Endless Thread - Hidden Levels Ep. 1: Mr. Boomshakalaka

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Welcome to our all-new collaborative series, "Hidden Levels," in which we team up with 99% Invisible to explore how the world of video games has impacted the world beyond. We’ll dive deep into how games are made and designed, exploring everything from the history of the joystick to the faithful recreation of nature in digital spaces. Whether you are a lifelong gamer or have never picked up a controller, "Hidden Levels" uncovers how games have quietly changed culture, technology, and the way we see the world...starting with a '90s arcade classic. Developer Mark Turmell worked at Midway, which was known for iconic games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Mortal Kombat. His creation of NBA Jam in 1993 pushed the company in a new direction. It debuted at the height of the Chicago Bulls' dynasty, aiming to capture the energy of professional basketball in a high-octane, over-the-top format. The game was a hit out of the gate, captivating players with its digitized graphics (with the heads of real NBA players) and fantasy gameplay where players could become "on fire." At the heart of the NBA Jam gaming experience was the voice of its announcer, Tim Kitzrow. Turmell and the game's sound team had realized they needed a voice that could match the game's energy and cut through the din of an arcade, without the budget for a professional NBA commentator. So they turned to Kitzrow, an improv comedian and journeyman actor, who was initially hired by Midway for pinball voiceovers — it was just a fun side gig. He had no idea that his work on NBA Jam would make such a lasting impact on the industry. Kitzrow modeled his energetic, flamboyant delivery on NBA announcer Marv Albert, infusing it with his own ad-libbed, short, and punchy catchphrases like "REJECTED!" and the game's most famous line, "Boomshakalaka!"—which was suggested by an artist and inspired by funk group Sly and the Family Stone. The game became a monumental hit, reportedly making $1 billion in quarters in its first year, with its catchphrases entering basketball vernacular. *** Credits: This episode of "Hidden Levels" was produced by James Parkinson, edited by Emmett FitzGerald, and mixed by Martín Gonzalez. Original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto, and Paul Vaitkus. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. This story was adapted from James Parkinson’s podcast, Gameplay. The Managing Producer for "Hidden Levels" is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. "Hidden Levels" is a production of 99% Invisible and WBUR's Endless Thread.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simuling Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, y'all, it's been Brock Johnson from Endless Thread, and I'm here with my friend. I'm Roman Mars from the podcast, 99% Invisible. And today we're bringing you the first episode from our new collaborative series called Hidden Levels. It's about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games. In the next six episodes, we'll get deep into how games are made and designed. Everything from the history.

of the joystick, to how nature is faithfully recreated in the digital world to a dispatch from the front lines of the console wars. So, Roman, when did video games first change your world? I mean, probably when I was in elementary school in the 80s, the arcade that I went to the most was a small section in a skating rink in Newark, Ohio. And so I first learned playing video games on roller skates, actually. That sounds impressive. How about you? I think, you know, I didn't have an arcade spot, but one memory that is really strong for me

is I had the luck. My brother actually brought me to Japan when I was 12 years old, and I was really lucky to do that. It blew my mind in so many ways, but I went into a real deal Japanese arcade while I was there, and it was so incredible.

I mean, the different kinds of games you could play, the sights, really the sounds, too. We are audio people, Roman. I love sound first and foremost. And that's what I think of sometimes when I think of video games. Absolutely. I'm exactly the same way. And there's something really special about designing game sounds so that it can cut through the din of all the other arcade games and kind of draw you to the machine.

Do you have a favorite sound that you think of when you think of video game sounds? I mean, my favorite is there used to be this really big arcade game called Gauntlet that had like four joysticks on it so you can play four different characters. And one of the sounds that the sort of game announcer said was, elf needs food badly. Elf needs food badly. Or elf is about to die. And I think about elf needs food badly every time I'm hungry. Literally every day of my life since I played gauntlet, I think about this game sound.

How about you? What's yours? Well, you know, I think of a couple classics for me. The Mortal Kombat, you know, Scorpion, Get over here! You know, there was a game I played a lot called Cruising USA that had this kind of ridiculous female passenger voice that was like,

yeah, all right. Hollywood, let's go. Oh, wow, Redwoods. Ooh, Hollywood, radical. But one that I think of a lot is the Rayyuken or Sure You Can, Street Fighter 2 sounds of Raiu or Ken doing the like, Rayyuken, sure you can.

