Hidden Levels #1: Mr. Boomshakalaka

0:06This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm Ben Brock Johnson from the WBUR podcast, Endless Thread. And today we're bringing you the first episode from our new collaborative series called Hidden Levels. It's about how the world of video games has changed the world beyond video games. In the next six episodes, we'll get deep into how games are made and designed. Everything from the history of the joystick to how nature is faithfully recreated in the digital world to a dispatch from the front lines of the console wars. So, Roman, when did video games first change your world? I mean, probably when I was in elementary school in the 80s.

0:48The arcade that I went to the most was a small section in a skating rink in Newark, Ohio. And so I first learned playing video games on roller skates, actually. That sounds impressive. How about you? I think, you know, I didn't have an arcade spot. But one memory that is really strong for me is I had the luck. My brother actually brought me to Japan when I was 12 years old, and I was really lucky to do that. It blew my mind in so many ways. But I went into a real deal Japanese arcade while I was there, and it was so incredible. I mean, the different kinds of games you could play, the sights, really the sounds too.

1:29We are audio people, Roman. I love sound first and foremost. And that's what I think of sometimes when I think of video games. Absolutely. I'm exactly the same way. And there's something really special about designing game sounds so that it can cut through the din of all the other arcade games and kind of draw you to the machine. Do you have a favorite sound that you think of when you think of video game sounds? I mean, my favorite is there used to be this really big arcade game called Gauntlet that had like four joysticks on it so you can play four different characters. And one of the sounds that the sort of game announcer said was, Elf needs food badly.

2:04Elf needs food badly. Or Elf is about to die. And I think about Elf needs food badly every time I'm hungry. Literally every day of my life since I played Gauntlet, I think about this game sound. How about you? What's yours? Well, you know, I think of a couple of classics for me, like the Mortal Kombat, you know, Scorpion, get over here. You know, there was a game I played a lot called Cruising USA that had this kind of ridiculous female passenger voice that was like, yeah, all right, Hollywood, let's go. Oh, wow. Redwoods. Ooh, Hollywood. Radical. But one that I think of a lot is the Ryu Ken or Shoryuken, Street Fighter 2 sounds of Ryu or Ken doing the like, Ryu Ken, Shoryuken.

3:03That one, I just say that sometimes to myself just to make myself happy. So clearly, Roman, as audio podcasters, we love sound and we could go on forever. Yeah. And the story we have for you today is all about an iconic video game sound. It's about a high-energy Vogel performance that helped spawn an entire franchise. The first episode of Hidden Levels is brought to us by 99PI contributor James Parkinson. Here it is. Let's go! Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 80s, Mark Timmel was a wonder boy of video game design. He released a successful game as a teenager and was earning thousands of dollars a month while still living at his parents' house.

3:50By the time he was in his 20s, Mark was working full-time as a developer in Chicago, designing coin-operated arcade games. Coin-op back in those days was always the cutting edge. It was better than any Super Nintendo, better than a Sega Genesis. It was really high-powered. I could put more sprites on the screen, more bullets, more explosions. And so it was, for me, it was like being a kid in a candy store. The company Mark worked for was called Midway, and they were famous for bringing a number of big Japanese games to the US, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. And in 1992, they released the iconic fighting game Mortal Kombat.

4:35But Mark was about to take Midway in a very different direction. Mark was a big basketball fan, and in the early 90s, he could tell that the NBA was really having a moment, particularly in Chicago. This was the height of Michael Jordan mania.

4:58Chicago Bulls were about to clinch their first championship three-peat, and the popularity of the league was at an all-time high.

5:12And Mark Timmel decided he wanted to capture the high-flying, razzle-dazzle energy of professional basketball and put it in an arcade game. He called his new creation NBA Jam.

5:27By the fall of 1992, NBA Jam was almost complete, and Mark Timmel and his team decided to test out their new game at an arcade in Chicago called Dennis' Place for Games. They rolled in a 400-pound cabinet, put in the chip with the NBA Jam code, and turned the machine on. Then Mark sat back to watch how the customers in Dennis' place would react. He says that back then, there was a pretty simple way to gauge whether a coin-op game was going to be successful. You could usually tell in the first couple of hours. In the coin-op business, if you can get somebody to put quarters in, reach into their pocket, go to the cash machine, the change machine, and put money in, And, you know, that's, like, really telling.

6:12It's very democratic, whether you like it or not. And as Mark watched, the customers at Dennis' place voted with their quarters. They crowded around the NBA Jam cabinet, shouting, cursing, fighting for the joystick. It was bedlam. There were fistfights, you know, people gambling. The coin doors were jammed up with money. You know, when somebody would do a big dunk and the backboard would smash into pieces. You know, they'll literally, you know, scream and run around the arcade. You know, it was awesome.

