2K Basketball

The 2K Basketball is a series of basketball games, most of which were developed by Visual Concepts and published by Sega. It is a successor to Sega's previous NBA Action series, and is made up of two "sub-series" which share assets and are usually developed in parallel - NBA 2K and College Hoops 2K.

Like many of the 2K sports games of the era, new 2K Basketball games were released annually, both to be improved from a technical perspective, and to reflect changes in the new basketball season. The series began in 1999, being released exclusively for the Sega Dreamcast (as a substitute for Electronic Arts' annual sports games - though EA had brought their games to the Sega Mega Drive and Sega Saturn, they refused to back the Dreamcast), and continued until Sega sold the Visual Concepts studio to Take Two Interactive.

As with other 2K sports games, Sega partnered with ESPN after the release of NBA 2K3, creating ESPN NBA Basketball before returning to the naming scheme with ESPN NBA 2K5. NBA 2K5 along with its college counterpart, ESPN College Hoops 2K5, were the last basketball games Sega were involved in - NBA 2K6, released in 2005, was published by Take Two under the 2K Games brand.

Both NBA 2K and College Hoops 2K continue to exist to this day. 2K Games both develops and publishes the games and is a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive. NBA 2K has since become the most widely recognised basketball video game series, with Electronic Arts struggling to release annual entries to its NBA Live series in recent years.