The Hot Hand

Turmell’s innate talent revealed itself in 1981 with the very first game he made. Anyone who played his shoot-’em-up called Sneakers could see it was the work of someone who knew precisely what he was doing, even if what he was supposed to be doing was studying algebra. Turmell shipped a copy of Sneakers using a new service called Federal Express to the company that made his favorite games, Sirius Software, not knowing if he would ever hear back. His phone rang a few days later. Sirius wanted to buy his game and guarantee him monthly royalty checks of $10,000. “My dad opened an account, bought some mutual funds, and poured some money in,” he says. “I had no idea what was happening.” When the most respected Apple II magazine named Sneakers one of its most popular releases of the year, the critical and surprising commercial success of Turmell’s first game only deepened his resolve. Sirius called again to dangle his dream job: a full-time position making video games. There was no longer any need for school. He moved to California to be with his people.

His reputation on the West Coast preceded him. One of the many people who knew Mark Turmell’s name before they met him was the guy who happened to be responsible for his computer. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak’s company had recently gone public and made him a millionaire, and he decided to celebrate by asking his girlfriend to marry him. Wozniak had recently earned his pilot’s license and purchased a single-engine plane, and he thought it would be fun to fly down the coast to San Diego to visit her uncle, a jeweler who could help design their rings. But they never made it there. His plane crashed upon takeoff into the parking lot of a nearby skating rink. Wozniak was badly injured and spent the next few months battling a type of amnesia that prevented him from making new memories. He remembered everything that happened before he reached for the throttle and nothing in the five weeks afterward. Only later did he learn that he spent a significant chunk of that time playing Apple II games. When he recovered and felt well enough to finally get married, Wozniak sent a wedding invitation to the man who made one of his favorite Apple II games, a nifty little thing called Sneakers. It was the least he could do. Mark Turmell had restored his sanity.

Turmell was something of a celebrity at Wozniak’s wedding. At one point he was approached by another young geek.

“Mark Turmell!” he said. “We love your games.”

This stranger eventually got around to introducing himself. He had recently founded a software company near Seattle, and he wanted Turmell to come work for him. Would he be interested? “No, man!” Turmell said. He was too busy making video games.

And that was how Mark Turmell blew off Bill Gates. But only in retrospect was turning down the opportunity to be one of the first employees at Microsoft an unfortunate decision. The early 1980s were a great time to be the same brand of geeky as Turmell. He drove a red Porsche convertible. He was profiled in People magazine. He received hundreds of fan letters and even some marriage proposals in the mail. Teenage boys wanted to be Mark Turmell. Teenage girls wanted to be with Mark Turmell. By virtue of his talent making video games, he’d turned himself into a bona fide celebrity. He could have worked anywhere he wanted.

The only place anyone who could’ve worked anywhere he would’ve wanted to work was Midway. Midway’s office was the industry’s epicenter of innovation. The companies that worked together in this one Chicago building were responsible for creating or distributing a staggering number of iconic video games: Ms. Pac-Man, Mortal Kombat, Galaga, and so many others that it would be silly to keep listing them because that would mean omitting even more. It’s safe to assume that any American arcade game that gobbled your quarters was almost certainly launched by the Midway crew—which soon included the guy who had invented Sneakers.

Turmell was so highly valued at Midway that when the company president would walk into his cramped office to ask when his latest game might be done, “I would be able to literally say, ‘It’ll be done when it’s done. And get out of my office,’” Turmell recalls. He could tell his boss to scram because they both understood the harsh reality of their business: Midway sold games to distributors, the distributors sold games to arcades, and the arcades told the distributors how a game was performing. The distributors bought truckloads of that game from Midway if and only if that game was performing well. “There was no amount of marketing, hype, or promotion that could inflect sales,” Turmell says. “It was all about cashbox. Nothing else mattered. It had to make cash.” And Turmell’s gift was for making games that made cash.