6:48I remember exactly how wild this game was. Growing up in Australia, I didn't have access to live NBA games on TV. But NBA Jam was the next best thing. It quite literally brought the excitement of the NBA to my fingertips. And I think there were a few different elements that drew kids like me in. For one thing, NBA Jam just looked good. It might be hard to believe now, but for kids like me who grew up on games like Pac-Man, NBA Jam was a whole new world. This was the dawn of digitized graphics, which meant that for the first time, designers like Mark could make avatars that looked and moved like actual people.

7:26So we would take videotape and run it through a digitizer that would create frames and we'd put it on the screen. And it was like, wow, look at that. That's a photograph right there on my computer screen. At first, Mark recorded video of amateur players he found on local courts throughout Chicago to run through the digitizer. But when he finalized the official licensing deal with the NBA, he did some minor digital surgery. Then we basically chopped the heads off of all of our local athletes and then generated the heads of all of these NBA superstars to, you know, paste on top. Which meant I could play the game as a real-life basketball star, or at least the head of one.

8:09I could be Scottie Pippen, Hakeem Olajuwon, or Shaquille O 'Neal. But the realism ended there, because the gameplay was pure fantasy. At times, NBA Jam felt more like Mortal Kombat than basketball. There were no fouls, no out-of-bounds, and the players were like superhumans. They leapt into the rafters for sky-high dunks and shot impossibly long-range three-pointers. When a player made three baskets in a row, the ball burst into flames and he became unstoppable for the next several possessions. But I think there was one element in particular that made NBA Jam stand out from all the other games in the arcade.

8:48It was an iconic sound that cut through all the bleeps and bloops and drew people to the NBA Jam cabinet like moths to a flame. Even if you didn't play the game growing up, you might have heard this sound.

9:08I'm talking about the voice of the games announcer.

9:18Today, voice acting is a key component of most video game productions, but back in the 1970s, there were no voices in video games at all. High quality audio recordings were just too large to fit on the sound chips of arcade machines. The earliest voices heard video games were digitised, using a technique called speech synthesis.

9:41Basically combining short sounds or syllables to form complete words. These synthesised voices were a clever solution to the problem, but they didn't exactly sound realistic. The space-themed shooter Stratobox was the first game to attempt this. As you find at alien ships, a very unnatural-sounding narrator would shout a handful of distorted phrases. Happy. Very good. Believe it or not, the narrator there was saying lucky and very good. One of the first games to use true recorded voiceover was Dragon's Lair in 1983. They managed to do this using laser disc technology. The team didn't have the budget to hire actors, so much of the voice acting was done by the animators and the production staff.

10:29Please save me. The cage is locked with a key. The dragon keeps it around his neck. Improvements in computer chip technology allowed for increased memory, and by the early 90s, it was common for arcade games to use real voice recordings, at least very short ones. These companies still weren't hiring professional actors, though. As a result, the voice performances were often bad. Like, really, really bad. You must recover all the energy immediately, Mega Man. But where is Dr Wiley? That's a good question. Just one more page and I would have finished this book. Die monster, you don't belong in this world.

11:13Captain Wesker, where's Chris? Stop it! Don't open that door! Yeah, that wasn't going to cut it for NBA Jam. This new basketball game was going to need a voice that could match the high octane style of the gameplay and cut through the noisy commotion of an arcade to draw people in. Someone with a distinctive delivery that would keep people dipping into their pockets for more quarters. They needed this guy. So firstly, can I just get you to introduce yourself, please? Hi everyone, Tim Kitsarow from NBA Jam Boom Shakalaka. That was very loud. Tim Kitsarow was not a famous actor back in the early 90s, and he certainly didn't grow up with dreams of becoming a voice actor for an iconic video game.

11:57But he'd always been a showman. He was one of seven children, and he was the entertainer in the family. He says his goal at dinner was to get milk to come out of someone's nose. One of my heroes is Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand voices, Looney Tunes. So when I was younger, I often did cartoon voices like Underdog. You know, the Simon Meyer signature says Underdog must die. Or Droopy Dog. There's a telephone, Butch. It's a dame. What'd you say, Butch? She's so unselfish. Tim got into theatre in high school and went on to study acting at Purchase College, where he crossed paths with some heavy hitters.

12:39My roommate was Stan Tucci, Vin Raines was in the... So a lot of big names came out of that place. But Tim's career didn't take off quite like those two. He spent the 80s as a genuine actor, bouncing between cities like New York and LA, looking for work. And eventually, he wound up in Chicago. He trained with the comedians at Second City while auditioning for commercials and playing the drums in a local band. His career felt like it was stuttering, until it took a very unlikely turn. Of course, the way the world works, sometimes, you know, you have one plan and then it goes another way. It all started because a couple of Tim's bandmates worked in Midway's pinball division.

