50 Years of Video Games: TV Basketball (Arcade)

Prior to 1974, you didn’t actually see human beings in video games. Sure, sometimes they were cheated in like how the games on the Odyssey would provide screen overlays with pictures of humans, but the actual game itself would rely on abstractions of humans instead. You would be controlling a paddle to hit a ball back and forth, but you would understand it was a stand-in for a real world sport played by humans even if you only saw lines and a dot on screen. However, while the early arcade games would struggle to even draw a stick figure, 1974 lead to games truly beginning to embrace sprites. Sprites are essentially 2D images placed into a scene and are rendered separately from elements like the background so that they can reduce how often the hardware needs to utilize more intensive rendering systems. Sprites allowed for more complex shapes to be easily placed in the game world, and so, with TV Basketball, we finally saw something approximating a human appear in a video game.

Taito’s Basketball was renamed TV Basketball in the U.S.A. when it ended up achieving another first beyond representing humans with in-game graphics, Midway being the first to license a game from a Japanese company for North American release. Like many firsts in the video game industry though some details on this are sketchy, some sources say it was released overseas a month after its original Japanese release, others say Midway waited until 1979, and there even seem to be two versions of the arcade machine, one where only two players can play and another with a four player option. On top of all of this it might even be the first basketball video game ever made. Basketball and TV Basketball seem to also have mild differences in the size of the players and how they’re differentiated visually, but for the sake of this review we’ll be looking at the American release whatever the truth behind its history is, and unfortunately after all of these interesting firsts and unusual details, we find ourselves looking at a Pong imitator wearing a basketball uniform.

TV Basketball is technically more  of a copy of Pong Doubles, the four player follow-up to the simplistic game about hitting a ball back and forth by twisting knobs to move paddles on screen up and down. In TV Basketball the paddles may be swapped out with humanoid shapes, but the idea behind them is pretty similar. While a ball is in play you twist a knob to move your assigned player or players up and down. The two teams on screen are differentiated by how their grey and white bodies are made, the solid team completely white while the striped team has their body broken up so they appear to have grey and white lines. There is an actual attempt to make a court, the area at the bottom of the screen that holds the score for both teams actually the ground and the lowest point a character can reach. Once a player’s feet touch that ground they can’t move any lower, although the ball is free to travel through it as it pleases oddly enough. The players are locked into a vertical column of movement and also have a maximum height near the top of the screen, able to reach high enough where their feet are a little above the tops of the human-sized nets.

The players in TV Basketball, despite having an upper and lower bound, can freely glide up and down through the air, so it’s not like it has completely shaken off the freedom of movement found in Pong. However, there are some tweaks that clearly set it apart from Pong Doubles. The two player teams in TV Basketball have one player on each half of the screen, meaning that there is always one player playing offense and one defense. The ball ricochets around the screen at an angle and doesn’t attempt to imitate a basketball at all, but depending on how the ball hits a player, the outcome can be different. Each of the players essentially has a side that bounces the ball and one that allows it to pass through, this usually lining up with the goal of the player who touches it. If someone playing defense is trying to block it as it heads towards the net for example, it will bounce away from the net, but if a player on offense is hit from behind by the ball, it will slide through the body in a somewhat awkward manner that still allows it to head towards the net instead of bouncing it towards the other side of the court. This does prevent accidentally scoring on yourself sometimes and is a surprising little touch, but unfortunately there is still a glaring issue present from the way the game tries to imitate basketball.

The nets on either side of the court are large and the ball can slide into them with ease, but it feels rather rough trying to deliberately sink a bucket. The ball in TV Basketball tends to go at simplistic but understandable angles, and while it doesn’t seem to have the same unexpected nuance of the Pong paddle’s eight distinct regions with differing launch angles, there are ways it can sometimes at least achieve an odd bounce or one that could break up the situations where two players just keep bouncing it between each other without moving. The real trouble with these bounce angles though is actually getting it up and into the net, as it is fairly easy to defend just by sitting a player up there permanently. The opposing team will need to get a launch angle that goes up and over, and the ricochet on the roof still might not place the ball in the net either, so it can often feel like the only hope of getting points in TV Basketball is having luck on your side as you try to angle it upward. You can’t try to set up anything too fancy by having the two teammates try and position the ball for such a bounce since the ball will pass through a player’s back, and so you become beholden to how the opponent or environment deflects it.

