It’s been a decade and a half since Electronic Arts released NBA Street Vol. 2, the last truly great basketball video game. Even 15 years later, the game’s sense of style and spirit (and not to mention its soundtrack) have never been matched. Sure, new technology has granted us games like NBA 2K and its hyper-realistic graphics and gameplay—but realism was never the point of Street Vol. 2. It framed basketball not simply as a sport played in identical, sanitized arenas across the country, but as a vital civic institution with its own history, music, and sense of place. It paid homage to basketball as spectacle, as art, as cultural lynchpin.

It was also fun as hell.

The gameplay was fluid, dynamic, fast-paced—each game a 3-on-3 sprint to 21 points by 1s and 2s at streetball courts located around the United States. Vol. 2 did not seek to faithfully capture regulation basketball, but rather the everyday soul of the sport. There was no fouling, no out of bounds. (There was goaltending.) When you went to dunk, your player was temporarily subject to lunar gravity, and he glided to the rim like a ballerina, like Jumpman.

It was the sounds of the game that truly animated each moment, not only the grunts of the players and jangle of the ball slicing through steel net but the noises that came from beyond the court. A handful of onlookers aahed and oohed in earnest from the sideline. Choice cuts of ‘90s and early ‘00s hip hop—Dilated Peoples, MC Lyte, Erick Sermon and Redman, a custom pack of Just Blaze beats—blasted at block party levels. Real-life streetball emcee Bobbito Garcia a.k.a. DJ Cucumber Slice served as one-man commentary team/hype man, and he strained to be heard above the din, extolling every block (“Protect the nest!”), steal (“Oh, he boofed it on you, money!”), and handle (“Do you need a straw with that shake?”).

The gentle learning curve and responsive touch of the controller forgave novices. Vol. 2 did not believe in delayed gratification; it took little practice to be able to cross up your opposition halfway to Guatemala or posterize him like Blake Griffin did Kendrick Perkins. The game incentivized you to drive to the hole and acrobatically soar to the hoop, to make use of the dozens of tricks and dunks at your disposal, with the prospect of accumulating enough trick points to serve your adversary a soul-crushing Gamebreaker. When you triggered a Gamebreaker, you were no longer an actor but a spectator having an out-of-body experience, bearing witness to your own legend unfolding in real-time. Instant nostalgia—that was Vol. 2 in a nutshell. The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of NBA Street Vol. 2, GQ spoke to the unlikely people who made it—a team of Canadian “hockey players” who went into the project with little collective streetball knowledge. They did their homework, became “eager disciples of street basketball religion,” and paid tribute to the fertile, hallowed grounds of Rucker Park at 155th Street in Harlem.

Open Court

Electronic Arts

NBA Street Vol. 2 was created over the course of two years at EA’s Vancouver campus by a team led by producer Wil Mozell. A veteran of five NBA Live games and a holdover from the first NBA Street team that had since dispersed, Mozell embraced the blank slate by building a team of individuals largely unfamiliar with the formula and legacy of sports video game production. Some had never worked on any video game before; Mozell’s search for a new art director led him to Kirk Gibbons, a “zen master” who had once won national championships with the UC-Santa Barbara surfing team and had developed several digital basketball products for Nike. The members of the Vol. 2 team set about diligently educating themselves on the history of streetball and hip hop; they pored over books, documentaries, and AND1 mixtapes and visited New York City’s most venerated streetball courts.