Hidden Levels Ep. 1: Mr. Boomshakalaka

Welcome to our all-new collaborative series, "Hidden Levels," in which we team up with 99% Invisible to explore how the world of video games has impacted the world beyond. We’ll dive deep into how games are made and designed, exploring everything from the history of the joystick to the faithful recreation of nature in digital spaces. Whether you are a lifelong gamer or have never picked up a controller, "Hidden Levels" uncovers how games have quietly changed culture, technology, and the way we see the world...starting with a '90s arcade classic. Developer Mark Turmell worked at Midway, which was known for iconic games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Mortal Kombat. His creation of NBA Jam in 1993 pushed the company in a new direction. It debuted at the height of the Chicago Bulls' dynasty, aiming to capture the energy of professional basketball in a high-octane, over-the-top format. The game was a hit out of the gate, captivating players with its digitized graphics (with the heads of real NBA players) and fantasy gameplay where players could become "on fire." At the heart of the NBA Jam gaming experience was the voice of its announcer, Tim Kitzrow. Turmell and the game's sound team had realized they needed a voice that could match the game's energy and cut through the din of an arcade, without the budget for a professional NBA commentator. So they turned to Kitzrow, an improv comedian and journeyman actor, who was initially hired by Midway for pinball voiceovers — it was just a fun side gig. He had no idea that his work on NBA Jam would make such a lasting impact on the industry. Kitzrow modeled his energetic, flamboyant delivery on NBA announcer Marv Albert, infusing it with his own ad-libbed, short, and punchy catchphrases like "REJECTED!" and the game's most famous line, "Boomshakalaka!"—which was suggested by an artist and inspired by funk group Sly and the Family Stone. The game became a monumental hit, reportedly making $1 billion in quarters in its first year, with its catchphrases entering basketball vernacular. *** Credits: This episode of "Hidden Levels" was produced by James Parkinson, edited by Emmett FitzGerald, and mixed by Martín Gonzalez. Original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto, and Paul Vaitkus. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. This story was adapted from James Parkinson’s podcast, Gameplay https://gameplay.co/. The Managing Producer for "Hidden Levels" is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. "Hidden Levels" https://www.wbur.org/podcasts/endlessthread/hiddenlevels is a production of 99% Invisible and WBUR's Endless Thread.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Speaker 01

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• 0:33Speaker 02

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• 1:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey y'all, it's Ben Brock Johnson from Endless Thread, and I'm here with my friend.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  I'm Roman Mars from the podcast 99% Invisible. And today, we're bringing you the first episode from our new collaborative series called Hidden Levels.

• 1:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  In the next six episodes, we'll get deep into how games are made and designed. Everything from the history of the joystick to how nature is faithfully recreated in the digital world to a dispatch from the front lines of the console wars.

• 1:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, Roman, when did video games first change your world?

• 1:44Speaker 04

  I mean, probably when I was in elementary school in the 80s. The arcade that I went to the most was a small section in a skating rink in Newark, Ohio. And so I first learned playing video games on roller skates, actually. That sounds, that sounds impressive. How about you?

• 2:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think, you know, I didn't have an arcade spot, but one memory that is really strong for me is I had the luck. My brother actually brought me to Japan when I was 12 years old. Uh, and I was really lucky to do that. It blew my mind in so many ways. But I went into a real deal Japanese arcade while I was there. And it was so incredible. I mean, the different kinds of games you could play, the sights, really the sounds too. We are audio people, Roman. I love sound first and foremost. And that's what I think of sometimes when I think of video games.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I'm exactly the same way. And there's something really special about designing game sounds so that it can cut through the din of all the other arcade games and kind of draw you to the machine.

• 2:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you have a favorite sound that you think of when you think of video game sounds?

• 2:50Speaker 04

  I mean, my favorite is there used to be this really big arcade game called Gauntlet that had like four joysticks on it. So you can play four different characters. And one of the sounds that the sort of game announcer said was elf needs food badly.

• 3:02Speaker 05

  Elf needs food badly.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Or elf is about to die. And I think about elf needs food badly every time I'm hungry. Literally every day of my life since I played Gauntlet, I think about this game sound.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  How about you? What's, what's yours?