That one, I just say that sometimes to myself just to make myself happy. So clearly, Roman, as audio podcasters, we love sound and we could go on forever. Yeah, and the story we have for you today is all about an iconic video game sound. It's about a high-energy vocal performance that helps spawn an entire franchise. The first episode of Hidden Levels is brought to us by 99PI contributor James Parkinson. Here it is. Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 80s, Mark Tamal was a wonder boy of video game design. He released a successful game as a teenager and was earning thousands of dollars a month

while still living at his parents' house. By the time he was in his 20s, Mark was working full-time as a developer in Chicago, designing coin-operated arcade games. Coin-op back in those days was always the cutting edge. It was better than any Super Nintendo, better than any. Sega Genesis. It was really high power. I could put more sprites on the screen, more bullets, more explosions. And so it was, for me, it was like being a kid in a candy store. The company Mark worked for was called Midway, and they were famous for bringing a number of big Japanese games to the

US, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. And in 1992, they released the iconic fighting game, Mortal Kombat. But Mark was about to take Midway in a very different direction. Mark was a big basketball fan, and in the early 90s he could tell that the NBA was really having a moment, particularly in Chicago. This was the height of Michael Jordan mania. Chicago Bulls were about to clinch their first championship three-ped, and the popularity of the league was at an all-time high. And Mark Thamesel decided he wanted to capture the high-flying, razzle-dazzle energy of professional basketball

and put it in an arcade game. He called his new creation NBA Jam. By the fall of 1992, NBA Jam was almost complete, and Mark Tamal and his team decided to test out their new game at an arcade in Chicago called Dennis's Place for Games. They rolled in a 400-pound cabinet, put in the chip with the NBA Jam code, and turned the machine on. Then Mark sat back to watch how the customers in Dennis' Place would react.

He says that back then, there was a pretty simple way to gauge whether a coin-op game was going to be successful. You could usually tell in the first couple of hours. In the coin-op business, if you can get somebody to put quarters in, reach into their pocket, go to the cash machine, the change machine, and put money in, you know, that's like really telling. It's very democratic, whether you like it or not.

And as Mark watched, the customers at Dennis's place voted with their quarters. They cradded a round. around the NBA jam cabinet, shouting, cursing, fighting for the joystick. It was bedlam. There were fist fights, you know, people gambling. The coin doors were jammed up with money. You know, when somebody would do a big dunk and the backboard would smash into pieces, you know, they'll literally, you know, scream and run around the arcade.

You know, it was awesome. I remember exactly how wild this game was. Growing up in Australia, I didn't have access to live NBA. games on TV. But NBA Jam was the next best thing. It quite literally brought the excitement of the NBA to my fingertips. And I think there were a few different elements that drew kids like me in. For one thing, NBA Jam just looked good. It might be hard to believe now, but for kids like me who grew up on games like Pac-Man, NBA Jam was a whole new world. This was the dawn of digitized graphics, which meant that for the first time, designers like Mark could make avatars that

looked and moved like actual people. You know, we would take videotape and run it through a digitizer that would, you know, create frames and we'd put it on the screen. And it was like, wow, you know, look at that. That's, you know, a photograph right there on my computer screen. At first, Mark recorded video of amateur players he found on local courts throughout Chicago to run through the digitizer. But when he finalized the official licensing deal with the MBA, he did some minor digital surgery.

Then we basically chopped the heads off of all of our local athletes and then generated the heads of all of these NBA superstars to paste on top. Which meant I could play the game as a real-life basketball star, or at least the head of one. I could be Scotty Pippen, Hakeem Elijah won, or Shaquille O'Neal. But the realism ended there, because the gameplay was pure fantasy. At times, NBA Jam felt more like Mortal Kombat than basketball. There were no fouls, no out of bounds, and the players were like superhumans.

They left into the rafters for sky-high dunks and shot impossibly long-range three-pointed. When a player made three baskets in a row, the ball burst into flames and he became unstoppable for the next several possessions. But I think there was one element in particular that made NBA jams stand out from all the other games in the arcade. It was an iconic sound that cut through all the bleeps and bloops and drew people to the NBA, jam cabinet like moths to a flame. Even if you didn't play the game growing up, you might have heard this sound.

