NBA 2K

The 'NBA 2K series of basketball games are arguably the most popular franchise of video games based on basketball. The series started life as the exclusive basketball title for the Sega Dreamcast, but later appeared on other consoles starting with NBA 2K2. It's since surpassed EA Sports's NBA Live series, to the point, where NBA Elite, a planned refresh of the Live franchise was canned.

The NBA 2K series provides examples of:

 * And Now for Something Completely Different: The "My Player" mode in recent titles, where you control nearly every aspect of your player's basketball career.
 * Announcer Chatter: Which is praised by fans as being downright realistic and actually pretty accurate to how commentary on any given NBA game would sound like.
 * Cash Cow Franchise: It's the pre-eminent NBA simulation franchise on the market right now.
 * Dueling Games: With EA's NBA Live/Elite series of games.
 * Guest Player(s): NBA 2K12 features some of the game's biggest legends like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and even Jerry West. (The player whose silhouette is represented in the NBA logo.)
 * Long Runner: The first game was released in November of 1999, and it's still going very, very strong, even surpassing EA's long-running series of NBA games.
 * Mission Pack Sequel: Though there are frequently plenty enough improvements with each passing game to make it more different than the previous year's edition.
 * Multi Platform
 * Shown Their Work: As stated before, the game sports some impressively realistic commentary, which is a refresher from other sports games where repetitive commentary lines plague them.
 * Sports Game