• 3:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you know, I think of a couple of classics for me, like the Mortal Kombat, you know, Scorpion, get over here.

• 3:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know, there was a game I played a lot called Cruising USA that had this kind of ridiculous female passenger voice that was like, yeah, all right. Hollywood, let's go.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  Oh, wow. Redwood. Ooh, Hollywood. Radical.

• 3:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  But one that I think of a lot is, is the Ryuken or Shoryuken. Street Fighter II sounds of Ryu or Ken doing the like Ryuken, Shoryuken.

• 4:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  That one, I just, I just say that sometimes to myself, just to make myself happy. So clearly, Roman, as, as audio podcasters, we love sound and we could go on forever.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the story we have for you today is all about an iconic video game sound. It's about a high-energy vocal performance that helped spawn an entire franchise. The first episode of Hidden Levels is brought to us by 99PI contributor James Parkinson. Here it is.

• 4:34Speaker 07

  Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 80s, Mark Turmell was a wonder boy of video game design.

• 4:42Speaker 07

  He released a successful game as a teenager and was earning thousands of dollars a month while still living at his parents' house. By the time he was in his twenties, Mark was working full-time as a developer in Chicago, designing coin-operated arcade games.

• 4:57Speaker 08

  Coin-op, back in those days, was always the cutting edge and was better than any Super Nintendo, better than a Sega Genesis. It was really high-powered. I could put more sprites on the screen, more bullets, more explosions. And so it was, for me, it was like being a kid in a candy store.

• 5:16Speaker 07

  The company Mark worked for was called Midway, and they were famous for bringing a number of big Japanese games to the US, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. And in 1992, they released the iconic fighting game, Mortal Kombat.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  But Mark was about to take Midway in a very different direction.

• 5:40Speaker 07

  Mark was a big basketball fan, and in the early 90s, he could tell that the NBA was really having a moment, particularly in Chicago. This was the height of Michael Jordan mania.

• 5:56Speaker 07

  Chicago Bulls were about to clinch their first championship three-peat, and the popularity of the league was at an all-time high.

• 6:11Speaker 07

  And Mark Turmell decided he wanted to capture the high-flying, razzle-dazzle energy of professional basketball and put it in an arcade game. He called his new creation NBA Jam.

• 6:26Speaker 07

  By the fall of 1992, NBA Jam was almost complete, and Mark Turmell and his team decided to test out their new game at an arcade in Chicago called Dennis's Place for Games. They rolled in a £400 cabinet, put in the chip with the NBA Jam code, and turned the machine on.

• 6:45Speaker 07

  Then Mark sat back to watch how the customers in Dennis's Place would react. He says that back then, there was a pretty simple way to gauge whether a coin-op game was going to be successful. You could usually tell in the first couple of hours.

• 6:58Speaker 08

  In the coin-op business, if you can get somebody to put quarters in, reach into their pocket, go to the cash machine, the change machine, and put money in, you know, that's like really telling. It's very democratic, whether you like it or not.

• 7:13Speaker 07

  And as Mark watched, the customers at Dennis's Place voted with their quarters.

• 7:19Speaker 07

  They crowded around the NBA Jam cabinet, shouting, cursing, fighting for the joystick. It was bedlam.

• 7:26Speaker 08

  There were fistfights, you know, people gambling. The coin doors were jammed up with money. You know, when somebody would do a big dunk and the backboard would smash into pieces, you know, they'll literally, you know, scream and run around the arcade. You know, it was awesome.

• 7:47Speaker 07

  I remember exactly how wild this game was. Growing up in Australia, I didn't have access to live NBA games on TV, but NBA Jam was the next best thing. It quite literally brought the excitement of the NBA to my fingertips. And I think there were a few different elements that drew kids like me in. For one thing, NBA Jam just looked good. It might be hard to believe now, but for kids like me who grew up on games like Pac-Man, NBA Jam was a whole new world. This was the dawn of digitized graphics, which meant that for the first time, designers like Mark could make avatars that looked and moved like actual people.

• 8:25Speaker 08

  You know, we would take videotape and run it through a digitizer that would, you know, create frames and we'd put it on the screen. And it was like, wow, you know, look at that. That's, you know, a photograph right there on my computer screen.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  At first, Mark recorded video of amateur players he found on local courts throughout Chicago to run through the digitizer. But when he finalized the official licensing deal with the NBA, he did some minor digital surgery.

