NBA 2K23 is a video game more than 20 years in the making

Visual Concepts is the 2K Sports studio. NBA 2K23, development usually runs for a week or two, then the team takes an entire workday to play the current version of the game and evaluate what they’ve built so far. Erick Boenisch was the executive producer. This meant that Erick Boenisch also had to reflect. Reminiscing, even.

“Going through the drafts, you’re literally like, Here is the opportunity to draft Shawn Kemp,” Boenisch said with a chuckle. “It is crazy! Or, Hersey Hawkins is here. I Love that guy in real life.”

Boenisch, 43, was speaking to Visual Concepts’ transformative approach to a sports video game’s traditional franchise mode in NBA 2K23MyNBA Eras allows fans to start in the NBA 40 years ago, or 30, or 20, and then rewrite basketball history. This is the best sports video game experience, and there has been nothing like it. And delivering this experience, Boenisch said, was as personally fulfilling for him, and NBA 2K’s development staff of 475, as it is for the millions of fans who have now peeked inside the mode and gone down a time-travel rabbit hole for themselves.

“Dino Radja,” Boenisch said, calling out the 1994 Boston Celtics’ Croatian sensation alongside Hawkins. “I LoveThis guy. These guys held special place in my heart from my childhood. Like Dana Barros [also a Celtic from that time] — always on my team. He held at one time the NBA record of most consecutive games played with an opponent. [3-point basket] made. […] I always had him on my team for that.”

Radja left the NBA 20 years before Boenisch joined Visual Concepts. Radja is a recent graduate from Sonoma State University. 2K Sports Headquarters in Novato, California, are 20 minutes away. But Radja, and Barros, and Hawkins, and all the other guys who didn’t make the cut in the earliest versions of NBA 2K come to life this year in a mode that Boenisch and his longtime colleagues blue-skied and spitballed almost from day one together.

Image by Visual Concepts/2K Sport

“If you’ve astutely paid attention, we’ve been working toward this for a long time,” Boenisch said. “We’ve been adding classic teams and cities for years and years and years — and getting players’ [likeness] rights along the way — [and]MyTeam has created historic uniforms and court floors. So There are many historical uniforms and players. To pull off this feat, we were expanding our library.

“If you undertake everything that is MyNBA Eras in one year, it is physically not possible,” Boenisch said. “But this year, I was like, We already have plenty. We can do it.”

MyNBA Eras lets a fan start a franchise playthrough with any NBA team extant in one of four years — 1983, 1991, 2002, or 2022 — and continue from there. For guys who are Boenisch’s age, or mine, it is a riot of nostalgia. Seeing David Thompson’s name in the Golden State Warriors’ starting lineup on opening day, 1983, was an emotional experience I’ve never had in another sports video game. Taking over the Charlotte Hornets in 1988, and betraying my favorite player from that team — Rex Chapman — by drafting center Rony Seikaly instead, I had to go hide in the bathroom for five minutes, and I live alone.

It didn’t come together until 2022, Boenisch said, because the demands of building two separate versions of NBA 2K21 — for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and then for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X — left Visual Concepts with an even shorter development cycle last year for NBA 2K22.

“2K22 was, literally, our shortest dev cycle in NBA 2K history,” Boenisch said, because the PS5/Series X version launched in November 2020. “And that was coming off the backs of, you know, a new console generation, and the pandemic. There’s only so much you can ask from people.”

MyNBA Eras isn’t just a cosmetic appliqué over some renamed rosters. Professional basketball’s rules have evolved greatly — perhaps more than those of American football — over the past 40 years, alternately allowing and prohibiting things like zone defenses, hand-checking, and contact a lot more rough than you see in the present-day sport. Boenisch and Mike Wang, the gameplay director for MyNBA Eras knew that time travel promises would be hollow if they only delivered classic uniforms with a filter on the CRT.

Image by Visual Concepts/2K sports

“Mike is like me — he’s a fan of the game, and a fan of the history of the game, more importantly,” Boenisch said. “The Or you will have no game. 2022 rules playing in 1985 — I guess you can, but it’s just not at a level that I could sleep well at night.” It only took a brief conversation with Wang and his gameplay lieutenants, Boenisch said, to get them committed to the complete immersion that Boenisch imagined for MyNBA Eras.

“His team was like, It’s something completely new, and we absolutely love it.,” Boenisch said. “We’re old heads, most of the people on that team — we’re in the Dad Phase of life, right? They were so excited about this. Mike’s team was gung-ho, 100%, whatever it takes to make the best game of basketball, and they delivered.”

It was difficult to get buy-in from the other third parties that contributed. NBA 2K23, whether that was recalcitrant institutions like Michael Jordan’s alma mater, the University of North Carolina, or the Los Angeles Lakers’ owner, Jeanie Buss, or even the Atlanta Hawks’ all-time great Dominique Wilkins, who isn’t camera-shy but never sat for an interview about Jordan until 2K Sports came calling. All of these moments are presented interstitially in the Jordan Challenge, a showpiece mode where players re-create 15 of His Airness’ greatest achievements, from college to his last days as a Chicago Bull.

The same applies to NBA 2K23Although the product is the culmination of decades of effort and determination, Patrick Ewing, Phil Jackson and Mike Fratello have all contributed their wholehearted efforts to make the Dreamcast a major pop-culture phenomenon. What started out as a Dreamcast title in sports was transformed into something mainstream. “The other half of it is putting out a product for so long, that is of such high quality, that people understand if you reach out to them, you’re doing high-quality work,” Boenisch said. “Then they don’t have to worry about, Which game will you play?”

Boenisch allows that the concepts behind the Jordan Challenge and MyNBA Eras aren’t necessarily revolutionary. Visual Concepts was the first to make them real on consoles. Wang and he gathered nearly 500 participants to row in the exact same direction and all of them bought in.

“Let me give you a stat,” Boensich said. “At Visual Concepts, here in Novato, we have over 65 people who have been at the company for 10-plus years. And there’s 40-ish that have been here for 20-plus years. That’s a big number on top of a big number. Our game is very passionately loved by the people working here. This makes it easy to rally the troops. We meet, we say, ‘These are the things we want to do.’ We have honest discussions on whether they’re possible or not.

“And then for the ones that we decide aren’t possible, we usually do them anyways.”