Authenticity didn’t use to be important to basketball video games. All we wanted was to play NBA Jam as Bill Clinton and be on fire. Times have changed, though. NBA 2K17 will be out soon, and it has paid the utmost attention to authenticity. In fact, the development team behind the game traveled over 16,000 miles to make the arenas as authentic as possible.
The latest game trailer, “Arena Authenticity,” espouses the level of commitment to the in-arena experience the people behind the game put in. They went to every single NBA arena and recorded over 200 hours of live game audio. This allowed them to capture the unique audio of every single arena. This includes obvious stuff, such as crowd chants and player intros. It goes beyond that, though. As the video shows, they recorded the individual buzzer sounds of every arena, and the trailer also seems to indicate they recorded how the ball sounds when dribbled on every NBA floor. Now that’s attention to detail.
That is certainly an impressive level of detail, although it can’t help but feel kind of excessive. Will anybody buy NBA2K17 because the buzzer in Sacramento is authentic, or that the ball sounds right bouncing off the floor in Detroit? Hopefully, because otherwise the 2K team traveled over 16,000 miles for nothing.