• 8:51Speaker 08

  Then we basically chopped the heads off of all of our local athletes and then generated the heads of all of these NBA superstars to paste on top.

• 9:02Speaker 07

  Which meant I could play the game as a real-life basketball star, or at least the head of one. I could be Scottie Pippen, Hakeem Olajuwon, or Shaquille O'Neal. But the realism ended there, because the gameplay was pure fantasy.

• 9:18Speaker 07

  At times, NBA Jam felt more like Mortal Kombat than basketball. There were no fouls, no out-of-bounds, and the players were like superhumans. They leapt into the rafters for sky-high dunks and shot impossibly long-range three-pointers. When a player made three baskets in a row, the ball burst into flames and he became unstoppable for the next several possessions. But I think there was one element in particular that made NBA Jam stand out from all the other games in the arcade. It was an iconic sound that cut through all the bleeps and bloops and drew people to the NBA Jam cabinet like moths to a flame. Even if you didn't play the game growing up, you might have heard this sound.

• 10:00Speaker 06

  From downtown, launches a shot.

• 10:05Speaker 06

  He's on fire!

• 10:07Speaker 07

  I'm talking about the voice of the game's announcer.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  Come, Shakalaka!

• 10:17Speaker 07

  Today, voice acting is a key component of most video game productions. But back in the 1970s, there were no voices in video games at all. High-quality audio recordings were just too large to fit on the soundchips of arcade machines. The earliest voices heard in video games were digitized, using a technique called speech synthesis. Speech synthesis. Basically combining short sounds or syllables to form complete words. These synthesized voices were a clever solution to the problem, but they didn't exactly sound realistic. The Space-Steamed Shooter StratoVox was the first game to attempt this. As you fired at alien ships, a very unnatural sounding narrator would shout a handful of distorted phrases.

• 11:07Speaker 07

  Believe it or not, the narrator there was saying "lucky" and "very good". One of the first games to use true recorded voiceover was Dragon's Lair in 1983. They managed to do this using LaserDisc technology. The team didn't have the budget to hire actors, so much of the voice acting was done by the animators and the production staff.

• 11:27Speaker 09

  Please save me. The cage is locked with a key. The dragon keeps it around his neck.

• 11:36Speaker 07

  Improvements in computer chip technology allowed for increased memory, and by the early 90s, it was common for arcade games to use real voice recordings, at least very short ones. These companies still weren't hiring professional actors, though. As a result, the voice performances were often bad, like really, really bad.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  You must recover all the energy immediately, Mega Man.

• 12:00Speaker 10

  But where is Dr. Wily?

• 12:02Speaker 06

  That's a good question.

• 12:03Speaker 05

  Just one more page and I would have finished this book.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  Die, monster. You don't belong in this world. Captain Wesker, where's Chris? Stop it. Don't open that door.

• 12:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, that wasn't gonna cut it for NBA Jam. This new basketball game was gonna need a voice that could match the high-octane style of the gameplay and cut through the noisy commotion of an arcade to draw people in. Someone with a distinctive delivery that would keep people dipping into their pockets for more quarters. They needed this guy. So firstly, can I just get you to introduce yourself, please? Hi, everyone. Tim Kitzler from NBA Jam. Boom shakalaka. That was very loud. Tim Kitzler was not a famous actor back in the early 90s, and he certainly didn't grow up with dreams of becoming a voice actor for an iconic video game. But he'd always been a showman. He was one of seven children, and he was the entertainer in the family.

• 13:01Speaker 07

  He says his goal at dinner was to get milk to come out of someone's nose.

• 13:06Speaker 11

  One of my heroes is Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand voices, Looney Tunes. So when I was younger, I often did cartoon voices like Underdog, you know, the Simon Barre signature says, "Underdog must die", or Droopy Dog. There's a telephone, Butch. It's a dame. What'd she say, Butch? She's so unselfish.

• 13:30Speaker 07

  Tim got into theatre in high school and went on to study acting at Purchase College, where he crossed paths with some heavy hitters.

