Wayback Wednesday: Portraits in NBA Live 95 & 96 PC

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 the player portraits in NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 PC.

Although our fondest basketball gaming memories come from what we accomplished on the virtual hardwood, our nostalgia encompasses everything about a title: graphics, sound effects, music, and the overall style. We fondly recall the smallest details, from the authenticity of Steve Nash lying on the floor in NBA Live 10 to Terry Mills and Oliver Miller having the same ratings in the PC version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition. When you’ve spent enough time with an old favourite to know it back to front, the most obscure details and trivia are embedded in your memories.

I’m not just trying to wax poetic with navel-gazing fluff here. I do honestly believe that, and it’s why I not only revisit games to produce Wayback Wednesday content, but also for my own enjoyment. It’s also why I don’t just do retrospective reviews, but also cover specific features and concepts in-depth. However, I’ll admit that it might seem like a flimsy justification to talk about – of all things – the portraits in NBA Live 95 and 96 PC! They are indeed an aesthetic element that are part and parcel of my nostalgia for those titles though, so let’s take a look back…way back…

From NBA Live 95 through to NBA Live 2001, there was really no question that the PC version was the definitive release. One might argue that the lack of a steal button in NBA Live 95-97 PC gave the console version a certain edge in gameplay, but as far as graphics, modes, and roster editing – to say nothing of the modding scene – PC had an undeniable advantage. That’s not to say that the console versions of those early NBA Live games didn’t try to push the limits of the hardware. Indeed, NBA Live 95 for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis has some surprisingly high quality portraits for the 16-bit era. They’re nowhere near as clean and clear as the portraits on PC, though.

Another key difference with the portraits in the PC versions of NBA Live 95 and 96 was that every portrait was a complete and unique texture. In the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95, there were a handful of generic neck and shoulders textures for all of the skin tones, with the players’ heads being swapped in and out during the starting lineup introductions. It was an effective use of the limited space on a cartridge, though the head switching was humorously very obvious when back-to-back players shared the same shoulders. It’s almost impossible not to move back and forth between players when you encounter such a situation, because we gamers have weird habits that way.

Of course, one advantage to the console version’s approach was that players never had outdated uniforms, as their head always appeared on shoulders wearing their current team’s jersey. While there was authenticity and aesthetic appeal in the PC version’s use of real photos, there wasn’t always accuracy once you began customising rosters. In fact, there are inaccuracies right out of the box, as NBA Live 95 and 96 PC feature outdated portraits for a number of players who had moved on since they were taken. This was particularly noticeable in NBA Live 96 since it had recycled many portraits from NBA Live 95, including ones that were already outdated by the 1995 season.

It’s interesting to try and pinpoint where the portraits are from. Some are clearly from photos taken during media day, while others are from action shots. If we go digging a little bit, we can find those media day portraits used elsewhere, such as on the backs of the 1994-95 Hoops set of trading cards. Series 1 of that set includes many of the same portraits from NBA Live 95 and 96 PC, identifying them as being taken during the 1994 season, or Media Day 1993 at the very earliest. This explains why Horace Grant is still wearing a Bulls jersey, and Dominique Wilkins and Danny Manning are sporting Hawks and Clippers uniforms from before they were traded for each other.

It’s interesting that these portraits were retained despite being a couple of years out of date, though admittedly it didn’t really matter too much for players who were still on the same team as they had been in 1993. It did result in some inconsistency with the portraits that were clearly taken more recently, as well as ones that were originally action shots. The developers clearly had to use whatever was made available to them, and it’s not as though modern games are above recycling assets such as portraits and even cyberfaces. Outdated uniforms and other discrepancies with portraits were just a point of interest that we noticed, rather than something that ruined the experience.

Speaking of discrepancies, NBA Live 96 PC features another interesting one. In NBA Live 95 and 96 PC, each player had three portraits: large, medium, and small, used on the starting lineup screen, roster screens, and in-game overlays respectively. In most cases, it was the same portrait in three different sizes. However, some players had a different large portrait. While Glenn Robinson’s small and medium portraits featured his headshot in a Bucks jersey, he sported a Team USA jersey in his large portrait. Ashraf Amaya’s small and medium portraits are from 1993 when he was briefly with the Rockets, but his large portrait features him wearing a Vancouver Grizzlies jersey.