From downtown, launches a shot. I'm talking about the voice of the game's announcer. Today, voice acting is a key component of most video game productions. But back in the 1970s, there were no voices in video games at all. High quality audio recordings were just too large to fit on the sound chips of arcade machines. The earliest voices heard in video games were digitised using a technique called speech synthesis. Basically combining short sounds or syllables to form complete words.

These synthesised voices were a clever solution to the problem, but they didn't exactly sound realistic. The space-themed shooter Stratovox was the first game to attempt this. As you find at Alien Ships, a very unnatural sounding narrator would shout a handful of distorted phrases. Believe it or not, the narrator there was saying lucky and very good. One of the first games to use true recorded voiceover was Dragon's Lair in 1983. They managed to do this using laser disc technology.

The team didn't have the budget to hire actors, so much of the voice acting was done by the animators and the production staff. Please save me! The cage is locked with a key. The dragon keeps it around his neck. Improvements in computer chip technology allowed for increased memory, and by the early 90s, it was common for arcade games to use real voice recordings, at least very short ones. These companies still weren't hiring professional actors, though. As a result, the voice performances were often bad, like really, really bad.

You must recover all the energy immediately, Mega Man. But where is Dr. Wiley? That's a good question. Just one more page and I would have finished this book. Die, monster. You don't belong in this world. Captain Wesker, where's Chris? Stop it.

Don't open that door. Yeah, that wasn't going to cut it for NBA Jam. This new basketball game was going to need a voice that could match the high-octane style of the gameplay and cut through the noisy commotion of an arcade to draw people in. Someone with a distinctive delivery that would keep people dipping into their pockets for more quarters. They needed this guy. So firstly, can I just get you to introduce yourself, please. Hi everyone, Tim Kittzer from NBA Jam, Boom Shackalaka. That was very loud. Tim Kitzro was not a famous actor back in the early 90s, and he certainly didn't grow up

with dreams of becoming a voice actor for an iconic video game. But he'd always been a showman. He was one of seven children, and he was the entertainer in the family. He says his goal at dinner was to get milk to come out of someone's nose. One of my heroes is Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand voices, Looney Tunes. So, you know, when I was younger, I often did cartoon voices like Underdog. You know, the Simon Meyer Sinanters says Underdog must die. Or droopy, droopy dog. There's a telephone, butch.

It's a dame. What did she say, butch? She's so unselfish. Tim got into theatre in high school and went on to study. acting at Purchase College, where he crossed paths with some heavy hitters. My roommate was Stan Tucci, Vin Raines, was in the, so a lot of big names came out of that place. But Tim's career didn't take off quite like those two. He spent the 80s as a genuine actor bouncing between cities like New York and L.A.

looking for work. And eventually, he wound up in Chicago. He trained with the comedians at Second City while auditioning for commercials and playing the drums in a local band. His career far like it was stuttering, until it took a very unlikely turn. Of course, the way the world works, sometimes, you know, you have one plan and then it goes another way. It all started because a couple of Tim's bandmates worked in Midway's pinball division. They often needed people to record little bits of voiceover, and they knew that their drummer Tim was pretty good at impressions.

One day, they asked him to help out with a Gilligan's Island pinball game. So I was hired to do Mr. Howell from Gillingen's Island. Maybe I can buy a new dinghy for my yacht. Over time, Tim became a regular voice on Midway's pinball games. I did the Twilight Zone, attacked from Mars. This is an emergency broadcast. The Earth is searched from Mars. The Shadow, World Cup soccer, NBA pinball, you know, or fast break, whatever.

It was just going in and having fun. And actually, this time I was getting paid for it. Being a voice actor for pinball was a fun side gig, but not much more than that. Tim never felt like it had the potential to be an actual career. I really had no idea what I was doing, you know, getting into that business. I knew that I loved playing pinball, but pinball, as I said, 15 games later, you know, I still didn't know much about the industry, still couldn't play worth a lick. It was just a fun extra gig for extra money, extra beer money.