• 13:38Speaker 11

  My roommate was Stan Tucci, Vin Raines, so a lot of big names came out of that place.

• 13:44Speaker 07

  But Tim's career didn't take off quite like those two. He spent the 80s as a journeyman actor bouncing between cities like New York and LA looking for work. And eventually, he wound up in Chicago. He trained with the comedians at Second City while auditioning for commercials and playing the drums in a local band. His career felt like it was stuttering, until it took a very unlikely turn.

• 14:08Speaker 11

  Of course, the way the world works, sometimes you have one plan and then it goes another way.

• 14:15Speaker 07

  It all started because a couple of Tim's bandmates worked in Midway's pinball division. They often needed people to record little bits of voiceover, and they knew that their drummer Tim was pretty good at impressions. One day, they asked him to help out with a Gilligan's Island pinball game.

• 14:30Speaker 11

  So I was hired to do Mr. Howell from Gilligan's Island.

• 14:36Speaker 07

  Maybe I can buy a new dinghy for my yacht. Over time, Tim became a regular voice on Midway's pinball games.

• 14:43Speaker 11

  I did the Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  This is an emergency broadcast. The Earth is being invaded by flying saucers from Mars.

• 14:53Speaker 11

  The Shadow, World Cup Soccer, NBA Pinball, or Fast Break, whatever. It was just going in, having fun, and actually this time I was getting paid for it.

• 15:03Speaker 07

  Being a voice actor for pinball was a fun side gig, but not much more than that. Tim never felt like it had the potential to be an actual career.

• 15:11Speaker 11

  I really had no idea what I was doing, getting into that business. I knew that I loved playing pinball, but pinball, as I said, 15 games later, I still didn't know much about the industry, still couldn't play worth a lick. It was just a fun, extra gig for extra money, extra beer money.

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Meanwhile, Mark Turmell and the NBA Jam crew were putting the finishing touches on their brand new basketball game. They'd signed the licensing deal with the NBA and figured out the gameplay and the graphics. And at a certain point, they started to think about the sound. A guy named John Hay handled just about every aspect of the audio for NBA Jam. He wrote the game's deeply 90s soundtrack.

• 15:57Speaker 07

  And in order to make the game sound more lifelike, he went out and recorded all these basketball sounds in the wild, like balls being dribbled or sneakers squeaks on hardwood floors. But Mark Turmell and John Hay knew that one of the most important sonic elements was the voice of the game's announcer. They wanted a commentator who would make the game come alive and sound like the way the NBA sounded on TV. Mark even thought about hiring an actual NBA commentator, but they didn't have the budget. Luckily for them, an affordable alternative was kicking around the office, drinking beer with the pinball guys.

• 16:33Speaker 11

  I used to just get regular calls because every, you know, every couple of months there was a new pinball game and it's like, let's, let's go to Tim. And so this felt no different to me.

• 16:43Speaker 07

  The recording studio was located in Midway's pinball factory. It was a giant noisy space with lots of workers and hundreds of pinball machines. But all the way in the back, there was a little five foot by five foot vocal booth. They called it the Meat Locker.

• 16:57Speaker 11

  It was kind of a depressing little place, but it was cosy. It was like our little world. It was just the sound guys, you know, not much bigger than a household giant refrigerator and a little window to, for me to see John. So yeah, although it was kind of dingy and dark and small and everything else, it was, it was home and you know, it's where some of the best, best work was ever done.

• 17:19Speaker 07

  Mark and John worked to brainstorm a library of words and phrases they needed Tim to record. First, they needed the names of every player in the game and a few different takes for each so that it wouldn't sound repetitive. Then they started compiling a list of all the different things that happened in a basketball game that Tim was going to need to react to. Just like a TV announcer, he needed to say something every time there was a big dunk or a three pointer or a blocked shot. John Hay wrote lines for each category, some of them taken directly from NBA broadcasts. When Tim Kitzrow finally got into the booth, he decided he wanted to model his delivery off of veteran NBA announcer, Marv Albert. Albert was the most famous basketball commentator in the world at the time and he had a flamboyant, energetic style.

