EA resurrects NBA Live, thanks to 2010’s Jesus Bynum

It is very rare for a game to get pulled once a company has invested a large amount of money in it, and it is even rarer for a company to pull a game once a public demo has been released for it. And to take things a step further, it is pretty much unheard of for a company to pull a game once copies have been printed. However, back 2010 that is exactly what happened with NBA Elite 11.

Ahead of release, everything was looking great, with EA touting they were ready to tackle 2K Games’ NBA 2K with one of the best NBA games they had ever made. However, when the demo of the game hit in September of 2010, forums, comments sections, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube were all ablaze commenting that the game was a glitchy mess. A video of NBA star, Andrew Bynum, was also a big hit on Youtube because of his in-game exploits.

Things got so bad, that EA cancelled the release of the game just a few weeks before release – commenting they were not happy to “ship a product [we’re not] proud of and compete for marginal share.” It was such a last minute decision, that a few copies of the final version of game got into the wild, and started selling on eBay for extravagant prices.

Now, almost two years later, it looks as though the Elite branding has been so tarnish by those events, that the company has decided to go back to the NBA Live name – the name Elite was originally supposed to replace – for the 2013 version of the game – with EA confirming to Gamesutra that they will use the Live moniker for future efforts.

EA have not given any solid details on NBA Live 13 as of yet, although it really cannot be much worse than last time.