Virtual Meets Reality: Inside NBA 2K and Pro Basketball
The cramped room in Midtown Manhattan was packed wall-to-wall with YouTubers—a relentlessly cheery bunch—the lot of them excitedly live-streaming, likes and comments bobbing across their screens.
It was August, and the crowd was previewing the latest product from the NBA 2K video game series—NBA 2K18, which was released Friday to those who pre-ordered—and the event was crowded with elite gamers, social media stars, 2K staffers and, pocked about the room, honest-to-God, in-the-flesh NBA players. Security stood at the front door. Booze flowed from a bar in the back. TVs pinstriped the length of the room, cutting it into even rows. That was the main attraction, with the gamers lining up, jostling through the morass of people to get their turn on the joysticks (all of this, of course, beamed over the internet to 2K devotees).
In a room full of presumed NBA fans it was somewhat disorienting to see these NBA players—Brooklyn Nets guard D'Angelo Russell, or No. 3 overall pick Jayson Tatum, or Portland Trail Blazers' star C.J. McCollum—move through the place relatively un-bothered. Sure, they posed for a few photos—and yes, one particularly pushy guy inch-wormed his way into a conversation with all of them—but things were relatively calm, a break from the usual onslaught of middle-aged fans stampeding for autographs any time a pro athlete is near. The NBA stars were focused on doing NBA star things—posing for endorsement photos, chatting with press—while the gamers were focused on doing gamer things: hurriedly testing NBA 2K18's new features and describing it, beat by beat, into selfie sticks.
The scene hints at a larger symbiosis between the NBA itself and 2K, the pre-eminent basketball video game: It's all part of the same machine. The two have grown together, not necessarily in lockstep, but in conjunction. The NBA is more popular than ever and fans
