Seth Rogen and James Franco sparked an international incident in 2014 when they produced The Interview, a fictional story about Kim Jong Un that resulted in North Korea hacking Sony Pictures! Further cementing Jams inimitable status in contemporary pop culture, Rogen and Franco told the LA Times and Rolling Stone, NBA Jam helped inspire the film:
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's office on the Sony Pictures lot is a lot like you might imagine it to be. A glass marijuana pipe sits on the desk beside Rogen's computer along with an ashtray filled with the butts of half a dozen joints. An arsenal of Nerf guns lines a shelf along one wall.
On a mid-November afternoon, the sound of yelling could be heard from the next room, where employees of Rogen and Goldberg's production company were playing the video game "NBA Jam," to which a great deal of time has been devoted lately. "If our next movie sucks, it'll be because of that," Goldberg said, deadpan.