The NBA Finals Make Me Hunger for a New Double Dribble
The NBA Finals Make Me Hunger for a New Double Dribble
The New York Eagles > The New York Nicks
The NBA Finals kick off this week, running from June 3rd to June 10th. The New York Nicks and San Antonio Spurs have this one opportunity to prove they are the best team in the world, and with the teams so evenly matched, anything could happen.
Except the return of Double Dribble. That’s definitely not going to happen. But it should!
For the uninitiated, Double Dribble made its arcade debut in 1986 (which means that, like Dragon Quest, it’s also turning 40 this year). Its success continues Konami’s string of coin-op hits, joining the likes of Gradius and Contra as one of the most successful games on the market. An NES conversion soon followed, which found even bigger success.
At the time, it was considered the most realistic basketball game on the market… though, admittedly, the competition wasn’t very steep. It might be hard to imagine now, but just having realistically proportioned characters that resembled real players in a basketball game was a huge deal back then. This was a time when Konami had begun, shall we say, looking to the faces of real celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Boris Karloff for inspiration (see Contra and Castlevania). While Double Dribble didn’t feature the likeness of real athletes, it stayed in line with the developer’s burgeoning house style that, at the very least, presented a game as realistic as the technology would allow. The slam-dunk graphics made a particularly powerful impression, practically working as cut scenes that gave players a second to stop and think about how awesome they looked. Not only were they visually stunning, they also signaled that Konami understood that dunks are the best part of watching basketball. They may only be worth two points… but in terms of star-making power, they were priceless.
But what makes Double Dribble special by today’s standards is how much it embraced simply being a videogame. While Konami wasn’t shy about putting homages to Hollywood celebrities in their games, they took more care with copyright law when it came to their sports games. Double Dribble features four teams: the Boston Frogs, the New York Eagles, the Chicago Ox, and the L.A. Breakers. Sure, the Ox brushed up against the name of the Chicago Bulls, but with no lookalike for budding star Michael Jordan in the mix, they could safely hide behind the argument that no one playing Double Dribble would mistake the fake team for the real deal.
There was also no mistaking the logic of the game with real-life basketball. Sure, the rules were generally the same, but thanks to a programming mishap, there’s a spot on the court that will always award players with a successful three-point shot. In fact, all the shots seemed to go in, or not in, based on unknowable properties that players needed to feel out in order to achieve mastery. Anyone with the right combination of luck, instincts, and basic understanding of the game could potentially win at Double Dribble, making it an attractive alternative to the real thing for the athletically uninclined who enjoyed the concept of basketball but couldn’t actually dribble a ball to save their lives.
Double Dribble also makes an awesome slide-whistle noise when the ball is in mid-air during a three-point-shot attempt, ending in a massive destructive sound if it manages to hit the hoop.
These are all things you won’t see in modern basketball games, let alone modern basketball. As a result, very few people today bother with NBA-branded videogames unless they are into the actual game, whereas Double Dribble managed to win over sports fans and non-fans alike. Just as Gradius seems poised for a comeback, Konami could do well with a new Double Dribble that maintains the non-canon team names, slam-dunk cinemas, otherworldly athletic idiosyncrasies, and general feel of the NES classic, while upping the ante on everything else.
I’d also be a lot more likely to actually watch the NBA Finals if players suddenly turned black-and-white during their slam dunks, and if there was a slide-whistle effect every time the ball flew through the air, but that’s probably asking too much.