The Dynasty

This is the first of what will be a series of posts chronicling my NBA Live dynasty.  I expect that it will interest almost nobody, but I still need to write down the history for myself and for posterity.

I have been playing the NBA Live video game series since the first one - NBA Live '95.  The games allow you to play full seasons, and I do - 82 games plus the playoffs.  I play full length games with 12 minute quarters.  As you can imagine, this is a brutal grind.  It is so brutal that I am now, almost in the real year 2011, still only playing NBA Live '99, so I have only gotten through 4 full seasons so far in the 15 years I've been playing.  Most people who do this play shortened seasons with short quarters, but I strive for authenticity.

I started the dynasty with NBA Live '95 in January or February of 1996 (NBA Live '96 had already come out).  The version I was playing ran on MS-DOS for the PC, controlled with the keyboard.

I played around with the game for quite a while before getting "serious".  There was many an exhibition game played, and I had several false starts to seasons where I eventually restarted for reasons that I cannot recall - probably having to do with being unhappy with my team's record.  There might have been a season that I played a good 15-20 full games of before restarting.

My team is the New York Knicks.  The real Knicks have been "my" team in real life since June of 1994, and I became an increasingly hardcore fan as the 1990s progressed.  There was never a question that I was ever going to play a full season as any team other than the New York Knicks, and they are who I am playing NBA Live '99 with today.

In general I am excellent at placing memories in space-time.  You know how people know exactly what they were doing on 9/11 or when Kennedy was shot?  I remember exactly what I was doing on December 29th, 1995 between 4 PM and 6 PM, walking past the girl in corduroy pants on November 30th, 1996, the cologne I bought in January of 2001, and the book I was reading on the toilet in ~April of 1997 (The Godfather).

The point being, I remember quite a bit of detail about my NBA Live seasons, even the ones that I played 15 years ago.  So, I'm going to recap seasons in this blog with as much detail as possible.

I planned on writing about the first season in this post, but the introduction has taken longer than expected, so I will end this for now.  To be continued (in way more detail than you'll ever need to know)...