Meanwhile, Mark Tammel and the NBA Jam crew were putting the finishing touch on their brand new basketball game. They'd signed the licensing deal with the NBA and figured out the gameplay and the graphics. And at a certain point, they started to think about the sound. A guy named John Hay handled just about every aspect of the audio for NBA jam. He wrote the game's deeply 90s soundtrack.

And in order to make the game sound more lifelike, he went out and recorded all these basketball sounds in the wild, like balls being dribbled or sneaker squeaks on hardwood floors. But Mark Thamele and John Hay knew that one of the most important sonic elements was the voice of the game's announcer. They wanted a commentator who would make the game come alive and sound like the way the NBA sounded on TV. Mark even thought about hiring an actual NBA commentator,

but they didn't have the budget. Luckily for them, an affordable alternative was kicking around the office, drinking beer with the pinball guys. I used to just get regular calls because every couple of months There was a new pinball game, and it's like, let's go to Tim. And so this felt no different to me. The recording studio was located in Midway's Pinball Factory. It was a giant noisy space with lots of workers and hundreds of pinball machines.

But all the way in the back, there was a little five-foot-by-five-foot vocal booth. They called it the meat locker. It was kind of a depressing little place, but it was cozy. It was like our little world. It was just the sound guys, you know, not much bigger than a household giant refrigerator. and a little window from you to see John. So, yeah, although it was kind of dingy and dark and small and everything else, it was home and, you know, it's where some of the best work was ever done.

Mark and John worked to brainstorm a library of words and phrases they needed Tim to record. First, they needed the names of every player in the game and a few different takes for each so that it wouldn't sound repetitive. Then they started compiling a list of all the different things that happened in a basketball game that Tim was going to need to react to. Just like a TV announcer, he needed to say something every time there was a big dunk or a three-pointer or a block shot.

John Hay wrote lines for each category, some of them taken directly from NBA broadcasts. When Tim Kitsero finally got into the booth, he decided he wanted to model his delivery off a veteran NBA announcer Marv Albert. Albert was the most famous basketball commentator in the world at the time, and he had a flamboyant energetic style.

You know, jump-off point was realizing that to me, Mar Valbert, compared to other sports broadcasters, he brought that extra energy. And I knew that I wanted to emulate that. But Tim was going to be Mar Valbert turned up to 11. Mar Valbert with a splash of Mortal Kombat. To get in the right headspace, Tim would visualize high-flying dunks and channel that energy into his performance. So that's where I kind of got that timber, that tone that, you know, that NBA jam had based off of like what I heard and then just making it my own.

Rejected. He's hitting up. He's on fire. Well, I mean, Tim's, I mean, he's amazing. He's a genius. This is Mark Timeligan. He says that Tim didn't stick to the script. Right away, he started getting creative. He's so quick-witted. You know, he's always willing to, you know, iterate and improve and take feedback. And when Tim went into the studio, He would just add lib and it was magic, you know, immediately. But Tim had to improvise within constraints. The arcade machines at the time still didn't have a lot of memory,

so his catchphrases needed to be short, like half a sentence. Or even just a single word. As for the game's most famous catchphrase, Tim doesn't take credit. The exact origin story is a little murky. but Tim believes it was a suggestion by John Carlton, one of the game's artists. He'd been listening to the funk group, Sly and the Family Stone. And on the song, I Want to Take You Higher, there's a chorus where they sing, Boo shaka-lac-lac-lac-lac-lac-lac-lac-poh-boh-chac-lac-lac-poh-chac-lac-lac-poh-chac-lac.

But they were just like, boo-shac-chac-lac-lac-laka. They weren't saying boom-shac-lac-laka. They were saying boo-shac-chac-lac-laka, bo-shac-hac-wh-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h... Whatever. Actually, the song goes boom laca laca. But you get the point. So he just said, hey, John, tell Tim to say boom shocklaka. Once again, this is the story that I heard.

I'm there, but I don't remember it. But I do remember vaguely, John just saying to me, say boom shocklaka. And I just said, what does that mean? I don't know, just say it. And I went, boom, shockalaka. And I said, is that? And he goes, yeah, do a couple more. Boom shockalaka.

