NBA Jam was ooit een grote hit in de Arcades en op de Super Nintendo (SNES) en de SEGA MegaDrive (SMD). Maar er zijn ook een hoop hardnekkige geruchten en mythes rond om deze erg populaire titel. Nu heeft de lead designer Mark Turmell in dit interview het één en ander bevestigd. Zo konden de Chicago Bull never nooit in de laatste seconde scoren, omdat Mark zo vriendelijk was om een stukje code in te bouwen die dit voorkwam. Waarom?? omdat Mark een groot Piston fan was. Daarnaast schijnen sommige Arcade kasten uit zich zelf te starten met een game en dan de speler Drazen Petrovic kiezen, feit is dat dit is begonnen nadat deze speler was overleden.... creepy shit.

Did Scottie Pippen's ratings in the game really drop when he played certain teams?

It's true, but only when the Bulls played the Pistons. If there was a close game and anyone on the Bulls took a last second shot, we wrote special code in the game so that they would average out to be bricks. There was the big competition back in the day between the Pistons and the Bulls, and since I was always a big Pistons fan, that was my opportunity to level the playing field.

What's the rumor we hear about NBA Jam being haunted?

We had already finished making NBA Jam when Drazen Petrovic died. The game had already shipped and he was on the Nets. So we had all of these coin-op machines around, and one night we were playing Mortal Kombat and there was a Jam machine next to it, and all of a sudden the game started calling out "Petrovic!" "Petrovic!" And this only happened after Petrovic had died. Everyone started freaking out. Something weird was going on with the software, and to this day, if you have an original NBA Jam machine every once in a while it will just yell out "Petrovic!" It's wild.