So NBA Playgrounds came out on Steam. It's a re-try at NBA Jam with players from past and present. I go look up the roster, to see if my fav dudes are in there.
And I notice Ian Mahinmi is on the roster.
How
Like J-Will the most NBA Jam player ever is not on the roster, but Mahinmi got a spot.
Retired players are licensed differently from current players. You license current players you get them all, retired players you almost have to license one by one. (The retired players association assists with this (so you can more easily license say the old Russell Celtics without having to deal with estates, etc.) but more recent NBA players because they don't rely on it because they're millionaires tend to not get involved in it.)
This is why for example when 2K put the 2002 Kings in the game, they didn't have Chris Webber. And a couple years back Scottie Pippen held out for more money (taking him off like half the classic teams in the game) before fan pressure got him to re-sign and he claimed it was just an oversight.
The coaches situation is even more amusing to me, in that they had George Karl on the Kings bench while the 1996 Sonics were coached by some generic black dude because nobody had thought about the licensing for the old coaches. They also licensed Mike Dunleavy as a classic player, but not a coach. So on.
The best old story was EA paid out a
huge amount of money back in 1999 to get Michael Jordan in their games (he
never had signed with the union's licensing) for some five years or something and then two years later he unretired to play for the Wizards and signed with the union, so all their competitors got to use him in any capacity in their games for a year past the exclusive EA contract running out for "free."
