Interview
May 28, 2026
Built with UE5, NBA THE RUN looks to bring back the golden age of basketball video games
For those old enough to remember, the late 90s through early 2000s provided what many fondly recall as the golden age of basketball video games. With iconic titles such as NBA Jam and NBA Street lighting up arcades, dorm rooms, and virtual playgrounds around the globe, the pick-up-and-play style of street basketball combined with fun to master mechanics and an over-the-top presentation that elevated the experience to legendary status—both for first-time players and those looking to consistently dominate opponents with their virtual street ball skills.
Now, a new contender has entered the arena as Play by Play Studios takes to the court with NBA THE RUN. Built with Unreal Engine 5 by a small team of industry veterans, the game attempts to capture the spirit of that memorable golden age while fitting how modern players compete and socialize today.
So, what were the team’s goals for the game and how have key UE5 features such as Nanite, Lumen, and Blueprints help transform the developer’s passion for old-school basketball games into something unique and special for today’s audience?
We caught up with several members of the Play by Play Studios team to find out.
Now, a new contender has entered the arena as Play by Play Studios takes to the court with NBA THE RUN. Built with Unreal Engine 5 by a small team of industry veterans, the game attempts to capture the spirit of that memorable golden age while fitting how modern players compete and socialize today.
So, what were the team’s goals for the game and how have key UE5 features such as Nanite, Lumen, and Blueprints help transform the developer’s passion for old-school basketball games into something unique and special for today’s audience?
We caught up with several members of the Play by Play Studios team to find out.
Thank you for joining us! Could you please provide a brief overview of NBA THE RUN?
Scott Probst, CEO, Play by Play Studios: NBA THE RUN is a fast-paced online 3v3 street basketball game. This is a game that was created by lifelong hoops fans and built for all hoops fans around the world. It's a love letter to basketball.
NBA THE RUN focuses on an easy to pick up and fun to master experience, featuring gameplay that showcases what's best about basketball. Defense as fun as offense, counters to everything, ankle-breaking tricks, logo 3s, monster dunks, jukes, oops and much more.
We take players on a tour around the world in knockout tournaments where only one team can become the G.O.A.T. of the run. There isn't another basketball game on the market that looks, feels, or plays like NBA THE RUN.
NBA THE RUN is described as an attempt to capture the "golden age" of basketball video games. For newcomers, could you please explain when that was, what it represents, and how you've modified the experience for today's modern audience?
Michael Young, Creative Director, Play by Play Studios: The golden age of basketball video games was the late 90s through the early 2000s. It was the era of games like NBA Jam and the NBA Street series, especially NBA Street Vol. 2. Those games captured something many sports titles have drifted away from. They were incredibly easy to pick up, but endlessly fun to master. You could hand a controller to a friend and be playing within seconds, yet the deeper you got, the more strategy and personality emerged.
They were also social games. NBA Jam and NBA Street were built to be played with friends in the same room. Every possession created tension because defense was just as powerful as offense. A perfectly timed steal, shove, or block could swing momentum instantly. Players also felt truly distinctive. Star players had towering strengths and real weaknesses, so building a team was strategic. You were constantly making real-time decisions about matchups, spacing, and who should take over in big moments.
Another key element was the metagame. In NBA Street, players were encouraged to play with flair and take risks. Pulling off advanced tricks, big dunks, and stylish plays built momentum toward a Gamebreaker. That system rewarded creativity, but it also carried risk. If you pushed too far and failed, you could lose the ball and give the other team an opening.
Image courtesy of Play by Play Studios
Those classic games also favored instant response over long, drawn out animations or momentum systems. The response to input on the controls was immediate. If you went up to dunk on someone like Shaq and realized midair you were about to get stuffed, you could kick the ball out to an open shooter at the last second. The game responded instantly to player input, which created improvisation and highlighted moments that felt earned.
In NBA THE RUN, we built our own version of that philosophy. The metagame is called In The Zone. Players earn Zone points by performing advanced tricks, alley oops, and rim-rocking dunks. The higher the risk, the greater the reward. Miss the move and you may lose possession. Land it and your player enters a heightened state where their abilities are amplified and momentum swings in your favor.
From a technical standpoint, the game has been built from the ground up to maintain a smooth 60 frames per second with immediate input response. That responsiveness allows players to improvise in real time the same way those classic games did.
The game of basketball has evolved since those games dominated the dorms. Instead of leaning heavily on And 1-style tricks, the moves are inspired by the way the modern NBA is played. Stepback threes, push-offs (we see you SGA), and space creating dribble moves are central to the experience. Don't worry though—we still have Off the Heezay and Off the Backboard passes.
