- NA release: 16th January 1997
- PAL release: 1st September 1997
- JP release: N/A
- Developer: Midway
- Publisher: Midway
- N64 Magazine Score: 52%


The Nintendo 64’s first basketball is a straight up arcade conversion, which means there’s nothing to the game except matches and very few options. It’s a 2-on-2 basketball game where scoring is so east that most games will be back and forth of constant scoring from both teams.

With four players, you might find a bit of fun, but this is the kind of game best suited left in the arcades, as it’s something that can be fun for a quick go, but playing for more than a few minutes quickly wears thin. For an arcade game, it’s fine. For a console game, it’s pretty terrible. I know that some people love this game, but it really needed a lot more to it.

Poor
Very, very quickly indeed, we got bored of saying “Serious hangtime!” in increasingly-ridiculous American accents, and one by one we quietly put down out joypads and sloped away to do something less boring instead. Like work.
Jonathan Davies, N64 Magazine #6
Remake or Remaster?
A collection of Midway’s arcade NBA games would be worth having.
Official ways to get the game.
You can buy an Arcade cabinet that contains NBA Hangtime from Arcade1Up.
N64 Games by Date
1997: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1998: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1999: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2000: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
Now we’re talking. I turn my head to the right and I can see my copy of Hang Time. Turn that bad boy into a werewolf and set that ball on ffyyaaaa
the arcade version at least is available via the Arcade1up cabinet.
And yeah, it’s perfect for a quickfire bit of arcade multiplayer fun 😀
Can’t imagine that it’d have much staying power as a single player console game, but the arcades are a vibe, and the NBA Jam games are really the quintisential arcade sports games. They’re loud, they’re brash, they’re stupid, they’re not complicated and they’re fun. Midway at their finest.
NBA Hangtime is also another rare example of a pure 2D game on the N64, and graphically it’s actually superior to the arcade version in some respects (and also much better looking than the only other home console version, the PS1 release); it was an excellent port of an arcade game that was perhaps a bit behind the times by 1996. I can imagine this being a popular game to rent back in the day though (when you could still rent games), perfect for the weekend when you had friends coming over and you wanted a good four player multiplayer game that wasn’t Mario Kart 64 again.
I’m not even a big basketball fan, but even I enjoy a good Jam. Hard to go wrong with it on any console, and this is probably the best console release a Jam game ever got.