Like Runner Aaron Farr or Lieutenant Les McBurney of the Sun Prairie fire dept, March Madness is living up to its name. Gonzaga are making it look like this might finally be their year, Jaden Ivey’s draft stock is skyrocketing, and there are actual human beings watching the games in person. What a time.
Sadly, video game basketball doesn’t get quite as swept up in the college game excitement. It’s understandable – the NBA is a truly global product by comparison, and it took NBA 2K until recently to even include the women’s game. Outside the US, college basketball is probably seen as equivalent to junior racing formulas or under 21s soccer tournaments – a feeder system interesting for its young talents, rather than its own intrinsic spectacle.
Still, March Madness has been documented in depicted in video games, and college teams do sneak into modern NBA 2K games in some form. But what are the best ways to scratch that particular itch you get this time every year? Firstly, go pick up that ointment from the pharmacy. And then play these five all-timer college basketball video games.
The year was 2002. The Xbox was the must-have new console. The Lakers were imperious. And our national appetite for basketball and video games was so high that it seemed perfectly logical for an NCAA college ball game to sit on the shelves alongside two different NBA franchises and several streetball offerings.
NCAA College Basketball 2K3 brought the ESPN presentation, carried over from NBA 2K3, that turned heads at the time and started to show NBA Live up as a complacent franchise. It had a lot more teams than we’d been treated to before, and the shiniest floors. So shiny. Bizarrely, Chris Hill was one of the best players in the game.
College ball makes only a fleeting appearance in 2K17, but an important one. Your MyPlayer begins their journey with either Kansas, Georgetown, Arizona, Louisville, UConn, Illinois, Oklahoma, Georgia Tech, Michigan State or Wake Forest, and you spend quite a while there in the Prelude phase of the story. Long enough to form a proper attachment to your chosen team. There’s even a coach Mike K cameo.
College teams were also available in Play Now alongside current and classic NBA teams. There’s a lot of fantasy matchups there. 
Commonly agreed upon as the best college basketball title of all time. This was Visual Concepts at its most ambitious and imaginative, matching peerless presentation with a real depth to gameplay modes, in the direction any fan would want. Legacy Mode gives you a struggling college team (handpicked from a limited selection) and offers the chance to turn around its fortunes and create a dynasty or move on up to a more prestigious university. More than that, you as a coach have your own ratings and can impact a team’s offensive or defensive stats.
2007 was a long time ago now, so the visuals have suffered a bit. But the animations are still surprisingly varied to 2020 eyes, and the raucous atmosphere of the college game is captured perfectly in its presentation. 
And here we have it. The most up-to-date licensed college basketball in existence, released in 2009 when Kanye was just a VMA speech-interrupting upstart and it was still alright to watch Glee. It’s a shame.
Some young hopeful named Blake Griffin appeared on the cover of NCAA Basketball 10 – wonder where he ended up? – and coming from the EA camp, it was built on NBA Live DNA which didn’t give it the best chance. The animations might not be as smooth as 2K’s, but it was still fun to start a franchise mode and watch players’ RPI ratings change dynamically according to real-life performances each week.
Finally, we’re going right back to 1995 and the Sega Genesis, where a dynamic young coach K, only 15 years into his job at Duke, landed himself one of those newfangled licensed video game doohickeys.
Basketball was never the easiest sport to play from an isometric 2D perspective – and that’s where NBA Jam came in and proved so amazing with a simple side-on approach – but EA’s presentation was peerless for the time.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
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