Designer of NBA Jam: There’s A Cheat That Benefits The Detroit Pistons

The Lead designer of NBA Jam Mark Turmell has apparently made it clear that he wasn't ready to pass the torch of the Bad Boys to the Chicago Bulls in 1993. Although by that time the era of the Bad Boys was all but gone with the fight between Laimbeer & Thomas that year, Turmell was still a Pistons die hard, and used his position to apparently enter in a code which would give the Detroit Pistons and strange advantage over the Chicago Bulls in the game.

In an interview with ESPN, he describes just how to take advantage of this cheat after being asked, "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.

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Now onto myself: I've been a video game collector for only a short amount of time, in the sense that I'm re-building what I once had. This past winter I came across someone who was selling a Sega Game Gear for super cheap, so you know I had to pick it up. I then went and grabbed NBA Jam from a used game store because it is one of the classic games from my childhood. I'm going to attempt to play the Bulls as the Pistons and I'll give an update after playing the game over the weekend to see what the made shot/brick ratio is.