Remembering Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City

Michael Jordan is widely-regarded as the greatest basketball player of all-time. ESPN’s ‘The Last Dance’ erased any doubts about that. Legendary is the word that sums up Jordan’s Hall of Fame career. MJ won six NBA championships, six NBA Finals MVP awards, five NBA MVP awards and played in 14 NBA All-Star games.

Jordan has also been very successful off the court. He is the owner of the Charlotte Hornets and the Jordan Brand generated $3.1 billion in sales in Nike’s 2019 fiscal year.

As iconic as Michael Jordan is, his Super Nintendo game Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City can be described as bizarre. This video game was released on November 21, 1994, around four months before MJ came back after playing baseball for around 13 months.

Electronic Arts developed the game and it was published by Ocean. They should be grateful that Jordan returned to the Bulls because it took away the spotlight from how weird their final product was.

The premise of the game is that Michael Jordan had to rescue fellow players who were kidnapped by mad scientist Maximus Cranium before an All-Star charity game.

Jordan has to navigate his way through Chicago, battling goons and strange one-eyed creatures. All of this using an infinite number of Basketballs as weapons to defeat them. But they were not official NBA basketballs, these basketballs could either freeze or blow up enemies. MJ was also able to dunk the basketballs as a second form of an offensive attack in the game.

One of the objectives of this video game was to make Jordan pinpoint keys on the levels, which could be used to unlock doors and free kidnapped players. It was just too much! You can’t make this up!

It might have starred Michael Jordan but this was far from a sports video game. Arming MJ with an arsenal of unique basketballs so he could rescue trapped hoop players clearly jumped the shark.

After the game was released Michael Jordan led the Bulls to their second three-peat and he has appeared in better video games since, including editions of the popular NBA Live and NBA 2K series. This helped people forget about Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City and there’s a reason why ‘The Last Dance’ doesn’t mention this game.

Nintendo Power ranked it as the 7th worst video game in Nintendo history and it didn’t sell well but at least it is unique and slightly entertaining. It is not as bad as Shaq Fu or Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden but that doesn’t say much.