The creation of games at Midway followed a meticulous process. Before they were ready to be unleashed on people who would hopefully feed trillions of quarters into the machines, Midway’s employees spent hours and hours playing and tweaking these games. Only when Turmell’s games had been poked and prodded and probed every which way did they make it to the world outside the Midway office. They didn’t travel very far. Their next stop was one of the experimental arcades nearby.

“You don’t know what you have in terms of a success or failure until you get it in front of a test audience,” Turmell says. “So we’d go sit there and watch.”

Mark Turmell was an expert at sitting there and watching. He’d been sitting there and watching for so long that he could predict within a matter of minutes whether one of his games would be a hit. When he visited Midway’s favorite test arcade one night in 1992, he realized that his latest creation was going to be the biggest hit of his career. The name of this game was NBA Jam.

2.

There is nowhere the world’s most talented basketball players would rather come to work than Madison Square Garden. This arena smack in the middle of New York City has been the site of so many divine individual performances over the years that it’s amazing it also happens to be the home court of the moribund New York Knicks. But for all those majestic feats in the long history of the game’s most hallowed arena, there were three games that stood apart. Three players had returned to the visitors’ locker room having scored the most points in the arena’s history: Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. The list of people who had conquered the Garden was an exclusive club of all-time NBA greats.

There was nothing to suggest that Wardell Stephen Curry would join their ranks when he walked into the Garden on February 27, 2013, as the evening commuters flooded Penn Station below. But it was strangely appropriate that no one was expecting much from Curry that night. He’d been very good at proving people very wrong for his entire life. Curry went to a small private high school and wasn’t supposed to be a big-time college player. When he became a big-time college player, he wasn’t supposed to be a good NBA player. When he became a good NBA player, he wasn’t supposed to be a great NBA player. He was baby-faced, unassuming, and about as intimidating as a cockapoo.

But there was one thing that Stephen Curry could do better than anybody who had come before him: shoot the basketball. While everyone in the NBA could shoot, no one in the NBA could shoot like him. The most dominant players had always been the ones who made extraordinary things look ordinary. Stephen Curry’s genius was making ordinary things look extraordinary.

As he trudged into the Garden that night, Curry was approaching an inflection point in his career. His bum ankles had sidelined him for most of the previous season, and his potential to change the game was still hiding somewhere inside of him. If you think of being a professional basketball player as a normal day job, which in many ways it is and in many more ways it is not, then Curry was similar to most twenty-four-year-olds who’d held the same job at the same company since college. His bosses had given him more responsibilities, and his annual raises and yearly bonuses paid him enough that he didn’t bother looking around for better opportunities. In the alternate universe where he sat behind a desk every day, Curry’s performance reviews would’ve been excellent, his recommendations for business school would’ve been glowing, and his adoring colleagues would’ve invited him to their weddings. He would’ve been the ideal corporate employee: highly competent, quietly confident, and extremely useful on the company softball team. He had come closer to working that sort of job than you might think.

When Curry was a college sophomore, his parents bumped into an NBA general manager after one of his games. His mother couldn’t help but indulge her curiosity. “Do you think Steph can make it in the NBA?” Sonya Curry asked. There was a reason that not even she could be sure that his future was in basketball. For all the genetic and socioeconomic advantages he’d inherited as the son of an NBA player, there was one severe disadvantage that he couldn’t overcome. “On every team he ever played on,” says Dell Curry, his father, “he was the smallest guy.”

The only way he could hold his own with bigger and better players, especially as they got even bigger and even better, was by changing the way he shot the basketball. This put Stephen Curry in a deeply ironic predicament. His shot had been his one great skill ever since he’d toyed around with the Fisher-Price baskets in his childhood home. But now someone was telling him that it wasn’t good enough. He listened only because that person was his father.

