Exclusive: Say hello to Mr Boomshakalaka: Tim Kitzrow on NBA Jam, MFL, and building an Adult-Swim-style sports universe

Tim Kitzrow didn’t set out to become the sound of arcade sports. In his telling, the road to NBA Jam ran through weekend drum gigs, a chance pinball session as Thurston Howell III, and countless hours of improv muscle honed at Second City with the likes of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell. But three decades on, his voice remains welded to gaming’s collective memory – equal parts carnival barker, sports lifer, and comedian who never met a punchline he couldn’t drop with one shot.

What surprised me most in our conversation wasn’t the famous origin story of “Boomshakalaka!” (we’ll get there, be patient, my child), but how fiercely Kitzrow sees himself not just as a voice actor, but as a writer and world-builder. The goal isn’t to reheat old lines; it’s to keep inventing rhythms, characters, and running gags that make an over-the-top sports game feel like a living broadcast.

From pinball booths to broadcast booths

Before the dunks and the fire, there was pinball. Kitzrow’s first break came voicing Mr. Howell on Gilligan’s Island for Williams/Bally, which led to steady work across cabinets like The Twilight Zone, Popeye, and Judge Dredd. It wasn’t glamorous; quick sessions, a few hundred dollars here and there, but it was a laboratory where Kitzrow could experiment.

“As an actor, anything that comes along, you take,” he tells me. “I put together a little weekend band with some friends, and one of the guys had a friend who worked at Williams. He goes, ‘We’re looking for someone to do Mr Howell for Gilligan’s Island. Can’t find anyone.’”

Kitzrow walked in, did the full millionaire routine – “Oh Gilligan, maybe we can bribe Kona (volcano God episode) … oh lovey, where’s my Teddy?” – and that was that. “That got me in the door,” he says. “Then they’d call me any time they were looking for a certain match or voice – The Twilight Zone, Popeye, Judge Dredd, etc. I probably did 10 to 15 titles with them.”

Those early pinball days weren’t glamorous. “You might only do two, three, four hours total on a pinball game,” he says. “You’re making a few hundred bucks at best. You’re not going to make a living on that.” It felt like fun extra cash, “like being in another little band”,  not a career.

Then came 1993 and NBA Jam. There was no grand plan, no agent negotiating points on a game that would eventually rake in headline-grabbing revenue. “It was $50 an hour,” Kitzrow says. “Same as the pinball. I’d go in, do a couple of sessions – maybe 15 hours total – and that was it. I wasn’t smart enough, savvy enough to know the business, to go, ‘Gee, these games make a lot of money, maybe I should make more than $50 an hour.’ I didn’t have an agent at the time.”

The penny didn’t drop until much later. “When the game came out and I found out it made a billion dollars, that’s when I realised I’d made like 800-and-change, maybe something like that,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Well, I’m probably being underpaid. I might want to raise my rate.’”

Even then, the response from the industry was basically: calm down, it’s only a video game. “It was just not thought of like TV or film or commercial work,” he says. “It was, ‘Oh, you’re just voice-over for a video game. We usually do it for free – the guys in-house do it. You’re lucky you’re making money.”

The happy accident that created a legacy

And then there’s that word. “Boomshakalaka” wasn’t a basketball term; it barely qualified as language. “A fellow in the studio, John Carlton, was listening to Sly & The Family Stone,” Kitzrow recalls. “The song I Want to Take You Higher. The chorus is ‘boom shaka-laka-laka, boom shaka-laka-laka’.”

Carlton misheard it, poked his head out of the office, and shouted down the hall: Tell Tim to say ‘Boomshakalaka.”

“He goes, ‘Hey Tim, say boomshakalaka,’” Kitzrow says. “Now, me being a basketball guy – I watched every game on TV with Marv Albert – I’d never heard anyone say ‘boomshakalaka’. I’m just trying to get the reference, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? This is not a basketball term.’ I said, ‘What is this?’ He goes, ‘Just say boomshakalaka… like that.’”

“So I go, ‘Boomshakalaka…?’ And that’s kind of it. We turned basically a nonsense phrase into one of the most memorable lines in games.”

He describes it as “a gift from the gaming gods,” the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle you can’t really manufacture. “I’ve thought sometimes, ‘What’s the next phrase?’” He admits. “But in the end it’s become all about the writing – the memorable lines.”

He points to some of his favourite deep cuts from later work, especially the EA NBA Jam reboot. “You’ll hear stuff like, on a three, ‘Rummaging through my wife’s top drawer, he finds nothing but nylon’ or on a rejection, ‘Like my wife says – not tonight.’ Those crazy little one-liners – that’s what I’m chasing now. The ‘Boomshakalaka’ moment is great, but there’s a lot of basketball poetry in there too.”

Writing the game you hear

The turning point was NFL Blitz and especially MLB SlugFest, where the “voice guy” gradually morphed into the writer. With producer Dan Forden (yes, Mortal Kombat’s Dan Forden), Kitzrow began building full broadcast scaffolding: categories, situations, and pages of scripted lines designed to hit at specific moments, then deliberately broken to pieces  in the booth with trademark improv to keep it alive.

SlugFest even opened with a minute-long improvised cold-open while the game loaded. Dozens of those pieces became fan-favourite Easter eggs: two announcers vamping before first pitch, a sports-radio sketch stitched into a loading bar.

“There’s never been a session where I didn’t go off-page. As a professional, I try to keep on script – I know it’s costly to be in the studio – but sometimes it’s just going off. It’s too much fun,” he grins.