13:21They often needed people to record little bits of voiceover, and they knew that their drummer Tim was pretty good at impressions. One day they asked him to help out with a Gilligan's Island pinball game. So I was hired to do Mr Howell from Gilligan's Island. Maybe I can buy a new dinghy for my yacht. Over time, Tim became a regular voice on Midway's pinball games. I did the Twilight Zone attack from Mars. This is an emergency broadcast. The Earth is being invaded by flying saucers from Mars. The Shadow, World Cup soccer, NBA pinball, you know, or fast break, whatever. It was just going in and having fun and actually this time I was getting paid for it.

14:04Being a voice actor for pinball was a fun side gig, but not much more than that. Tim never felt like it had the potential to be an actual career. I really had no idea what I was doing, you know, getting into that business. I knew that I loved playing pinball, but pinball, as I said, 15 games later, I still didn't know much about the industry, still couldn't play worth a lick. It was just a fun extra gig for extra money, extra beer money. Meanwhile, Mark Timmel and the NBA Jam crew were putting the finishing touches on their brand new basketball game. They'd signed the licensing deal with the NBA and figured out the gameplay and the graphics.

14:41And at a certain point, they started to think about the sound. A guy named John Hay handled just about every aspect of the audio for NBA Jam. He wrote the game's deeply 90s soundtrack.

14:58And in order to make the game sound more lifelike, he went out and recorded all these basketball sounds in the wild. Like balls being dribbled, or sneaker squeaks on hardwood floors. But Mark Timmel and John Hay knew that one of the most important sonic elements was the voice of the game's announcer. They wanted a commentator who would make the game come alive and sound like the way the NBA sounded on TV. Mark even thought about hiring an actual NBA commentator, but they didn't have the budget. Luckily for them, an affordable alternative was kicking around the office, drinking beer with the pinball guys.

15:34I used to just get regular calls because every couple of months there was a new pinball game and it's like, let's go to Tim. And so this felt no different to me. The recording studio was located in Midway's pinball factory. It was a giant noisy space with lots of workers and hundreds of pinball machines. But all the way in the back, there was a little five foot by five foot vocal booth. They called it the Meat Locker. It was kind of a depressing little place, but it was cozy. It was like our little world. It was just the sound guys, you know, not much bigger than a household giant refrigerator and a little window for me to see John.

16:10So, yeah, although it was kind of dingy and dark and small and everything else, it was home and, you know, it's where some of the best work was ever done. Mark and John worked to brainstorm a library of words and phrases they needed Tim to record. First, they needed the names of every player in the game and a few different takes for each so that it wouldn't sound repetitive. Then they started compiling a list of all the different things that happened in a basketball game that Tim was going to need to react to. Just like a TV announcer, he needed to say something every time there was a big dunk or a three-pointer or a blocked shot.

16:46John Hay wrote lines for each category, some of them taken directly from NBA broadcasts. When Tim Kitsuro finally got into the booth, he decided he wanted to model his delivery off of veteran NBA announcer Marv Albert. Albert was the most famous basketball commentator in the world at the time, and he had a flamboyant, energetic style.

17:09by Michael Short. That's 13. You know, jump off point was realizing that to me, Marv Albert compared to other sports broadcasters, he brought that extra energy. And I knew that I wanted to emulate that. But Tim was going to be Marv Albert turned up to 11. Marv Albert with a splash of Mortal Kombat. To get in the right headspace, Tim would visualize high-flying dunks and channel that energy into his performance. So that's where I kind of got that timber, that tone that, you know, that NBA Jam had based off of like what I heard and then just making it my own. Rejected. He's heating up. He's on fire.

17:51Well, I mean, Tim's, I mean, he's amazing. He's a genius. This is Mark Tamelligan. He says that Tim didn't stick to the script. Right away, he started getting creative. He's so quick-witted. You know, he's always willing to, you know, iterate and improve and take feedback. And when Tim went into the studio, he would just ad lib. And it was magic, you know, immediately. But Tim had to improvise within constraints. The arcade machines at the time still didn't have a lot of memory. So his catchphrases needed to be short, like half a sentence. From long range, oh my! Is the lead of chance again! Or even just a single word.

18:44Come on! As for the game's most famous catchphrase, Tim doesn't take credit. The exact origin story is a little murky, but Tim believes it was a suggestion by John Carlton, one of the game's artists. He'd been listening to the funk group Sly and the Family Stone. And on the song, I Want to Take You Higher, there's a chorus where they sing. Boo shaka laka laka, boo shaka laka laka, bow down. I want to take you high. But they were just like, boo shaka laka laka, boo shaka laka laka. They weren't saying boom shaka laka. They were saying boo shaka laka laka, boo shaka laka, boo shaka. Whatever. Actually, the song goes boom laka laka.