Dell Curry knew that Stephen’s strength would soon be his weakness. He could see that his son’s low release point meant that anyone taller than him would be able to block his shot. He could also see that everyone was taller than him. Dell took the drastic measure of making Stephen take a break from competitive basketball for a while. In the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school, when other kids his age were juggling college scholarship offers, Stephen was busy teaching himself to shoot again. By lifting the ball above his head and releasing as he ascended, he was essentially making himself taller. But his learning curve was steep. He took hundreds of shots every day on the court outside his family’s stucco two-car garage, where crepe myrtle trees prevented the ball from bouncing into the pool when he missed, and he missed so often that he began to hate shooting. It was a brutal summer that made him miserable. He almost quit basketball altogether.

But that painful summer produced a weapon that Curry would have for the rest of his life. In that summer he became the best shooter the sport of basketball had ever seen. It was that summer that made him a college star and then an NBA player.

He was still in for another rude awakening once he got to the pros. He was good. He wasn’t great. When the Warriors played the Knicks in his rookie season, his first time in the Garden as an NBA player, Curry found himself planted firmly on the bench. He could have resigned himself to the fact that he would never be valued properly by the NBA and nobody would have blamed him.

Curry’s weapon was the slingshot of basketball. There was an obvious reward for anyone who could wield it: his shots were worth three points instead of two. And not since a biblical shepherd boy named David had the slingshot been used to such a devastating effect. But the slingshot wasn’t a bazooka. He still had to be selective about when he shot, where he shot, and why he shot. He couldn’t shoot too early in the twenty-four-second shot clock. He couldn’t shoot too far behind the three-point line. And he couldn’t shoot too much. That restriction was the one constant of his entire career until that February night in Madison Square Garden. Stephen Curry couldn’t shoot as much as it made sense for him to shoot.

But what if he could?

3.

There is no getting around it. NBA Jam was a spectacularly bizarre rendition of basketball. The characters had cartoonish heads that were bigger than their entire bodies. It was perfectly legal for them to shove, elbow, or pummel the players on the other team. They swished full-court shots and somersaulted above the basket for breathtaking slam dunks. Mark Turmell’s creation defied the conventions of sports games because it wasn’t supposed to be like existing sports games. His inspiration was a sci-fi game called Primal Rage. This video game about basketball was modeled after dinosaurs fighting in a postapocalyptic society.

But from the very beginning, Turmell thought NBA Jam had the potential to be a big hit. His careful process for making video games started with turning his colleagues at Midway into guinea pigs, and his test subjects played his games so often they soon needed incentives to keep playing. So they bet. They became compulsive gamblers when they beta tested his games. They usually wagered candy bars. But when it was time for them to troubleshoot NBA Jam, their showdowns were unusually competitive. The developers chose a different form of currency for their bets: cold, hard cash. That was interesting, Turmell thought.

It wasn’t long after NBA Jam migrated to a local arcade called Dennis’ Place for Games that Turmell started hearing that something was wrong with his new game. The NBA Jam machine was malfunctioning. Turmell went to the arcade to check for himself. He quickly deduced the problem. It was true that the machine couldn’t take any more quarters, but not because the machine was broken. It was because the coin boxes were stuffed. The kids in Dennis’ Place for Games were feeding quarters into NBA Jam at such a furious pace that employees had to empty the machine every hour so they could keep playing. That was even more interesting, Turmell thought.

The usage statistics as they continued testing the game were off the charts. Every shred of data suggested that NBA Jam would be a sensation unlike any video game ever created. But Midway’s executives didn’t believe the data at first. “We thought the numbers that came back were screwy,” said Neil Nicastro, the president of Midway at its peak. “We hadn’t yet tested anything that had made that much money.”

For a game to be successful in the summer of 1993, it had to earn about $600 per week in the test arcade. There was a thin line between groundbreaking hit and epic flop. If a game made $150, it was a bust. If a game made $1,500, it was a smash. NBA Jam made $2,468 in a week when no other game at Dennis’ earned more than $750. That number was so ludicrous that Turmell saved a physical copy of the earning report as proof. “Do the math,” he says. “It takes ten minutes to play a game. The arcade’s open for twelve hours. For that kind of revenue, you have to be playing almost nonstop every day.”