Presumably these assets came in late or time was otherwise a factor, but whatever the case, it can catch you off guard when you see an entirely different large portrait for a player. Notably, the PlayStation version of NBA Live 96 came out later and updated a few of those portraits, as well as adding some for players who were missing them on PC. Additionally, players who were missing in the PC version of NBA Live 96, such as Terry Cummings and Howard Eisley, reused their portraits from NBA Live 95 PC. The PC and PlayStation versions of NBA Live 97 made some long overdue updates to player portraits, though player movement still resulted in some jerseys being outdated.

There are some other noteworthy facts about the portraits in NBA Live 95 and 96 PC. If you open up the portrait files using PicEd and scroll to the bottom, you’ll notice that there are additional portraits for Dennis Rodman featuring different hair colours. The Worm had a unique head with hair that changed colour at random, with a matching portrait that indicated which colour had been chosen for the upcoming game. Later titles would achieve the same effect with multiple face textures. You’ll also see that there are duplicate portraits for the All-Stars, and that the “No Portrait Available” portrait has its own offset, along with a placeholder texture when there are errors.

Although PicEd allows us to browse the portraits in NBA Live 95 and 96 PC, we’ve always been limited as far as editing them. NBA Live 95 tends to crash following any changes to its portrait files. Conversely, NBA Live 96 will accept custom textures, but the game is very finicky when it comes to bits and colours in the images that are being imported. Even if the texture is imported correctly and appears to be fine in PicEd, it can still be garbled or contain artefacts when loaded in-game. As such, there have been very few portrait mods for NBA Live 96 PC, though PicEd’s ability to blank out portraits by changing the offset to “No Portrait Available” has been extremely useful.

However, the greatest use of PicEd in modding hasn’t been its ability to import to and modify portraits in NBA Live 96, but rather to export them. Many years later, when we were making retro rosters and adding missing Legends to games like NBA Live 2005 and NBA Live 06, those portraits were extremely handy assets. Even if they couldn’t be used for cyberface textures, they were clean photos on grey backgrounds that could easily be made transparent, and imported into the portrait files for NBA Live 2005 through 08. Exporting those headshots from NBA Live 95 and 96 PC saved a ton of time, since there was no need to go hunting for suitable pictures online.

Aside from spending countless hours playing NBA Live 95 and 96 PC, the reason I’m so nostalgic for their player portraits is that those were the games that got me into modding after I discovered the NLSC way back in 1997. Even before I knew about the modding scene – or patching, as it was called then – I’d been updating NBA Live 96’s rosters for my own personal use throughout the 1997 season. As such, I’ve also spent many hours looking at those portraits as I move players around, and decide which retirees I’m going to overwrite with the new rookies. Name a player from NBA Live 95 or 96 PC, and I’m confident that I’ll see their headshot in my mind’s eye.

My affinity for those games also shaped my preferences for how portraits were handled in later games. I was opposed to the use of player renders in NBA Live 09 and desired to see a return to real photos, which did happen in NBA Live 10. I’ll defend that preference to a certain extent as real photos did feel far more authentic, since player faces circa 2008 generally still weren’t photorealistic. I’ve softened my stance since then, especially as the quality of faces has improved, though the mixture of renders and real photos in newer games feels sloppily inconsistent and unfinished. Nevertheless, the use of actual headshots feels “classic”, and evokes a nostalgic vibe.

Again, it may sound bizarre to be nostalgic about player headshots of all things, so I would like to reiterate that most of my memories do revolve around gameplay on the virtual hardwood! However, NBA Live 95 and 96 PC weren’t too far removed from a time when player portraits were 8-bit and 16-bit sprites based on headshots, rather than higher resolution photos. Before the jump to true 3D and individual face textures, those portraits were the most realistic depictions of players in those early games! And of course, they’re all part of capturing a snapshot of the NBA at that time, which plays into the interactive almanac aspect of basketball video games that I enjoy so much.

On top of that, many of those portraits found a new use as modding assets for later NBA Live titles. To that point, if you grew up playing NBA Live 2005 or 06 on PC and used roster mods from our community, chances are those portraits look very familiar, even if you’ve never played the games they’re originally from! Although there aren’t any glaring mistakes such as Kevin Edwards using Blue Edwards’ portrait, there’s some interesting trivia surrounding the headshots in NBA Live 95 and 96 PC, from their origins to players having multiple portraits. For an older gamer like me, even just browsing the portrait files in PicEd brings back so many fond memories.

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