Knicks Spurs and the Games of Summer '99

That's the 1999 San Antonio Spurs, flying home from the NBA Finals.

They're pictured returning from their Game 5, 78-77 victory over the New York Knicks, where they clinched their first NBA Championship. The Larry O'Brien trophy is in the bottom right. 

To celebrate, they are doing the most 1999 thing possible: having a StarCraft LAN party!

Apparently, this was a very popular hobby amongst Spurs players. And here's video proof, featuring future Hall of Famer, and arguably the greatest Power Forward of all time, Tim Duncan.

Twenty seven years, and several StarCraft updates later, and we're running it back. That's right, the Spurs are taking on the Knicks in the NBA Finals, tipping off 6/3.

San Antonio is no stranger to winning. Having successfully built around Duncan across two decades of excellence, the Spurs made six Finals appearances from 1999-2014, winning five times. The Knicks, on the other hand, were largely irrelevant throughout the 2000s and 2010s. One of the most celebrated NBA franchises stunk for the best part of twenty years, but they've since turned it around, steamrolling their way through the Eastern Conference to make this year's Finals.

As you know, I'm susceptible to nostalgia, and Knicks Spurs has properly set me off. Back in the day, I watched every game of the '99 Finals, albeit on VCR the next morning, as I wasn't staying up until 4am on a school night. I remember Latrell Sprewell relentlessly attacking the rim, Tim Duncan doing everything right, Alan Houston showing off that smooth jumper of his, and David Robinson mustering up some late-career magic. I also recall Larry Johnson shuffling up the court, struggling to push through back issues that would end his career, Sean Elliot having a nightmare of a series, and a collection of point guards as poor as any I've ever seen in the NBA Finals. To be honest, it was a relatively dire series, a low-scoring and predictable end to a miserable lockout-shortened season, but that won't stop me from reminiscing and getting myself all worked up for part two!

As you would expect, I've been eating up every Knicks Spurs retrospective that has appeared on my social media timelines, including that StarCraft clip. I was delighted to see Duncan, Elliot, Rose and Robinson so engrossed in computer games, and it had me pondering the games that captured my imagination back in the spring and summer of 1999, and trying to recall what exactly I was playing during those NBA Playoffs.

I'm sure that, for many of you, the summer of '99 would've been all about the wait for the Dreamcast, which launched in the US that September. Or perhaps Final Fantasy VIII, which was due out the same day. Not me though. I didn't discover FFVIII until early 2000, and although I was once a Sega die-hard, I was fully out on the Dreamcast, unwilling to forgive Sega for abandoning my beloved Saturn. In fact, I didn't buy one for another ten years, because I'm a stubborn prick.

In the summer of '99, I was all about Metal Gear Solid, and I was playing it during the '99 Playoffs. I grabbed a copy in May, on the cusp of sitting my GCSE exams. Terrible timing, but I was a good student, and was able to balance long sessions of tactical espionage action with Seamus Heaney and Weimar Republic revision. I got a shit tonne of As, thanks to my good brain, and fell in love with MGS, thanks to my good taste.

I was also rinsing the Syphon Filter demo that came with issue 47 of the Official UK PlayStation Magazine. That was the July issue, so I'd have had it in June, smack-bang in the middle of the Finals. I was tasing terrorists until they ignited, running Gabe through sheets of glass, and generally revelling in the chaos. I would get the full game that Christmas, and would go on to greatly enjoy both PS1 sequels, especially part two.

I celebrated my sixteenth birthday during the '99 Finals; the one game I know for sure I received that day was The Rise of Rome expansion for Age of Empires. It came with an AoE branded mouse mat which I used well into the 2010s. Unlike the Spurs, I wasn't partaking in PC multiplayer, preferring to play on my lonesome. I wouldn't have even known what a LAN party was back then, and wouldn't have listened if you'd tried to explain it to me, because I was 16 and knew everything. Instead of playing with other humans, I poured hundreds of hours into the single player campaigns and map creation, bringing the great battles and locations of antiquity to life. I was a pretty cool kid.

Metal Gear Solid, Syphon Filer and Age of Empires - those are the games that were capturing my imagination the last time the Spurs and Knicks met in the NBA Finals. This time around, it'll be Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem and UFO 50 keeping me occupied whenever the basketball isn't on. Perhaps one day I'll be reminiscing about them in a blog post about the convergence of my interests and another Knicks Spurs showdown?

Anyway, Knicks in 7. Can't wait!