The commotion inside Dennis’ Place for Games was a preview of the delirium that would infect arcades across the country. Midway needed to sell about two thousand machines to make the game financially worthwhile, and NBA Jam would have blown away expectations with ten thousand sales. NBA Jam wound up selling more than twenty thousand machines. The mania surrounding Turmell’s game was neatly encapsulated by a nasty letter that one out-of-stock distributor wrote to Midway. “Your programmers have created a monster,” he wrote.

NBA Jam was too successful. It turned out to be one of the most lucrative video games ever made. In less than a year, NBA Jam earned $1 billion in quarters.

But why?

There was nothing obvious about NBA Jam’s success. The suits who had been skeptical of the numbers never could have imagined that even NBA players would play NBA Jam. It wasn’t because of the abnormal body types or the acrobatic dunks or even because it felt rebellious and a little bit cool to exhibit such a blatant disregard for the rules of basketball. They became obsessed with NBA Jam because of a subtle quirk in the game mechanics.

It was critical to Mark Turmell that each of his games included a goal other than beating the computer. There had to be an elevated state of ability that would compel people to keep stuffing coins into the cashbox. But the inherent problem with sports games was that they were difficult to gamify. They were already games. It was satisfying to win a basketball game, but so what? It wasn’t a superpower. Turmell was noodling on this problem one day when he went to Burger King for lunch. He ordered a chicken sandwich with cheese and only cheese. Turmell was always working, even when he was at lunch, and he mentioned his dilemma to another Midway developer named Jamie Rivett. “We need some kind of mode,” Turmell said.

By the time Turmell’s chicken sandwich with cheese was ready, Rivett had suggested an idea they both knew immediately was brilliant: on-fire mode. They sketched out the details over lunch, walked back to the Midway office, and implemented on-fire mode that afternoon. If a player made two shots in a row, they decided, then he would be heating up. If he made three shots in a row, then he would almost certainly make his next shot. It didn’t matter what kind of shot it was. The ball would burst into flames. He would be on fire!

This is why Mark Turmell’s arcade game was so addicting. Our minds are programmed to search for patterns. He simply programmed a tendency of the human brain that already existed into NBA Jam. We see one, two, three shots in a row and intuitively seek out the fourth. We crave order in chaos. Turmell made sure there was a reward for that behavior. He turned the hot hand into NBA Jam’s superpower.

Not long after that working lunch at Burger King, Turmell offered the voice-over role for his game to a local comedian named Tim Kitzrow. The script for the gig was two pages. It was exactly the sort of job that no one should have known about. But the test audiences in Dennis’ Place for Games became infatuated with Kitzrow’s voice. They kept feeding quarters into the NBA Jam machines because they wanted to hear a few of the game’s catchphrases.

“Boomshakalaka!”

“He’s heating up!”

And what they really wanted Kitzrow to bellow were the three words that came next.

“He’s on fire!”

Mark Turmell could relate. When he was the age of those kids in the arcade, he had a soft spot for NBA players who caught fire, the ones who made one, two, three shots in a row and everyone in the building knew they were making a fourth. His favorite player was the Detroit Pistons guard Vinnie Johnson, and his nickname was “the Microwave” because he heated up instantly. It wasn’t surprising that Turmell idolized Johnson, given his three childhood loves. The first was playing with computers. The second was playing basketball. But it was his third childhood love that explains why he insisted his basketball explode into a fireball when a player was hot. He would have been captivated by NBA Jam if he hadn’t invented it first.