Boom Shackalaka. Yeah, that's probably good. All right, moving on. The recording sessions for NBA Jam were done in around 20 hours. And when Tim was finished, he didn't think it was a big deal at all. As far as he was concerned, this was just another gig. Like Gilligan's Island Pinball. Little did he know that those 20 hours would change the course of his life.

And from that point forward, he'd be known to the world as Mr. Boom Shackalaka. After the success of their test night at Dennis's Place for Games, the NBA Jam team was confident that their game was not a dud. But still, Mark Tamell had this lingering worry that the game wouldn't translate outside of Chicago. After all, he could see the backend data showing which NBA teams people were choosing to play with. So I knew looking at the stats that the bulls were just dominant.

Everybody was picking the balls. And so in the back of my head, I thought, maybe this is a Chicago thing. When the game went live across the country, Mark flew to L.A. to see how it played there. He went to an arcade in Westwood, where NBA Jam had just been installed. And I walked in and I just watched.

And it was the same bedlam that I had seen in Chicago, except that the players were picking the Lakers. And so it really was that moment where I said to myself, wow, you know, this is going to happen in every NBA city at the very least. And this is going to happen around the country. And sure enough, that's exactly, you know, what happened. NBA Jam was picked up by arcades all around the country.

And city after city, people happily forked out their hard-end quarters in order to rain down three-pointers with Detloft Shremf, or dunked from half court with Clyde Drexler. If there was one group of people who seemed to love the game most of all, it was NBA players. On his days off, Miami Heatstar Glenn Rice would wait in line at the local arcade just to play NBA Jam as himself.

Gary Payton, a point guard with the Seattle Supersonics, demanded to know why he hadn't been included in the game. He even sent personal photos to Mark Thamal that he could use to make Peyton's avatar. And then there was Shaquille O'Neal. We got contacted from the distributor in Orlando and said that Shaq wanted to buy two games. Shaq wanted one NBA jam machine for his own house

and another for the Orlando Magic's team jet. They brought one of the NBA Jam cabinets onto the jet and it traveled with them on the road and they would reel it up into Shaq's hotel suite and the players, instead of going out and partying or clubbing, they would go in and just play and play as you, other. Even the opposing team would come in the night before the game or after the game and play. In 1993, NBA Jam was the talk of both the arcade world and the world of professional

basketball. But back in Chicago, Tim Kitzroi still hadn't played the game. So I asked John to say, hey, where can I, you know, go see, you know, NBA Jam? Tim went to a nearby arcade and walked up to a cabinet that he assumed was NBA Jam. But it turns out it was a different basketball. basketball game, one of their competitors. And Tim was not all that impressed by the announcer. It would be like, nice shot, four two, he makes it. I was like, what the hell is wrong with that guy? I walk over, he had to watch the NBA Jam, he's on fire from downtown, not tonight, you know, whatever. And I was like, well, that guy's pretty good. And it was clear that the kids in the

arcade agreed with him. They were absolutely loving NBA Jam. And that was like, like, you know, this moment, I went, wow, this is something. This is like, you know, made the equivalent of being, you know, someone from like, you know, a group that hears their song on the radio for the first time. It's like, this is a hit. And I got kind of charged, but I couldn't resist sometimes just by accident, didn't think about it, but I'm watching. And I would start to say like, rejected, ugly shot. Get that stuff out of here. Boom, you know, someone turned around. Hey, man, you sound like the dude in the game. I go, dude, I am the dude. It is! It is you!

NBA Jam went on to become a bigger hit than anyone ever expected. To use an arcade term, it was a quarter muncher, devouring coins like a hungry hippo. In its first year, NBA Jam made $1 billion in revenue, one quarter at a time. I was out at Midway in their lunchroom, and there was an article on the board, you know, just like a Xerox article that said, NBA Jam surpasses, breaks all records, makes a billion dollars in quarters first year. And I just said, who wrote this? This is funny. I just absolutely convinced it was someone just having some fun to kind of like prop up the team and, you know, give them some confidence like, yeah, NBA Jam's a great game, but had no idea in reality the game made a billion dollars. And that was the moment my brain went, wait a minute, I made 900. What?