• 18:11Speaker 11

  You know, jump off point was realising that to me, Marv Albert compared to other sports broadcasters, he brought that extra energy and I knew that I wanted to emulate that.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  But Tim was going to be Marv Albert turned up to 11. Marv Albert with a splash of Mortal Kombat. To get in the right headspace, Tim would visualise high-flying dunks and channel that energy into his performance.

• 18:37Speaker 11

  So that's where I kind of got that timber, that tone that, you know, that NBA Jam had, based off of like what I heard and then just making it my own. Rejected! He's heating up! He's on fire!

• 18:50Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, Tim's a, I mean, he's amazing. He's a genius.

• 18:54Speaker 07

  This is Mark Turmell again. He says that Tim didn't stick to the script. Right away, he started getting creative.

• 19:01Speaker 08

  He's so quick-witted, you know, he's always willing to, you know, iterate and improve and take feedback. And when Tim went into the studio, he would just ad lib and it was magic, you know, immediately.

• 19:20Speaker 07

  But Tim had to improvise within constraints. The arcade machines at the time still didn't have a lot of memory, so his catchphrases needed to be short, like half a sentence.

• 19:40Speaker 07

  Or even just a single word.

• 19:46Speaker 07

  As for the game's most famous catchphrase, Tim doesn't take credit. The exact origin story is a little murky, but Tim believes it was a suggestion by John Carlton, one of the game's artists. He'd been listening to the funk group Sly and the Family Stone, and on the song "I Wanna Take You Higher" there's a chorus where they sing...

• 20:06Speaker 11

  Boom shakalaka, shakalaka, boom shakalaka, boom shakalaka. I wanna take you high! But it was, they were just like, boom shakalaka, shakalaka, boom shakalaka. They weren't saying boom shakalaka, they were saying boom shakalaka, shakalaka, boom shakalaka, boom shak...whatever.

• 20:21Speaker 07

  Actually, the song goes boom lakalaka.

• 20:26Speaker 11

  But you get the point. So he just said, "Hey, John, tell Tim to say Boom Shakalaka." Once again, this is the story that I heard. I'm there, but I don't remember it. But I do remember vaguely John just saying to me, "Say Boom Shakalaka." And I just said, "What does that mean?" He goes, "I don't know, just say it." And I went, "Boom Shakalaka." And I said, "Is that it?" And he goes, "Yeah, do a couple more." "Boom Shakalaka." "Ooh, Boom Shakalaka." He went, "Yeah, that's probably good." "All right, moving on."

• 20:57Speaker 07

  The recording sessions for NBA Jam were done in around 20 hours. And when Tim was finished, he didn't think it was a big deal at all. As far as he was concerned, this was just another gig. Like Gilligan's Island Pinball. Little did he know that those 20 hours would change the course of his life. And from that point forward, he'd be known to the world as Mr. Boom Shakalaka.

• 21:20Speaker 07

  After the success of their test night at Dennis's place for games, the NBA Jam team was confident that their game was not a dud. But still, Mark Turmell had this lingering worry that the game wouldn't translate outside of Chicago. After all, he could see the backend data showing which NBA teams people were choosing to play with.

• 21:39Speaker 08

  So I knew, looking at the stats, that the Bulls were just dominant. Everybody was picking the Bulls. And so in the back of my head, I thought, "Maybe this is a Chicago thing."

• 21:50Speaker 07

  When the game went live across the country, Mark flew to LA to see how it played there. He went to an arcade in Westwood, where NBA Jam had just been installed.

• 21:59Speaker 08

  And I walked in and I just watched. And it was the same bedlam that I had seen in Chicago, except that the players were picking the Lakers. And so it really was that moment where I said to myself, "Wow, you know, this, this is going to happen in every NBA city at the very least. And this is going to happen around the country." And sure enough, that's exactly, you know, what happened.

• 22:28Speaker 07

  NBA Jam was picked up by arcades all around the country. And city after city, people happily forked out their hard-earned quarters in order to rain down three-pointers with Detlef Schrempf or dunk from half-court with Clyde Drexler.

• 22:44Speaker 07

  If there was one group of people who seemed to love the game most of all, it was NBA players. On his days off, Miami Heat star Glenn Rice would wait in line at the local arcade just to play NBA Jam as himself. Gary Payton, a point guard with the Seattle Supersonics, demanded to know why he hadn't been included in the game. He even sent personal photos to Mark Tumal that he could use to make Payton's avatar.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  And then there was Shaquille O'Neal.

