ball is afterlife

It was April. I finally wasn’t sick anymore. Jordan was moving back to DC in a month, and we’d missed peak cherry blossom season at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, so we figured a trek to the Museum of the Moving Image would be a worthy final friend date in the city.

I’d known the Museum of the Moving Image had housed an original NBA Jam 93 cabinet at some point, but could not find any recent enough information about it to prove myself right. The most recent article I could find was from 2016, and no one had mentioned it in any Yelp reviews or Instagram posts since then, so I figured it was a gamble. We’d see if it was there, and if it wasn’t, we’d move along. We weren’t really there just for NBA Jam, anyway – we both loved the Muppets and were looking forward to the big Jim Henson exhibit they recommended saving for last. 

Regardless, I told Jordan all about the game at lunch before heading to Astoria. I told her about how a lot of my thesis research was focused on avatars, golems, and digital reanimations, and about how video games had gone hand-in-hand with the NBA since the 90s. I told her about Dražen Petrović and Reggie Lewis and the 1993 NBA offseason that probably made fans feel like the world was ending. I told her about how they were both in the game and about how the developers swore up and down that Dražen haunted the game – that when the game was in demo mode, the announcer would shout “Petrović! Petrović!” into the void like Dražen was begging anybody who would listen to remember him. I told her about how Reggie Lewis, though he died just over a month later, was never reported to have done the same.

As we made our way through the exhibits on the second floor, I heard the unmistakable sound of a game over in Ms. Pac Man. My grandparents had a Ms. Pac Man machine at their house that I spent hours playing every summer as a kid, so I’d know it anywhere. 

I didn’t know if I’d find NBA Jam in the next exhibit, but I knew I’d heard an arcade game. I grabbed Jordan’s hand and dragged her towards the sound like it was instinct.

Tucked away in a dark room on the second floor, there it was. NBA Jam 93. Midway Games. Bingo. Bullseye. Boom shackalacka, so to speak. 

I was not sure the game was haunted. Sure, I’m a bit of a believer in the supernatural and paranormal – I never quite grew out of believing in magic, and I think it’s healthy to keep a little mystery in your life – but I assumed it was just a collective grief hallucination thing like when we saw Kobe Bryant possess Khris Middleton at the 2020 All-Star Game or that the developers were trying to generate a buzz surrounding their game. 

I did not go into this assuming – or even hoping – that Dražen would shout his name. Still, my hands shook as I selected the teams. I would play as the Nets and Jordan would play as the Celtics.

We weren’t very good, but that didn’t matter. It was electric – yet chilling – to see Dražen Petrović and Reggie Lewis go head-to-head. It didn’t really feel like they were alive, or like they were sentient inside the game somewhere, but it did feel like I knew something no one else in the room did.

We’d been standing there fumbling with the controls and trying to get the ball in the 8-bit basket for ten minutes and figured we would give someone else a turn on the machine. Jordan went one way to sit on the bench across from the game, and I went to put our extra tokens on top of the machine on the other side of the room.

That’s when I heard it.

“Petrović!”

I froze. With a slightly maniacal grin on my face, I whipped my head around to see that the game was still unoccupied. It had gone into demo mode. My smile dropped and my blood ran cold.

“Jordan,” I said as I walked back over to the bench, hands shaking. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The haunted thing,” I explained. “Petrović. I think I heard it.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Do you need a minute?” Jordan asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

We sat on the bench for a while. Soon enough, a father and son went up to the NBA Jam machine. They selected the Bulls and the Lakers. I wondered if they knew. I wondered if anyone did.