Ultimate Basketball (USA)

Nintendo NES 1990 American Sammy

Ultimate Basketball is a NES basketball video game. It was released in September 1990 by American Sammy. The game was later licensed by Taito and released in Japan as Taito Basketball (タイトーバスケットボール). This video game is completely unrelated to the Amiga video game of same title and was represented on the American television series Video Power.

The game plays like a conventional sports video game. The player choses from a list of 14 teams, and controls five players on the team on the court, though only one player may be directly controlled at a time. There is a championship mode and a single game mode in the game.

The game is unlike later sports based video games in that doesn't use real professional or college basketball players. The players a player may select for a team are entirely fictional, as are their statistics.

It was possible for so many players to foul out that only three or four were on the floor at the end of the game. In the Japanese version, a generic cheerleader comes over to the player and kisses him for winning the championship.