28 Fake NBA Teams in Japan’s “Super Dunk Shot”

12 Comments

Super Dunk Shot is the 1992 Japanese version of the classic NCAA Basketball game for the Super NES. When the game was released in Japan, however, all of the college teams and players were replaced with amusingly fictional NBA teams and players.

Team Logos & Divisions

Team Details & Player Names

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12 Comments
  1. Thank you for sharing. I’ve never even heard of this game. This is amazing.

  2. Ha! The same guys did a baseball game I played the hell out of, Roger Clemens’ MVP Baseball. You can look up the team names, but they didn’t have anywhere near as much fun with them as they did this game. However, if you look on the wiki, they toyed around with player names instead. Darryl Strawberry became Raspberry, that sort of thing.

    1. Haha, yeah, I’ve been considering doing a gallery for that game & other games with fake names. There’s something charming about fake names of real world things like that, especially fake names coming out of Japan.

      1. Check Septentrion, released as SOS outside Japan. It has a fake movie credits reel and it’s something else.

  3. LOL! Boston Celeries is my favorite.

  4. What’s insane is that every team-and every single player on each team-corresponds to those in the actual NBA at the time of release in Japan. I’m fairly certain that the teams and players have the same attributes as their real life equivalents, too.

  5. We used to play this version back in the day. So much laughs from the crazy team and player names!

  6. Very common in sports games.

    I personally used to play International Superstar Soccer(aka. Winning Eleven, aka Pro Evolution Soccer), as until about 2008 or so it was a superior game, and earlier versions before they got a player union licence used names like Sheeran for Shearer etc.

    Sensible Soccer from British developer Sensible Software(now owned by Codemasters) used a vowel shift with real player names, and team names simply being the name of the town/city they come from, or in the case of multiple teams from the same city, the city name plus main shirt colour.

    Fire Pro Wrestling(except the newest version) uses completely accurate versions of real wrestlers(except a few, such as Tiger Mask who is based on the anime character, who has had his costume recoloured, too) with changed names. For instance, Tiger Mask becomes Mask de Panther, Mitsuharu Misawa becomes Mitsuhide Hikawa, Dynamite Kid becomes Dynamic Kid etc.

    While I can’t speak for American sports, as I’m not a fan of any of them, I imagine there’ll be plenty of others like this out there. I think American copyright law may prevent these games coming stateside, as the English releases of Fire Pro Wrestling use the costume recolouring like used on Tiger Mask for everyone, and even changed a few of the movesets.

  7. Funny but a great plagiarism of the teams. I would say that it was lack of originality on the part of executives and programmers of the game. instead of making more original logos and equipment. they only made a satire of the nba teams in everything, from the name, the image and the players. but good the innocence of many at that time

  8. This is amazing, I love when sports games have to scramble & go with the next-best thing to the real players and/or teams, really gives them an odd kitschy charm.

    On that note I stumbled upon a game that’s a lot like this, “Actua Ice Hockey 2” on the PlayStation. It only came out in Europe (possibly even England-exclusive?) and in the same vein as this, in lieu of an official NHL license it instead had fake team names and real player names with one letter removed; like Wayne Grotzky of the New York Vipers, for example.

  9. I really like the Milwaukee Weiner-Dogs

  10. Milwaukee Backs. Is that a kangaroo? So what, Backs as in the Outback in Australia? It seems a like a stretch, but it’s the only sense I can make of it.