• 23:12Speaker 08

  We got contacted from the distributor in Orlando and said that Shaq wanted to buy two games.

• 23:21Speaker 07

  Shaq wanted one NBA Jam machine for his own house and another for the Orlando Magic's team jet.

• 23:28Speaker 08

  They brought one of the NBA Jam cabinets onto the jet and it travelled with them on the road and they would wheel it up into Shaq's hotel suite. And the players, instead of going out and partying or clubbing, they would go in and just play and play as each other. Even the opposing team would come in the night before the game or after the game and play.

• 23:54Speaker 07

  In 1993, NBA Jam was the talk of both the arcade world and the world of professional basketball. But back in Chicago, Tim Kitzrow still hadn't played the game.

• 24:05Speaker 11

  So I asked John, I said, "Hey, where could I go see NBA Jam?"

• 24:09Speaker 07

  Tim went to a nearby arcade and walked up to a cabinet that he assumed was NBA Jam. But it turns out it was a different basketball game, one of their competitors. And Tim was not all that impressed by the announcer.

• 24:22Speaker 11

  It would be like, "Nice shot, for two, he makes it." I was like, "What the hell is wrong with that guy?" And I walk over, "He had to watch the NBA Jam, he's on fire from downtown, not tonight", you know, whatever. And I was like, "Well, that guy's pretty good."

• 24:40Speaker 07

  And it was clear that the kids in the arcade agreed with him. They were absolutely loving NBA Jam.

• 24:45Speaker 11

  And that was like, you know, this moment where I went, wow, this is something. This is like, you know, made the equivalent of being, you know, someone from like, you know, a group that hears their song on the radio for the first time. It's like, this is a hit. And, and I got kind of charged, but I couldn't resist sometimes just by accident. Didn't think about it, but I'm watching and I would start to say like, rejected, ugly shot. Get that stuff out of here. Boom, suck it up. You know, someone turned around, hey, man, you still like the dude in the game. I go, dude, I am the dude. And then they go, it is, it is you.

• 25:20Speaker 07

  NBA Jam went on to become a bigger hit than anyone ever expected. To use an arcade term, it was a quarter muncher, devouring coins like a hungry hippo. In its first year, NBA Jam made $1 billion in revenue, one quarter at a time.

• 25:36Speaker 11

  I was out at midway in their lunchroom and there was an article on the board, you know, just like a Xeroxed article that said, NBA Jam surpasses, breaks all records, makes a billion dollars in quarters first year. And I just said, who wrote this? This is funny. I just absolutely convinced it was someone just having, you know, some fun to kind of like prop up the team and, you know, give them some confidence like, yeah, NBA Jam's a great game, but had no idea in reality, the game made a billion dollars. And that was the moment my brain went, wait a minute, I made 900. What?

• 26:13Speaker 07

  It's impossible to say whether or not the game would have been successful without Tim Kitsuro, but his contribution is undeniable. In 1994, a version of NBA Jam was released for the Super Nintendo. At that time, home consoles had a lot less memory than arcade cabinets. And so certain elements had to be stripped from the game to make it small enough to fit on a cartridge. In the end, they cut the music, but retained the sound effects and Tim Kitsuro's iconic voice.

• 26:47Speaker 07

  As new versions of the game got released, Tim was able to renegotiate for better compensation. And while NBA Jam didn't make him rich, the game changed the course of his career and his whole approach to video game voice work. It went from this side gig he did for beer money to a viable career.

• 27:04Speaker 11

  I wasn't going into a room of 20 people who looked like me to do a Bud Light beer commercial or a cheesy sitcom audition or an extra part in a movie. This was people saying, "We want Tim because Tim delivers the goods."

• 27:20Speaker 07

  Off the back of NBA Jam, Tim became the voice of other midway sports titles like NFL Blitz,

• 27:28Speaker 06

  Midway presents NFL Blitz!

• 27:32Speaker 07

  NHL Hits,

• 27:33Speaker 06

  Welcome to Boston! Big outs are two front teeth and let's do this!

• 27:38Speaker 07

  And MLB Slugfest.

