plain fun. Somewhere along the way though we got obsessed with realism. We got obsessed with making our sports games pure simulations with the most realistic graphics and animations and whatnot, not to mention the microtransactions, instead of the joyful arcade experiences many of us grew up on. And that's a shame because sports are inherently fun. Professional athletes get paid millions of dollars to play the same games that we all played as children. And while it’s no secret that even though modern sports games are selling well, even though sales are down in general compared to the times where there was competition, they aren’t very fun to play for the casual fan.

EA Sports big was a label created by Electronic Arts in 2000 to make sports games for casual fans. On June 9th of 2001 EA released the first NBA street for the Playstation 2. It was received very well even though it suffered from the notorious EA rubber band effect Where in the computer could seemingly come back out of nowhere and make a blowout into a close game. On April 29th of 2003 EA dropped the sequel, NBA Street Vol.2, and gave gamers one of the most fun basketball titles of all time.

One huge difference was that the rubber band AI which had plagued so many EA titles up until that point was noticeably gone. Vol.2 expanded on the amount of tricks you could do, making dunks even more ridiculous, and made defense way more interesting than the first NBA street. It took not only the elements of the first game that worked and kept those and ditched the ones that didn't but also did the same thing for the sport itself. The elements of basketball that work well in a video game are in NBA Street Vol 2. The elements of basketball that don't work well in a video game are not in NBA Street Vol 2. The game Blends the Aesthetics and the culture of not just basketball, but Street basketball, and Hip Hop as well. The soundtrack featured a who's who of Hip Hop, at the time anyway, and introduced a ton of kids to artists like Black Sheep, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, MC Lyte, and Lords of the Underground. More importantly perhaps, the series also introduced kids who had never seen it to the singular beauty that is streetball. The NBA Street series, and volume 2 in particular, served as a powerful bridge between Hip Hop, basketball, and gamers of all stripes.

And while all of that is fine and good, what makes NBA Street Vo. 2 a pillar? Why does it deserve to be held in the same legendary status as sports games giants like Tecmo Bowl or NHL ‘94? The answer is really quite simple. If you play this game today, even if you have never played it before and don’t have any sort of nostalgic connection to it, you are going to have a good time. This game is for fans of basketball, sure, but it's also for those who don’t like basketball, or sports at all for that matter, and just like playing fun video games. One of the things that Kris and I like to say on the podcast is that good games are just that, good games. It doesn't really matter what the content is, or the gameplay style, or the particular subgenre a game falls into, good games are good games. NBA Street Vol.2 is a good game. It’s a pick up and play title. The game is intuitive to the point where even if you know nothing about basketball you're going to be able to pull off cool tricks, score points, and have a good time doing it. Between all of the different modes, Be A Legend, NBA Challenge, and Street School, there's about 15 hours of solo gameplay included on the disc. There are a plethora of unlockables, jerseys/players/etc., which keeps the solo play engaging and when you’ve finished with all of that, there is the versus mode. And that is where the game really shines. When this game first came out I spent hours playing against my roommates and friends in college. As time went on and other games came out we played them sure, but we always came back to street. This game was in constant rotation for years. The beauty was in the simplicity. Got a few minutes? A quick game of Street was just the thing. Got a few hours? A tournament style session with friends was guaranteed to be a good time. Add in the fact that Street Vol.2 included support for up to four players at a time and you were sure to have a party. 

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So there it is. The first in our series of discussing the four pillars of gaming. I hope you enjoyed reading about why NBA Street Vol.2 should be considered a pillar in the sports gaming pantheon. Everything written above about how fun that game was 20 years ago is just as true today as it was back then. And with modern accessories available right here on the Stone Age Gamer the game is bound to look and sound the best it ever has.So grab some friends, grab some drinks, and get yourself a copy of NBA Street vol 2. I promise you a good time awaits. What did you think of NBA Street Vol.2? Join the Stone Age Gamer discord, or you can find me on Bluesky at geekadedan.bsky.social to let me know your thoughts. I’ll be back in two weeks with another potential new series here at the blog that I can’t wait to get into.