Finally, we tailored the experience to how people play games today. Crossplay allows players to game with all of their friend groups. Matches are shorter and built for quick competition with friends. Modes take inspiration from games like Fall Guys, with knockout-style tournaments, quick eliminations, and rule variations that can change from match to match. The result is a basketball game that captures the spirit of the golden age while fitting how modern players compete and socialize today.
Simon Golding, CTO, Play by Play Studios: Unreal Engine 5 was chosen because it gives us the strongest balance of visual quality, performance, tooling, extensibility, and long-term stability. It reduces engineering overhead, accelerates production, and positions the project on a modern, well-supported foundation that can scale with our needs. Additionally, UE5 provides a unified, mature cross-platform architecture that lets us target PC, consoles, and future platforms from a single codebase. This dramatically reduces porting cost, minimizes platform-specific technical debt, and ensures consistent behavior across hardware.
In NBA THE RUN, we built our own version of that philosophy. The metagame is called In The Zone. Players earn Zone points by performing advanced tricks, alley oops, and rim-rocking dunks. The higher the risk, the greater the reward. Miss the move and you may lose possession. Land it and your player enters a heightened state where their abilities are amplified and momentum swings in your favor.
From a technical standpoint, the game has been built from the ground up to maintain a smooth 60 frames per second with immediate input response. That responsiveness allows players to improvise in real time the same way those classic games did.
The game of basketball has evolved since those games dominated the dorms. Instead of leaning heavily on And 1-style tricks, the moves are inspired by the way the modern NBA is played. Stepback threes, push-offs (we see you SGA), and space creating dribble moves are central to the experience. Don't worry though—we still have Off the Heezay and Off the Backboard passes.
Finally, we tailored the experience to how people play games today. Crossplay allows players to game with all of their friend groups. Matches are shorter and built for quick competition with friends. Modes take inspiration from games like Fall Guys, with knockout-style tournaments, quick eliminations, and rule variations that can change from match to match. The result is a basketball game that captures the spirit of the golden age while fitting how modern players compete and socialize today.
Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this project?
Simon Golding, CTO, Play by Play Studios: Unreal Engine 5 was chosen because it gives us the strongest balance of visual quality, performance, tooling, extensibility, and long-term stability. It reduces engineering overhead, accelerates production, and positions the project on a modern, well-supported foundation that can scale with our needs. Additionally, UE5 provides a unified, mature cross-platform architecture that lets us target PC, consoles, and future platforms from a single codebase. This dramatically reduces porting cost, minimizes platform-specific technical debt, and ensures consistent behavior across hardware.
Image courtesy of Play by Play Studios
How did flagship features of Unreal Engine 5 such as Nanite and Lumen help your relatively small team with development?
Cullen Lemieux, Environment Artist, Play by Play Studios: The flagship features of Nanite and Lumen were crucial for our team as we adopted a very iterative art process. Without the need for baking and lightmaps, we were freed up to adjust lighting on the fly and see our results in real time. This allowed for very fast iteration times and really helped us nail down our environmental moods quickly and efficiently. Nanite was also a big time save for the team, as we could author more high fidelity assets without the standard concessions that come with non-Nanite assets. Nanite also helped us with our draw call amounts on high-fidelity platforms and current-gen consoles.
Hunter Hazen, Lead Environment Artist, Play by Play Studios: Lumen and Nanite are game changers. Lumen frees you from the time-consuming process of creating lightmaps and baking lighting. It is a big improvement on previous dynamic lighting solutions. Nanite is fantastic for processing and handling a lot more geometry: from triangle counts and LODs to draw calls, Nanite can make high-fidelity assets a lot more performant. However, when attempting 60 fps on lower-end hardware, you may need to account for previous methods of optimization. Luckily, with the power of Unreal Engine, all of this is possible
Which other Unreal Engine 5 feature(s) stood out to you most during development (and why)?
Hazen: Unreal Engine has always been a more accessible game development platform. The visual scripting for shaders and Blueprints makes rapid prototyping easy. This allows us to quickly test and vet new visual concepts, workflows, and gameplay ideas. Speed of iteration has been one of Unreal Engine's strongest features, and it just keeps getting better as the suite of tools grows. Especially with new procedural placement tools such as the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) Framework.
Image courtesy of Play by Play Studios
The stylized, yet true-to-player-likeness look of NBA THE RUN is really unique. Can you speak to how this was achieved in Unreal Engine 5?