• 27:40Speaker 11

  And now sit back, it's time to play ball!

• 27:44Speaker 07

  By this stage, the technology had improved to the point where there were really no limits on how much voiceover you could include in video games. And with the freedom to get as wild as he wanted, Tim delivered some truly outrageous baseball banter.

• 27:58Speaker 11

  Hey, here's one, Jimmy. Famous people, dead or alive, all-star team, on the mound, I got Abe Lincoln. Why? Abe Lincoln, he's got these beady eyes, got a little drifter beard, he's intimidating. Who do you got? With Slugfest, I wrote all the creative colour commentary. So that was actually the most exciting part of my career. I was not only making really good money, I was writing and basically in charge of the content. So I was given the opportunity to basically create the whole world.

• 28:28Speaker 07

  Tim Kitzrow is not the most important voice actor in video game history, but his performance in NBA Jam is certainly one of the most beloved. And his role in the game's success set an important precedent for how voice acting can elevate a video game and bring it to life. In the decades that followed, game developers began to invest more and more in vocal performances. And sports game companies started spending money to hire real-life announcers to do commentary. In fact, one of the most famous video game franchises of all time is named after an announcer.

• 29:02Speaker 10

  Welcome to Madden NFL 2000, the new millennium of football.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  And Tim's influence wasn't limited to video games. It fed back into the sport of basketball itself. Over time, NBA Jam catchphrases like "he's heating up" have become part of the general basketball vernacular. And if you turn on a game today, it's pretty obvious that many basketball commentators grew up playing NBA Jam.

• 29:28Speaker 12

  Crosses over, finds Zubotz, gives it up to Harden at the free throw line. A lob, Zubotz! Boom, shakalaka! As he dumps it with two hands. And the Clippers lead 17-7. Oh my goodness, feeling like NBA Jam here early. Clippers all dunks, rock into the rim. Tim's jam's right move left, attacks the paint, leaves it out for the cutting Boston. He'll dunk it over the top of Lopson! Brandon Boston! Boom, shakalaka!

• 29:54Speaker 06

  Boom, shakalaka! Yeah! Boom, shakalaka! Yeah! Boom, shakalaka! Oh! Boom, shakalaka! Come on! The rebound! Apple burger! The rebound! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Win! Apple burger! It's good!

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 30:33Speaker 13

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 31:00Speaker 02

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• 31:27Speaker 14

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 31:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  We are back with Hidden Levels in our first episode. Roman Mars.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 32:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  We have been talking NBA Jam and the vocal performance is really just one of the most distinct things about the game because NBA Jam has all these other quirks and these quirks really make this game legendary. It has so many hidden design details, exactly the kind of stuff we're talking about in this series. Let's talk about a few of these hidden design details you game.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 32:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, so James Parkinson in the story, he talked about how the game wasn't the most realistic depiction of basketball, even though they were using this new technology to capture people, maybe not super realistic.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Sure, I mean, the ball caught fire, so that rarely happens in a basketball game. But yeah, I get you.

• 32:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right, so if you knew where to look in this game, you could also unlock secret players who were not athletes, at least that I know of. So Bill Clinton is one example, Al Gore is another.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Oh, I had no idea. What other examples are there?

• 33:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  George Clinton could also be unlocked as a character.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  All the Clintons are represented.

• 33:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  All the Clintons, man. George Clinton, that's right. And he was a character named P-Funk that was in the tournament edition of the game. You could also access one of the people who we heard from in the episode who made NBA Jam. We don't think of programmers as ballers necessarily, but all the programmers were playable in the game and that includes Mark Turmell, who we heard from earlier.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Was he particularly good at the game as a player?

• 33:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  It may shock you to learn that he was practically unstoppable.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, that's what I would do.

• 33:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Same.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  That's awesome.

• 33:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Here's another interesting sort of secret Easter egg in the game, Roman. It's called super clean floors, which if a player activated this, the basketball court would become very slippery and the players on the other team would fall over all the time. I actually remember, I remember being the target of this and playing the game and it basically renders the game impossible for you. It's, it's crazy.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  I mean, they put so many fun and clever things into this game. It's like, it's awesome.

