‘Boomshakalaka’: NBA Jam’s iconic announcer was paid $800 to voice the game, which reportedly made over $1 billion
Tim Kitzrow says he “wasn’t savvy enough to know the business” at the time
The voice behind NBA Jam’s iconic commentary says he was paid around $800 for his work on the game, which would go on to make well over $1 billion.
In an interview with The Escapist, Tim Kitzrow – the voice behind such well-known phrases as “boomshakalaka” and “he’s on fire” – explained that at the time he had no way of knowing the game would be a success.
Kitzrow originally started recording voices for pinball games for WMS Industries – which owned pinball companies Bally and Williams, as well as game developer and publisher Midway.
Kitzrow recalled how he started off by recording speech for such pinball tables as Gilligan’s Island, The Twilight Zone, Popeye and Judge Dredd, doing around 10-15 in total.
“You might only do two, three, four hours total on a pinball game,” Kitzrow said. “You’re making a few hundred bucks at best. You’re not going to make a living on that.”
It was this work that led to Kitzrow taking on his most memorable role, as the commentator on Midway’s NBA Jam, which was originally released in arcades before getting home console ports.
However, according to Kitzrow, at the time it was treated as just a normal job, and had he known how successful NBA Jam would have become he might have negotiated for a higher fee.
“It was $50 an hour”, he recalled. “Same as the pinball. I’d go in, do a couple of sessions, maybe 15 hours total, and that was it. I wasn’t smart enough, savvy enough to know the business, to go ‘gee, these games make a lot of money, maybe I should make more than $50 an hour’. I didn’t have an agent at the time.
“When the game came out and I found out it made a billion dollars, that’s when I realised I’d made like $800 and change, maybe something like that,” he said, laughing. “I thought ‘well, I’m probably being underpaid, I might want to raise my rate’.”
The experience didn’t appear to put Kitzrow off voicing future video games – he returned to provide commentary for NBA Jam Tournament Edition, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, NFL Blitz, NBA Showtime, MLB Slugfest and EA‘s NBA Jam reboot.
Kitzrow – who returned to the commentator role for Mutant Football League 2, which comes out of Steam Early Access on December 10 – also recalled that his famous “boomshakalaka” line was an improvised outburst inspired by a 1970s psychedelic soul song.
“A fellow in the studio, John Carlton, was listening to Sly & The Family Stone,” he said. “The song I Want to Take You Higher. The chorus is ‘boom shaka-laka-laka, boom shaka-laka-laka’.” Carlton asked Kitzrow to trying saying that while recording his lines for NBA Jam.
“Now, me being a basketball guy – I watched every game on TV with Marv Albert – I’d never heard anyone say ‘boomshakalaka’,” he explained. “I’m just trying to get the reference, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? This is not a basketball term.’ I said, ‘What is this?’ He goes, ‘Just say boomshakalaka… like that.
“So I go, ‘Boomshakalaka…?’ And that’s kind of it. We turned basically a nonsense phrase into one of the most memorable lines in games.”
