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NBA2K

Bob Fitzgerald was a young play-by-play announcer for the Golden State Warriors in 1999 when he walked into a studio in Novato, Calif. He had done voice-over work before, so he didn’t think much of this side gig, calling games for an upstart basketball video game looking to challenge the EA Sports’s juggernaut, NBA Live.

For the next six years, as Visual Concepts produced NBA2K for Sega Sports and later ESPN, Fitzgerald lent his voice, though not his name — he went by the alias Bob Steele — to the game. He soon realized those hours-long sessions in which he had to announce every score combination up to 200 served a purpose when his son put up 174 points playing NBA2K. He laughed when his broadcasting colleagues complained about hearing his voice whenever their kids played the game. But the moment he realized he might be a part of something special came while watching the 2001 movie, “The Wash,” which features a scene in which Snoop Dogg gets high, has his hair braided and plays NBA2K, with a familiar voice in the background.

“I went, ‘Oh, damn. That’s NBA2K. That’s me,’ ” Fitzgerald says with a laugh. “I didn’t have an idea of what this was going to be.”

NBA2K on Friday released its 25th edition of a game that has surpassed anyone’s conception of what it could be — an all-encompassing basketball experience that touches on lifestyle, music, sneaker culture, fashion, basketball analytics and even urban planning — advancing over the years from developing a dream basketball player to a team to a park to a neighborhood to an entire city for hoopers to convene.

Snoop Dogg has gone from playing the game in a movie to making its theme music and appearing as one of its celebrity characters. Jay Z once served as executive producer; Spike Lee directed a storyline, and J. Cole appeared on the cover. The NBA and its teams now back a professional esports league, The NBA2K League. And NBA players look to the game’s player ratings as gospel, often tweaking NBA2K’s digital marketing director, Ronnie Singh, aka Ronnie 2K, over low ratings. Memphis Grizzlies all-star Jaren Jackson Jr., the NBA’s reigning defensive player of the year, recently credited NBA2K with helping him develop the timing to become a better shot blocker.

“Basketball doesn’t change. The rules don’t dramatically change about it. But what we offer and what we aim to entertain our fans with changes so dramatically every single year,” Singh says. “We’re just scratching the surface."

Bebeto Matthews

As a kid, Erick Boenisch charted his stats playing with Jose Canseco and the Texas Rangers on Sports Talk Baseball on his Sega Genesis, and he claims to have once scored 800 points on one of NBA2K’s basketball predecessors, Double Dribble. So, he says, “It was a natural progression for me to move into making sports video games. An easy, no brainer choice.”

He joined Visual Concepts in 2002 and has seen the company grow from a few dozen like-minded gamers to hundreds of employees dedicated to dominating the market. He is now vice president of NBA development for 2K at Visual Concepts.

NBA Live, 2K’s main competition, produced its final game in 2018. NBA2K’s creators and fans credit the game’s popularity on not solely what’s in the game but everything on the sports-watching periphery. Upgrading quality and establishing cultural influence was the objective, Strauss Zelnick says, when he took over as chief executive of Take-Two Interactive, the holding company for 2K and Rock Star Games, in 2007. Hunting greater relevance, which would only begin with a game featuring more realistic graphics and gameplay, NBA2K sought “to make the experience of basketball meet the zeitgeist of basketball,” Zelnick says. Back then, the release was a three-month process, with programmers moving on to the next season. But with more demanding gamers, and a desire to stay up to date with their concerns, engagement requires frequently updating ratings, hairstyles, and even tattoos to reflect the changes that occur during a season.

“No stone goes unturned with that game. Whereas I think you can look at a lot of different sports games across the spectrum and you can kind of see like, ‘Oh, they haven’t touched that mode in like five years,’ ” said Andrew McNeill, vice president of Esports at Monumental Sports &amp; Entertainment. In his position, he oversees operations at Wizards District Gaming, winners of the NBA2K league titles in 2020 and 2021. “I don’t think they really let one aspect lag behind.”

The name is a reflection of when it debuted — on Nov. 11, 1999 — and is a reference to the “Y2K” scare that accompanied the arrival of the new millennium. But the product has evolved, embracing trends and establishing new ones. The NBA has long skewed toward a younger audience, capitalizing on social and digital trends. The league has in turn understood the benefit of pairing with a popular game that can be cross-promoted through broadcasts and in-game advertisements.

Fans who play NBA2K watch more games and engage with the league on social media more, Adrienne O’Keeffe, the NBA’s head of digital consumer products, wrote in an email. "It’s a “communal experience” for fans, she said.

Nick Otto

Singh, 40, threw himself into NBA2K long before he became an employee; a regular in online forums where gamers competed and commented over a product they were obsessed with.

“It starts," Singh says, “with the authenticity.”

Eventually, Singh started calling himself Ronnie 2K. He later ditched law school for a job with a publicity-starved, independent professional baseball team in San Diego, before landing at Visual Concepts.<b> </b>Fifteen years later, the Bay Area native has helped push NBA2K through its most popular era while becoming a celebrity himself, hanging with professional athletes and rappers whose attraction to the game adds an element of cool that NBA2K relies on.