• 34:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it is awesome. And here's one that is awesome, but only if you're a Detroit Pistons fan. Going back to our buddy Mark Turmell, the programmer, the unstoppable player in the game and also programmer of NBA Jam, he was a Pistons fan and he hated the Chicago Bulls. So a few years back, Turmell confirmed something to Sports Illustrated. If you were playing the Pistons against the Bulls in NBA Jam and it was a close game, the game was programmed so that the Bulls literally could not score a last second shot to tie or win the game.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  That is diabolical. I mean, this is like, especially in a time period of the, of the eighties and nineties, when the Bulls were this like huge dynasty, like Michael Jordan was, you know, the GOAT. And I'm sure everyone wanted to play as the Bulls and to think that they couldn't win if they played against the Pistons is hilarious.

• 35:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's really funny, but also you couldn't play as the GOAT. So for years, Jordan would not license his name to NBA video games. He wanted to retain his likeness rights, of course. So you could play as Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, decidedly less exciting. And some basketball games, no offense, Scottie and Horace, but some basketball games actually had a generic player 99 instead of Jordan later on.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  So you could play kind of as generic Bulls player, which you could imagine as being Jordan.

• 35:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, you could pretend 99 was 23. Okay. So Roman, here's a, a final example of the amazing strangeness of NBA Jam. There is actually a game inside of NBA Jam, the game that has zero amount.

• 35:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  To do with basketball.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  So you could just, you just break out and play another game?

• 35:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Totally different game, but it's one you might recognize. So in the arcade version of NBA Jam, you could access this second game where you play as a tank and have to drive around these different kind of three dimensional geometric obstacles. And I think you might recognize it. So here's what it looks like. Here's a playthrough on YouTube. Take a look.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Totally, because this is a game that was inside the aforementioned skating rink in Newark, Ohio. And this looks almost exactly like Battle Zone. I mean, like Battle Zone had these vector graphics that I thought were absolutely gorgeous. In fact, if I were to create a game today, it would all be vector graphics, to tell you the truth. But it looks so much, yeah, it looks, it's, it looks like Battle Zone.

• 36:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Battle Zone is a favorite of mine as well. I don't know how you would play this game on roller skates, Roman, because Battle Zone had those like two joysticks that you had to move. But like you said, like, it looks like a game that is designed now, if that makes sense, even though it's, it's so old. There was this legendary cheat code in NBA Jam that allowed for this. And to access this second game that was kind of a Battle Zone reference, both players would have to hit X, Y, Z and pull down their joysticks at the same time. And then you could actually get into this tank game, which was really just an homage to Battle Zone.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  That is so cool. And everyone using their joystick and buttons in this way brings us nicely to our next episode. We're actually talking about video game controllers.

• 37:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's right. Next time on Hidden Levels, one of the most elemental parts of video gaming, whether or not you're on roller skates, we are diving into the history of the joystick.

• 37:41Speaker 15

  There's a kind of direct manipulation quality to it. Do you want to move forward on a screen? Press the stick forward. Do you want to move backwards within the environment of the screen? Pull the stick backwards.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  That is the next time on Hidden Levels from 99% Invisible and Endless Threat.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  This episode was produced by James Parkinson, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto and Paul Vaitkus. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. This story was adapted from James Parkinson's podcast, Gameplay. You can find a link to that show on our website. The managing producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Verube. Hidden Levels was created by Ben Brock Johnson from a loadrunner fever dream with power ups and cheat codes. Thanks to the team at 99PI and Endless Thread.

• 38:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR. The rest of our team tackling unsolved mysteries, untold histories and other wild stories from the internet includes my illustrious co-host, Emery Sivertson, managing producer Sumit Ajoshi, editor Meg Kramer, producers Dean Russell, Grace Tatter and Franny Monahan, and sound designer Emily Jankowski.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  And for 99% Invisible, Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kirk Cole Stadius, the digital director. Delaney Hawes, our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. The art for this series was created by Aaron Nestor. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. We have another episode of Hidden Levels on Friday. See you then.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  No, yeah, right. Okay. Here it goes. Boom shakalaka.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 40:13Speaker 16

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 40:18Speaker 07

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 40:20Speaker 16

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 41:10Speaker 14

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 41:40Speaker 17

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