It's impossible to say whether or not the game would have been successful without Tim Kitsero, but his contribution is undeniable. In 1994, a version of NBA Jam was released for the Super Nintendo. At that time, home consoles had a lot less memory than arcade cabinets, and so certain elements had to be stripped from the game to make it small enough to fit on a cartridge. In the end, they cut the music, but retained the sound effects and Tim Kistro's iconic voice. Can't buy a bucket. Grabbs the rebound. As new versions of the game got released, Tim was able to renegotiate for better compensation. And while NBA jam didn't make him rich,

the game changed the course of his career and his whole approach to video game voice work. It went from this side gig he did for beer money to a viable career. I wasn't going into a room of 20 people who looked like me to do a, you know, a Bud Light beer commercial or a cheesy sitcom, you know, audition or an extra part in a movie. This was people saying, we want Tim because Tim delivers the goods. Off the back of NBA Jam, Tim became the voice of other Midway sports titles, like NFL Blitz, Midway presents, NHL hits, and MLB's Slugfest.

And now sit back, it's time to play ball. By this stage, The technology had improved to the point where there were really no limits on how much voiceover you could include in video games. And with the freedom to get as wild as he wanted, Tim delivered some truly outrageous baseball banter. Hey, here's one, Jimmy. Famous people did her alive, all-star team.

On the mound, I got Abe Lincoln. Why? Abe Lincoln, he's got these beady eyes, a little drifter beard, he's intimidated. Who do you got? With Slugfest, I wrote, you know, all the creative color commentary. So that was actually the most exciting part of my career. I was not only making really good money, I was writing and basically in charge of the content. So I was given the opportunity to basically create the whole world.

Tim Kitsrow is not the most important voice actor in video game history, but his performance at NBA Jam is certainly one of the most beloved, and his role in the game's success set an important precedent for how voice acting can elevate a video game and bring it to life. In the decades that followed, game developers began to invest more and more in vocal performances, and sports game companies started spending money to hire real-life announcers to do commentary. In fact, one of the most famous video game franchises of all time is named after an announcer. Welcome to Madden NFL 2000, the new millennium of football.

And Tim's influence wasn't limited to video games. It fed back into the sport of basketball itself. Over time, NBA Jam catchphrases like he's heating up have become part of the general basketball vernacular. And if you turn on a game today, it's pretty obvious that many basketball commentators grew up playing NBA Jan. Crosses over, finds Zubats, gives it up to harder at the free to line. A lot of Zubats!

Boom, Shackalaka! As he dumps it with two hands. And the Clippers lead 17-7. Oh, my goodness, feeling like NBA Jam here early. Clippers all dumps, walking to the ramp. Frank's blue flack. The Gats of paint leads it out for the cutting Boston. He'll dump it.

Over the top of Lopton, Brandon Boston. Boom, shaka, laca. Boom, shakalaka. Yeah. Boom, saca laca. Yeah. Boom, saca laca. Come home.

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We are back with Hidden Levels in our first episode. Roman Mars. Ben Brock Johnson. We have been talking NBA Jam and the vocal performance is really just one of the most distinct things about the game because NBA Jam has all these other quirks. And these quirks really make this game legendary. It has so many hidden design details, exactly the kind of stuff we're talking about in this series. Let's talk about a few of these hidden design details. You game? Absolutely. All right. So James Parkinson in the story, he talked about how the game wasn't the most realistic depiction of basketball, even though they were using this new technology to capture people, maybe not super realistic. Sure. I mean, the ball caught fire, so that rarely happens in a basketball game. But yeah, I get you.

Right. So if you knew where to look in this game, you could also unlock secret players who were not athletes, at least that I know of. So Bill Clinton is one example. Al Gore is another. Oh, I had no idea. What other examples? apples are there. George Clinton could also be unlocked as a character. All the Clintons are represented. All the Clintons, man. George Clinton. That's right.

And he was a character named P. Funk. That was in the tournament edition of the game. You could also access one of the people who we heard from in the episode who made NBA Jam. We don't think of programmers as ballers necessarily. But all the programmers were playable in the game. and that includes Mark Termel, who we heard from earlier. Was he particularly good at the game as a player?