19:28You get the point. So he just said, hey, John, tell Tim to say boom shakalaka. Once again, this is the story that I heard. I'm there, but I don't remember it. But I do remember vaguely John just saying to me, say boom shakalaka. And I just said, what does that mean? He goes, I don't know, just say it. And I went, boom shakalaka. And I said, is that it? And he goes, yeah, do a couple more. Boom shakalaka. Ooh, boom shakalaka. yeah, that's probably good. All right, moving on. The recording sessions for NBA Jam were done in around 20 hours. And when Tim was finished, he didn't think it was a big deal at all.

20:05As far as he was concerned, this was just another gig. Like Gilganzal and pinball. Little did he know that those 20 hours would change the course of his life. And from that point forward, he'd be known to the world as Mr. Boom Shakalaka. After the success of their test night at Dennis' place for games, the NBA Jam team was confident that their game was not a dud. But still, Mark Turmel had this lingering worry that the game wouldn't translate outside of Chicago. After all, he could see the back-end data showing which NBA teams people were choosing to play with. So I knew, looking at the stats, that the Bulls were just dominant.

20:45Everybody was picking the balls. And so in the back of my head, I thought, maybe this is a Chicago thing. When the game went live across the country, Mark flew to LA to see how it played there. He went to an arcade in Westwood where NBA Jam had just been installed. And I walked in and I just watched. And it was the same bedlam that I had seen in Chicago, except that the players were picking the Lakers. And so it really was that moment where I said to myself, wow, you know, this is going to happen in every NBA city at the very least. And this is going to happen around the country. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

21:29NBA Jam was picked up by arcades all around the country. And city after city, People happily forked out their hard-earned quarters in order to rain down three-pointers with Detlef Schrempf while dunked from half-court with Clyde Drexler. If there was one group of people who seemed to love the game most of all, it was NBA players. On his days off, Miami Heat star Glenn Rice would wait in line at the local arcade just to play NBA Jam as himself. Gary Payton, a point guard with the Seattle Supersonics, demanded to know why he hadn't been included in the game. He even sent personal photos to Mark Dermal that he could use to make Payton's avatar.

22:11And then there was Shaquille O 'Neal. We got contacted from the distributor in Orlando and said that Shaq wanted to buy two games. Shaq wanted one NBA Jam machine for his own house and another for the Orlando Magic's team jet. They brought one of the NBA Jam cabinets onto the jet and it traveled with them on the road and they would reel it up into Shaq's hotel suite and the players, instead of going out and partying or clubbing, they would go in and just play and play as each other. Even the opposing team would come in the night before the game or after the game and play. In 1993, NBA Jam was the talk of both the arcade world and the world of professional basketball.

23:02But back in Chicago, Tim Kittsrow still hadn't played the game. I asked John, I said, hey, where can I go see NBA Jam? Tim went to a nearby arcade and walked up to a cabinet that he assumed was NBA Jam. But it turns out it was a different basketball game, one of their competitors. And Tim was not all that impressed by the announcer. It would be like, nice shot, 4-2, he makes it. I was like, what the hell is wrong with that guy? And I walk over, watch the NBA Jam, he's on fire from downtown, not tonight, you know, whatever. And I was like, well, that guy's pretty good. And it was clear that the kids in the arcade agreed with him.

23:44They were absolutely loving NBA Jam. And that was like, you know, this moment where I went, wow, this is something. This is like, you know, made the equivalent of being, you know, someone from like, you know, a group that hears their song on the radio for the first time. It's like, this is a hit. And I got kind of charged, but I couldn't resist sometimes just by accident. Didn't think about it, but I'm watching and I would start to say like, rejected, ugly shot. Get that stuff out of here. Boom, suck it. And someone turned around. Hey, man, you sound like the dude in the game. I go, dude, I am the dude.

24:18And then it is, it is you. Yeah. NBA Jam went on to become a bigger hit than anyone ever expected. To use an arcade term, it was a quarter muncher, devouring coins like a hungry hippo. In its first year, NBA Jam made$1 billion in revenue, one quarter at a time. I was out at Midway in their lunchroom, and there was an article on the board, just like a Xeroxed article that said, NBA Jam surpasses, breaks all records, makes a billion dollars in quarters first year. and I just said, who wrote this? This is funny. I just absolutely convinced it was someone just having, you know, some fun to kind of like prop up the team and, you know, give them some confidence like, yeah, NBA Jam's a great game, but had no idea in reality the game made a billion dollars.