Since your control of the ball is limited to having it bounce of your player’s body you really don’t have a good chance of getting it up and over into a very limited goal region. However, trying to score points is the entire reason behind your movement, and since your defensive player can’t reach above a certain point, it even fails to hit that mark of being a reactive game like Pong. Your offense player may need to be moving around and hitting the ball right to try and go for the higher score within the time limit, but your defensive player is heavily incentivized to perch on that net since it limits the other team’s options so heavily and if it can pass above that player’s head it would be impossible to stop anyway. The players are spaced enough that you can justify lowering the defensive player to try and get the ball to the other side of the court, the knob controllers responsive enough that you can get the defender up onto their perch before the net is truly at risk at being scored on. Unfortunately, this does mean TV Basketball boils down to heavy dependence on the luck of the bounce over the movement of the player sprites.

THE VERDICT: TV Basketball may have some similarities to Pong Doubles in that two teams are bouncing the ball about to try and score, but TV Basketball makes some unfortunate design mistakes despite the revolutionary feat of including recognizably human characters. The players can simply jump too high, meaning the net is easily defended and angling the shot to the point it can slip in feels reliant on luck instead of the way a team moves its players about. You aren’t given enough control over the way the ball ricochets off your paddle-like person and the goal is far too small, the incentive to even move minimal since shots themselves can even be split into whether or not it would be impossible to block it from going in. TV Basketball simply does not motivate even actively controlling your character enough to make it worth putting in the time to try and actually win a game.

And so, I give TV Basketball for arcade machines…

A TERRIBLE rating. Moving the player on offense can still impact the game’s outcome some so TV Basketball avoids being a complete wash, but it can sometimes be hard to notice a difference in outcome between two active players and simply letting the ball bounce around as it pleases with the defensive players perched above their nets. It is simply too easy to prevent points from happening and the way they are scored often feels like it was achieved not by planning but simply by the ricochet deciding to angle a certain way. Honestly a 4 player cabinet feels unnecessary since that splits up defense and offense control and allows one to idle as a glorified wall. Taito’s original two player cabinets at least necessitated you controlling both players on your team at once so defense would move at the same time as offense, but it’s not like the ball moves with such speed that you would have to worry about your defensive player being in the wrong spot once it’s on that side of the court. When it comes down to it, the players should just not be allowed to go up and over the net, and while you’ll probably still get a lot of accidental goals in such a modified version, you also would get a lot more intentional goals since you can try to truly angle your shot in the general direction of your target. The simplicity of the design does mean it might feel like you lacked control over the defensive side in that case though, and this is probably why this was the first basketball game ever made: others simply knew that the Pong style ball-and-paddle play doesn’t really work with a small net as the only way to earn points.

TV Basketball reminds me of the abysmal Volleyball! which released on the Odyssey² many years later. However, TV Basketball at least understood that a player hit from behind shouldn’t bounce the ball backwards so it gets a small leg up over another awful attempt to adapt a sport using Pong mechanics that don’t suit it. TV Basketball feels like you could also at least squeeze some more playability out if it with something like a gentleman’s agreement not to perch your defense on the net’s edge, but the two teams have too much control in the blocking game and not enough when it comes to shooting. Once we leave the era where all sports games seemed to be variations of Pong then two-dimensional basketball would actually find some decent design approaches, but the first video game depicting the sport really did not have a handle on it. At least it will always have a set of contested but still mostly solid historical firsts to rest on instead of being just a poorly conceived twist on a well-trodden game type.