NBA Jam for Wii Incorporates Photos into Game Graphics

Boom shaka laka! If you’re familiar with 90s arcade games, you might recall NBA Jam, the over-the-top basketball sim. EA Sports is developing a remixed, updated version of the classic for the Nintendo Wii, to be released this fall. As a major part of their art design, the game uses real photographs of NBA players’ heads, attached to digitized bodies.

Instead of conventional animation, the developers chose to use larger scaled photos of the players’ heads which change depending on their performance and experiences.

These digital Frankensteins are a clever way to update the game’s artwork while retaining the larger-than-life, old school feel that continues to endear so many fans 17 years after the original game was released.