NBA Jam became unavoidable for boys and girls of a certain age. They played so much that it was as if Mark Turmell had brainwashed a generation of young, impressionable minds into believing the concept of the hot hand. It was systematically drilled into them that anyone who made three shots in a row was almost certainly going to make the fourth. And there was one person who would never be convinced otherwise. This child had an excuse to play NBA Jam because his dad was in the game, and he could even pretend to play as himself since they technically shared a name. But nobody called this kid Wardell Curry.

They called him Steph.

4.

The Golden State Warriors were late. There were three buses leaving for Madison Square Garden for their game against the New York Knicks, and Stephen Curry was supposed to be on the second bus. He was always on the second bus. But on this night, for some reason he can’t remember, Curry took the third bus. “Which I never do,” he tells me a few years later. He regretted the decision almost immediately. The third bus took an illegal turn out of the hotel, and the Warriors were pulled over by unsuspecting traffic cops.

When the bus finally chugged into the bowels of the arena, the players were tired and cranky, and this wasn’t entirely the bus driver’s fault. The night before had been a rough one for the Warriors. They had lost to the Indiana Pacers in a game that was spoiled by a nasty brawl. They boarded a plane, landed at some ungodly hour, and woke to the news that one of their teammates had been suspended and Curry had been fined for their roles in the fight.

So it had been a lousy day even before Curry found himself stuck on the third bus, dealing with the New York Police Department. But there was nothing he could do about that now. It was time for him to begin his warm-up routine in the Garden. This would be his escape. He started close to the basket, and he kept moving farther and farther back. Finally, as the fans took their seats, he was shooting from several feet behind the three-point line, the strip of paint on every court that was about to redefine the way the game was played.

The three-point line had been introduced to the NBA decades earlier because the biggest people in basketball were too dominant. The sport had become unfair. It discriminated against players like Curry on the basis of their height. With fans tuning out and the game desperate for a jolt, the most democratic solution the NBA could muster was simple math. They slapped a line on the court twenty-three feet, nine inches from the hoop for no reason other than it seemed like the right distance. Any shot within this line would be worth two points. Any shot behind this line would be worth three points.

There is another way of thinking about this radical shift in how basketball was played. The people responsible for the overall health of the NBA were tweaking the algorithm. The word “algorithm” today brings to mind geeks in front of computer screens writing the code that has come to govern our lives. But really an algorithm is a set of rules for solving a problem. When the NBA had a problem, the NBA rewrote the algorithm. The league changed the rules to make the game more exciting and to give players an incentive to stay behind the three-point line—the first in a series of unconnected events that allowed for the hot hand of Stephen Curry.

But the players didn’t respond to that incentive right away. In the 1979–1980 season, 3 percent of their shots were three-pointers. Only when their curiosity outweighed their suspicion did NBA players begin to recognize the three-point line as something other than a silly gimmick, and the proportion of three-pointers inched higher until it had reached 22 percent of the total shots in a season by the late 2000s. And then something funny happened. After nearly three decades of steady growth, the percentage of three-point attempts held steady for the next five years. It flatlined. NBA teams were behaving as if they had determined basketball’s optimal ratio. The sport had found its equilibrium.

But two things were about to happen that would blow that assumption to bits. The first thing was that Stephen Curry was drafted by a team that he didn’t want to draft him: the Golden State Warriors. They were so putrid and their owner was so reviled that he decided to sell the team not long after Curry fell into his lap. The second thing was that a collection of extremely wealthy people with little experience in basketball paid a record fortune to buy the Warriors. They rebuilt their NBA team around the bold notion that they should ignore every orthodoxy of building an NBA team. The construction process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it could have failed, but the eventual dominance of the Warriors can be traced back to one of the most unusual strategies they embraced. It was the notion that the three-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.

For almost the entire history of basketball, ever since James Naismith slapped a couple of peach baskets on the wall of a gymnasium and created a sport, the most important area of the court had been around those hoops. The best shots in basketball were always the ones closest to the basket. Or at least that’s what people thought. The Warriors weren’t sure anymore. “When you can exploit the three-point line,” their general manager says, “closer is not necessarily better.”