NBA 2K6 and NHL 2K6 Showcased Polish Over Pizzazz When the Xbox 360 Launched

The start of the Xbox 360 generation was witness to sports games and the “big two” sports companies going completely different directions in just about every way imaginable.

There is more than one way to do something, and 2K and EA chose two different paths for how to develop games for the Xbox 360 at the start of the high-def era.

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In retrospect, it’s fair to say EA got the wrong directions from the local gas station attendant while 2K got itself a new map.

When I wrote at length about Madden 06 last week, there were so many different directions to take it because Madden 06’s legacy is extremely complicated. It’s year one of NFL exclusivity, a troubled development year at Tiburon, and the PS2 version of Madden 06 is almost entirely different from the Xbox 360 version of the game.

NBA 2K6 and NHL 2K6 do not have complicated legacies. By any public accounts out there, while developing for a new console was taxing, these games came together as expected. And they came together as expected because they were more or less continuing their legacies from the generation prior.

Because what’s important to remember about both these 2K games at the time is they were the “market leader” in terms of critical acclaim. NHL 2K was “better” than EA’s NHL series, and NBA 2K was better than NBA Live (albeit some might dispute that to some extent).

Kush Games and Visual Concepts had a good handle on their respective sports, and while it was a transition year for every sports game going to the Xbox 360, 2K had already gone through its “major” transition with the PS2/Xbox versions earlier in the season.

That transition for 2K was in many ways the continued fallout from the NFL pulling its licensing away from 2K. What also happened in that year between 2K5 to 2K6 is ESPN also went with EA over 2K.

At the time, this felt like an even bigger blow for some because that impacted every 2K Sports game. 2K had to reinvent its presentation in all its sports games, on top of coping with losing NFL 2K.

However, if there was a bright side to losing all this licensing, it was that 2K got a chance to look at its broadcast package from top to bottom and revitalize it. In addition, some of those NFL 2K developers got absorbed by the other in-house development teams and presumably helped out in big ways.

What all this did was push 2K to re-focus and think about what its sports games were all about. With that in mind, let’s get into why NHL 2K6 and NBA 2K6 succeeded in ways that really put into question everything EA was doing at the time.

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