“There’s a lot of positive momentum towards gaming,” Singh says. “It no longer was the thing you did in the basement, but more what all the cool kids were doing. And that crossover was really exciting for me. Coming from an Indian background and seeing what people did in tech — the cross-section of tech and sports ... that’s kind of quenched my entrepreneurial spirit."

Singh says he has spent “almost every day” in awe of the connections he has made promoting the game. In 2019, he played in the celebrity game during the NBA’s All-Star Weekend festivities, then went to the Jordan Brand party. Marcus and Jeffrey Jordan, sons of the party’s host, approached Singh and told them that their father wanted to meet him to discuss his performance in the game.

“I’m like, ‘Your dad, Michael Jordan, wants to talk to me?’ ” says Singh. “That was pretty mind-blowing.”

The downside of being the game’s public face is that Singh is also the target of fans disappointed with the game’s glitches, and especially players — and their significant others — who chafe at their ratings. Last year, Warriors guard Klay Thompson called Singh a “hater” and a “clown” for his rating in three-point shooting. (The beef ended shortly with Thompson posting an apology on Instagram: “Cyber-bullying is super lame and loser behavior.”) In 2015, Hassan Whiteside, then a relative unknown hoping to stick with the Miami Heat, said in a live postgame interview that his inspiration for achieving a triple-double in which he set the franchise record for blocks was because he was “trying to get my 2K rating up.”

Though he doesn’t set the ratings, Singh said he doesn’t mind taking the hits. He gets it.

“These players play this game their whole lives,” he says. "Why wouldn’t these ratings mean so much to them? They’re super-competitive. All of those guys want to be the number one.”

NBA2k

The NFL remains the behemoth of the American sports landscape, occupying a perch so distant from the other professional leagues that the NBA has focused on global branding to increase its popularity. With NBA2K23 reaching 13 million in sales, Zelnick says, “the brand sort of outpunches its weight class.” Michael Pachter, a gaming research analyst for Wedbush Securities, finds it fascinating that NBA2K continuously outsells its football counterpart, EA Sports’s “Madden,” often by more than twice as many units.

“How did they make this so crazy successful? It’s easy to play, difficult to master. It’s challenging. It’s fun,” Pachter says. “I think it’s just a cultural phenomenon because it executes so well. It’s such a great game. They don’t have competition. So one would think they could let quality slide, but that’s just not in their DNA.”

Boenisch says the game’s transformation from pastime to cultural phenomenon started in 2011, when Jordan was the cover athlete and the game featured a Jordan challenge mode that offered users the chance to recreate 10 of his most memorable moments. Most of the game’s sales (140 million units worldwide) have occurred in the past decade, when NBA2K added such innovations as face-scanning technology and the introduction of WNBA teams. NBA2K24, which features Kobe Bryant as the cover athlete, will be the first installment with cross-platform support, or crossplay, which allows friends to play against one another whether they’re on a PlayStation, Xbox or personal computer.

"I tell people every time I log on, I feel like I’m going on vacation,” Boenisch says. “What we’re really good at doing is keeping our ear to the ground. I think we’re really good at listening to our fans. We’re really good at listening to our critics and everyone in between and really trying to deliver what people are looking for, what they want in a culture-related sports game.”

Turner Sports’ Kevin Harlan has been the voice of NBA2K since 2005. But Fitzgerald still looks back on his time as “Bob Steele” with an appreciation for the small role he played in the game’s infancy.

“To see it now, 25 years later, it’s incredible,” Fitzgerald says. “I kind of had a sense of, ‘Hey, if they keep improving their technology on this with the growth of the league and with how iconic some of the superstars are, then yeah, this, this hopefully this will be a successful franchise and it’ll get to where Madden was.’ ”

Having already done that, NBA2K is now looking to set new standards. “I think we’ll get to a point where the game is indistinguishable from live action. We’re not quite there yet. It’s very close,” Zelnick says, “It’s our company’s focus on creativity, innovation and efficiency. Sometimes we fall short or we don’t always get it right, and then we set ourselves up and try again. We’re always trying to do better. I’m fond of saying, ‘arrogance is the enemy of continued success.’ We know we’re not perfect, but we sure do try.”

National Association of Black Journalists, Story of the Year, Sports (2009) 

Associated Press Sports Editor Award for Breaking News, Second Place (2010)

Associated Press Sports Editor Award for Features, Fourth Place (2008)

Associated Press Sports Editor Award for Investigative, Fourth Place (2007) 

Associated Press Sports Editor Award for Projects, Honorable Mention (2011)

Georgia Sports Writers Association, Breaking News, First Place (2000) 

Cox Enterprises Rookie of the Year (1999)

Florida A&M University, BS in Newspaper Journalism 

Michael Lee is a Sports enterprise reporter at The Washington Post focusing on the intersection of gender, diversity and how sports shape our society. 

Michael Lee

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NBA2K is 25. Its influence is only growing.

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