When the book opened with the story of Atari and Pong, I was taken aback surely the story of a 1993 arcade hit does not need to explain Pong to the reader? But the goal wasn't to outline every arcade game ever, but to point out the legacy of a sports game being the first hugely successful arcade game. In his book NBA Jam Reyan Ali revisits the NBA and the arcades of the early 1990s to explain how the NBA Jam game came to be by interviewing the people responsible for its creation while giving insight into both the rise and decline of Midway*. And it was the perfect time for a larger-than-life arcade basketball game starring real-life players. It was a time when Michael Jordan was the most famous man in the world, a young Shaquille O'Neal was busting backboards, and the New York Knicks were, miraculously, honest-to-goodness contenders. Just seeing it was a delight for me, but I was equally pleased to find my children found it just as fascinating as I did, despite their complete lack of general basketball knowledge or awareness of the sheer magic that was the NBA in the early 1990s. Last summer while on vacation I happened upon a marvelous sight: a fully-operational NBA Jam arcade cabinet in a Seattle food court.
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