EA’s 2010 NBA Jam revival made for a good excuse to do a history feature on the franchise, so I talked to ex-Midway developers about the original game’s development, Acclaim’s former CEO about the license confusion, and people who worked on Acclaim’s less popular series titles. Then EA showed us a bunch of modern prototype stuff to demonstrate how it was trying to do things differently. My favorite part of the story, though, was sitting in on a focus group at EA to see how players reacted to the new game.