It may shock you to learn that he was practically unstoppable. I mean, you know, that's what I would do. Same. That's awesome. So here's another interesting sort of secret Easter egg in the game, Roman. It's called Super Clean Floors, which if a player activated this, the basketball court would become very slippery. and the players on the other team would fall over all the time. Actually, I remember being the target of this and playing the game,

and it basically renders the game impossible for you. It's crazy. I mean, they put so many fun and clever things into this game. It's like, it's awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. And here's one that is awesome, but only if you're a Detroit Pistons fan. Okay. Going back to our buddy Mark Turmel, the programmer,

the unstoppable player in the game and also programmer of NBA Jam. He was a Pistons fan and he hated the Chicago Bulls. So a few years back, Tremel confirmed something to Sports Illustrated. If you were playing the Pistons against the Bulls and NBA Jam, it was a close game. The game was programmed so that the Bulls literally could not score a last second shot to tire win the game. That is diabolical. I mean, this is like especially in a time period of the 80s and 90s when the Bulls were this like huge dynasty. like Michael Jordan was, you know, the goat.

And I'm sure everyone wanted to play as the Bulls and to think that they couldn't win if they played against the Pistons is hilarious. It's really funny. But also, you couldn't play as the goat. So for years, Jordan would not license his name to NBA video games. He wanted to retain his likeness rights, of course. So you could play as Scotty Pippen, Horace Grant, decidedly less exciting. And some basketball games, no offense, Scotty and Horace. But some basketball games actually had a generic player 99 instead of Jordan later on.

So you could play kind of as generic Bulls player, which you could imagine as being Jordan. Yeah, you could pretend 99 was 23. Okay, so Roman, here's a final example of the amazing strangeness of NBA Jam. There is actually a game inside of NBA Jam, the game, that has zero amount to do with basketball. So you can just break out and play another game. Totally different game, but it's one you might recognize. So in the arcade version of NBA Jam, you could access this second game where you play as a tank and have to drive around these different kind of three-dimensional geometric obstacles. And I think you might recognize it.

So here's what it looks like. Here's a play through on YouTube. Take a look. Totally, because this is a game that was inside the aforementioned skating rink in New York, Ohio. And this looks almost exactly like Battlezone. I mean, like, Battlezone had these vector graphics that I thought were absolutely gorgeous. In fact, if I were to create a game today, it would all be vector graphics to tell you the truth. But it looks so much.

Yeah, it looks like Battlezone. Battlezone is a favorite of mine as well. I don't know how you would play this game on Roller Skates, Roman, because Battlezone had those like two joysticks that you had to move. But like you said, like it looks like a game that is designed now, if that makes sense, even though it's it's so old, there was this legendary cheat code in NBA Jam that allowed for this. And to access this second game that was kind of a Battle Zone reference, both players would have to hit X, Y, Z, and pull down their joysticks at the same time. And then you could actually get into this tank game, which was really just an homage to Battlezone. That is so cool. And everyone using their

joystick and buttons in this way brings us nicely to our next episode. We're actually talking talking about video game controllers. That's right. Next time on Hidden Levels, one of the most elemental parts of video gaming, whether or not you're on roller skates, we are diving into the history of the joystick. There's a kind of direct manipulation quality to it. Do you want to move forward on a screen? Press the stick forward.

Do you want to move backwards within the environment of the screen? Pull the stick backwards. That is the next time on Hidden Levels from 99% invisible and endless threats. an endless threat. This episode was produced by James Parkinson, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, original music by Swanreale,

Jamila Sandoto, and Paul Vytkis. Series theme by Swanreale and Paul Vichis. Fact-checking by Graham Hesha, this story was adapted from James Parkinson's podcast Gameplay. You can find a link to that show on our website. The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Barube. Hidden Levels was created by Ben Brock Johnson from a load runner fever dream with power-ups and cheat codes thanks to the team at 99PI and endless thread.

Endless thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. The rest of our team, tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories, and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious co-host Amory Sievertson, managing producer Samutajoshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter, and Franny Monaghan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski. And for 99% Invisible, Kathy 2 is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstadis, the digital director, Delany Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashemadon, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series is created by Aaron Nestor.

We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. We have another episode of Penn Levels on Friday. See you then. Oh, yeah, right. Okay. Here it goes. Boom, Shakalaka!