Bryan Johnston, Lead Character Artist, Play by Play Studios: We knew we wanted a unique visual style we could call our own, but we weren't sure what that would look like at first. UE5's node-based material system gave us the flexibility to experiment quickly, with real-time feedback that made iteration easy. We explored the balance between realism and stylization, taking cues from graffiti lettering—like bold outlines and edge lighting—and adding colorful sketch marks to give it a handcrafted feel, until we landed on a look that captured the mood and tone of our game.
Using built-in features like the Subsurface shading profile, we gave the skin a more lifelike quality, while overlay materials allowed us to precisely control elements like outline thickness. The Material Editor made it easy to refine every detail and dial in exactly the look we were aiming for.
From ankle-breaking tricks to signature style moves, could you please speak to the character animations in NBA THE RUN and how UE5 helped you achieve them?
Mike Laygo, Animation Director, Play by Play Studios: Since we have stylized characters, we wanted to match that with a stylized, yet non-cartoony, hand-keyed approach that felt super responsive. We also felt that hand-keyed animations with dynamic timing would be novel since most sports games use motion capture to achieve a "simulated broadcast" that's focused on slower, realistic motion. The next goal was to be true to basketball while having a dynamic, larger-than-life feel. For instance, we tried to analyze moves from actual NBA games, then we'd push the poses and timing, and exaggerate the height and hangtime to feel "arcadey." However, we didn't want people flipping four times and dunking. It took a few iterations to find what the team liked.
We also wanted to make the characters feel heroic and unique by giving each some customized animations that are based on their actual moves performed in the NBA. But being a tiny team of animators, there would be no way to create a completely unique animation set for every character. We really needed to find a way to share a base animation set that we could expand upon, on a per-character basis. Thankfully, we were able to leverage Unreal's Animation Retargeting technology, which enabled us to focus more on unique and interesting animations instead of having to recreate common ones.
Image courtesy of Play by Play Studios
The playgrounds appear to have as much character as the players themselves. How has Unreal Engine 5's lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you craft these larger-than-life venues?
Lemieux: Our goal for the maps in the game was to be true to life but put our own spin on them: recognizable, yet distinct to our desired look and feel. Unreal's lighting and shader tools really helped us nail down a style and run with it. The real-time lighting was a crucial element to nailing down these real-life locations, as we could quickly iterate and test lighting scenarios fast and efficiently. Being a small team with big goals, we needed an engine that would provide us the reliability and speed to iterate fast but keep our desired quality. We wanted to put everything we had into these environments, enhancing believability and immersion to really put you in these iconic locations—and Unreal Engine 5 really helped us achieve that.
How did UE5 help you optimize the game across the various platforms it will be available on?
Hazen: Unreal Engine has a host of performance-tracking features. This is very helpful when identifying and fixing performance resource hogs. Stat GPU, Stat Unit, and Traces have been very helpful in deducing and fixing performance issues across multiple platforms.
Image courtesy of Play by Play Studios
Has having access to Unreal Engine's source code been beneficial to your team during development? If so, how?
Golding: Access to Unreal Engine's source code has been a strategic advantage. It gave us the flexibility to fix issues internally, optimize systems for our needs, integrate deeply with our pipelines, and ensure consistent cross-platform behavior. This level of control reduced risk, accelerated development, and allowed us to deliver a more stable and performant product.
Play by Play is described as a small team with big dreams. With that in mind, which UE5 feature(s) had the largest quantifiable impact on cross-discipline workflows and how did these features help the team reduce iteration time, improve team collaboration, and/or lower production costs throughout the development process?
Hazen: This is tough to say since there are so many features of Unreal that make it very powerful and productive. Visual scripting with Blueprints allows for rapid iteration and validation of gameplay ideas, Nanite and Lumen have sped up and increased the fidelity level possible on current generation consoles and higher end PCs, and ease of use has allowed cross discipline collaboration.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Hazen: Yes, another great feature of using Unreal Engine is the large quantity of documentation, tutorials, resources, and communities. Unreal Engine’s documentation has, on many occasions, helped us achieve our goals, Community discussions and tutorials have opened us to new ideas, and Fab has been a treasure trove of content that can be used to quickly spin up ideas and scenarios.
Image courtesy of Play by Play Studios
How has the team taken advantage of Easy Anti-Cheat?
Golding: Easy Anti-Cheat has been an important part of our security for the game. It provides real-time protection against unauthorized tools, memory manipulation, and tampering attempts that could compromise fair play.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about NBA THE RUN?
Golding: You can visit our web site at NBATHERUN.com, follow us on Instagram, X, Tik Tok and YouTube, and join our growing community on our Discord.
You can also check out the game for yourself when it goes into Open Beta on PS5, XB, and Steam this Saturday, May 30.