NBA Live 06: The Beginning of the Beginning of the End

NBA Live 19 may have been the final version of EA’s NBA series, but you can trace its demise all the way back to the Xbox 360’s launch.

There are many missteps you can point to with the NBA Live series, more than any other EA Sports game in fact. People can be bummed it doesn’t exist today, but in another sense it got more chances than most series do before finally being canned.

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I won’t go into all those missteps in excruciating detail, but NBA Live 06, NBA Live 07, NBA Elite 11, and NBA Live 14 can all be pointed to as games that could have ended other franchises. In fact, NBA Live 06 is probably the game with the most redeeming qualities of any of those bad games.

Because NBA Live 06 has a more complicated legacy than I remember at the time. It’s a bad game on Xbox 360, but that’s more because it’s an empty game. But going back and playing it again 20 years later, it’s not a game that feels terrible.

Madden 06 feels terrible and bereft of good ideas. NBA Live 06 feels incomplete but has the outline of something that could have worked.

Of course, you can’t talk about NBA Live’s history without NBA 2K either. NBA 2K6 was the “play it safe” game on Xbox 360, and at the time, we were not quite aware of how big the gap was going to grow in just one year’s time when NBA Live 07 squared off against NBA 2K7.

It’s also important to note NBA 2K was the one series that had really eaten into EA’s dominance in head-to-head competition. NHL 2K and NBA 2K were better games than Live and EA NHL, but NHL 2K never pulled in front like NBA 2K did in terms of sales and mindshare.

And, depending on what side of the fence you were on, NFL 2K was also better than Madden, but there’s no question Madden was still dominating 2K on the sales front even before exclusivity ended that battle.

So coming off the cancellation of NFL 2K, it was clear almost immediately that NBA 2K was now the flagship title for that brand. 2K threw everything they had at NBA 2K, and EA simply never caught back up.

And you know what makes it harder to catch up? When you strip every last feature out of your game as it jumps from PS2/Xbox to Xbox 360.

With that in mind, let’s go back to E3 2005 and trace the legacy of NBA Live 06 from that moment, through the PS2 version’s release, and up through the Xbox 360’s launch to explain why EA missed so badly with NBA Live 06 on the Xbox 360.

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