
- 48/100
- Players3 ratings
- 62/100
- Critics1 review

1996 · Acclaim Studios Austin · Arcade · Basketball
College Slam
Timed Nintendo exclusive
Part of the NBA Jam series of basketball games, College Slam allows you to choose from over 40 real college teams and take part in head-to-head games, tournament games, and season-long play. The gameplay is arcade-style two-on-two fast action featuring backboard shattering wild dunks, power-ups and other crazy moves. The game also features fight songs from all the available teams.
- Released
- 31 January 1996
- Platforms
- Game BoyMS-DOSPlayStationSNESSega GenesisSega SaturnWindows
- Genres
- ArcadeBasketballSports
- Developers
- Acclaim Studios Austin
- Publishers
- —
- Modes
- MultiplayerSingle-player
- Perspective
- Side view
- Themes
- Action
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Age ratings
- ESRB E
- Languages
- English
About
College Slam is a college basketball video game published by Acclaim. It was released for the Super NES, Genesis, Game Boy, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and PC. It includes most major Division I colleges, but some, such as the University of Tennessee, the University of Notre Dame, and Mississippi State University (who had just made a run to the Final Four that year), are not included. The player can play tournaments, a season, or a single game. Many gaming critics accused it of being a thinly veiled repackaging of NBA Jam.
Keywords
- basketball
- college
- cartoony
Media
The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
Each team starts out by picking any two out of five players to play with during the game. During timeouts, and at half-time, the player has a choice to make substitutions. When a player makes two baskets in a row, the announcer says "He's heating up", and if he makes three baskets in a row without the other team scoring, he says "He's on fire!", which makes it easier to score.
In the season mode, the player can pick from 44 teams, and then play a 20-game season against quality competition. In the tournament mode, 16 teams compete for a chance to win the national championship. The player also has the ability to edit teams and players. Like NBA Jam before it, the gameplay is goofy, but yet competitive as players can easily make full-court shots off and on and can score 3 in a row to get a flaming ball. Occasionally the college ball players can get struck by lightning as they dunk.
Reception
The two sports reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly gave the PlayStation version scores of 6.0 and 5.5 out of 10. Though they acknowledged that some players would find the college license appealing, they remarked that the game differs too little from NBA Jam to stir real interest, with one of them noting that "Some of the players look exactly the same as they did in Jam except for a color palette change." Tommy Glide and Greasy Gus of GamePro concurred that the game retains the fun of NBA Jam, but that the new alley-oops and player substitutions do not significantly enhance the game, leaving College Slam a pointless clone. Reviewing the Genesis version, a Next Generation critic argued that even the college licensing does nothing for the game, since it does not use real players and in some cases gets the teams' uniform colors wrong. He scored it 2 out of 5 stars.
In 1996, Computer Gaming World declared College Slam the 11th-worst computer game ever released.
Releases by platformdates and regions as published
Editions and related releases
- Ported as
- College Slam
- Built on it
- College Slam
Games like this
81NCAA March Madness 06
2005 · PlayStation 2, Xbox
Basketball · Sports

NCAA March Madness 2004
2003 · PlayStation 2, Xbox
Basketball · Sports
79NCAA Basketball 10
2009 · PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Basketball · Sports
NEC exclusive76TV Sports Basketball
1990 · Amiga, Commodore 64 +2
Basketball · Sports
74NBA 2K20: The Prelude
2019 · Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 +4
Basketball · Sports

Basketball
1980 · Intellivision
Basketball · Sports
69NBA Jam Tournament Edition
1994 · Expanded · Arcade, Atari Jaguar +7
Arcade · Basketball
Nintendo exclusive75Drag x Drive
2025 · Nintendo Switch 2
Basketball · Sports
Collections6 collections
Platform libraries
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System gamesRetail releases
- Game Boy gamesList of games
- Sega Genesis gamesLicensed games
- Sega Saturn gamesGames
- PlayStation (console) games (A–L)Games list (A–L)
Genres
- Basketball gamesGames
Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.