Mutant Football League: cartoon chaos with a beating heart

That ethos now powers Mutant Football League (MFL), Michael Mendheim’s gnarly, post-apocalyptic love letter to arcade football that lets Kitzrow do what the NFL never would. After Blitz’s late-hit era was sanded down, and a 2012 remake arrived cleaner but tamer, MFL became a second golden ticket. If you missed it,  I spoke to Mendheim recently and got him to tell that particular tale.

“When Michael [Mendheim] first approached me in 2016, I had no idea about the original Mutant League Football,” (back in Sega Genesis days) he says. “I’m not a game player, so I’m not aware of many titles. He had to show me what the original was, and I went, ‘Wow, that’s like the same time NBA Jam came out.’”

What Mendheim pitched sounded like a spiritual sequel to the best chaotic bits of Blitz, without a licensing department standing by with scissors. “With the NFL licence, the League, they were taking away all the late hits,” Kitzrow says. “We remade Blitz in 2012 with EA Sports, and it was kind of a watered-down version. So here was a chance to take off all the stops and go, ‘Let’s go all out and make this the craziest, over-the-top football game.’ That’s what appealed to me.”

The post-apocalyptic setting gave him a blank canvas. “There’s this beautiful artwork, this post-apocalyptic world,” he says. “And I got to bring my vision of the voice, the atmosphere. It’s like if you were given a South Park or something, but there’s no script, no characters, no audio. You see it and you know you want to make fun of pop culture, whatever. I was able to create the characters, the voice, the dialogue.”

“I don’t think of it as a video game – I think of it as an action cartoon, a late-night Adult Swim show.”

Crucially, the booth is a cast: Kitzrow juggling three voices (himself, Bricks, and Bricks Jr.), trading banter about the city they’re in, last time’s hotel, and whatever flimflam the script or improv can carry. Presentation matters. You’re not just playing; you’re tuning into a Tim Kitzrow show that’s happening live and direct from his mind.

He’s bullish on MFL’s runway, too. With celebrity teams in the works, licensed music on the table, and a publisher conversation simmering, Kitzrow believes the series is poised to break through if the marketing puzzle can be solved without the AAA money that the likes of Madden spend on lunch.

“In the end, the biggest part of the budget to make a game successful is marketing,” he says. “These days, it’s influencers and content creators. YouTubers can cost up to $500,000. Everybody wants space on the shelf. How do you get that when you don’t have EA money behind you – the 30, 100 million dollar marketing budgets for Madden?”

What he’s convinced of is that, if people see it, MFL will stick. Especially in a world where watching games has become its own pastime.

“Sports games have become spectator sports too,” he says. “People watch people playing on YouTube and Twitch; they don’t want to play. If you just sit and watch Madden or NBA 2K, it’s kind of boring – this zombie kind of real-but-not-real version of what you see on TV. Where’s the interest? Where’s the funny, the excitement?”

“If you just watch Mutant Football League, it’s that crazy late-night Adult Swim cartoon. It’s fun to watch because there’s so much happening. It’s colourful, it’s loud, it’s verbose – so much to entertain you just by taking in the visuals and audio. You don’t have to play.”

He laughs, imagining an alternate universe where home consoles never took off and MFL lived and died in arcades. “If this were a world where it was still all about the arcade and Mutant Football League was on a screen, with all that crazy shit going on, everybody would be crowded around that screen,” he says. “They would not be crowded around a Madden or an NBA 2K screen.”

A gateway drug to sports fandom

One thread we pulled on: how Jam and Blitz turned non-fans into fans. In the ’90s, they were irresistible gateway drugs – five-minute blasts that made the NBA and NFL feel approachable. With the NFL’s global footprint bigger than ever, Kitzrow reckons MFL can be that bridge again for audiences who bounce off sim heaviness. This happened to me. As a British kid, I didn’t give two hoots about the NBA, but I cared deeply about NBA Jam, and still do. I have an OG Jam arcade board behind me as I write this. And I am never giving it up.

Kitzrow has heard that story more times than he can count. “I believe Blitz and Jam were gateway drugs to the NFL and NBA,” he says. “There’s a whole generation of kids who thought, ‘To enjoy a sports game, I have to do these big sim games – NBA 2K, Madden – all these involved things.’ And it’s like, how about you just have fun?”

“You didn’t have to commit two hours of your afternoon,” he says of the arcade era. “You could jump in and have a blast for a few minutes. A lot of fans weren’t necessarily basketball or football fans first – Jam and Blitz made them that.”

With the NFL bigger now in Europe than it’s ever been, he sees MFL playing a similar role now. “For a worldwide audience that doesn’t have the background or commitment to get so involved with Madden – teams, players, all of that – this can be the gateway,” he says. “You can have your Madden and your deep systems, but if you want a fast, furious, off-the-wall football game that still plays like football and makes you laugh? There’s nothing else like it.”

Keeping it human in the age of AI

Kitzrow’s voice has changed since ’93 – deeper, punchier – and he prefers it that way. 

“Some kid, well, 40-year-old kid, came in and said, ‘I do a great impression of you from NBA Jam,’” he says. “He goes, ‘From downtown! Welcome to NBA Jam! Boomshakalaka!’ And I thought, that doesn’t sound anything like me. Then I realised: he had the inflection. But my phrasing, my inflections back then were much different than I remember.”

AI cloning looms, of course. He’s pragmatic (and contractually guarded), but not fatalistic. The “secret sauce,” as he frames it, isn’t timbre; it’s timing, acting, and the ability to conjure a living broadcast from a spreadsheet of edge-cases.

“I’m sure some people with low budgets have used AI for their websites, their advertising,” he says. “You can get, like, a Santa Claus voice for 15 bucks. There goes a lot of work for actors.”

Contractually, he draws hard lines. “I sign things like, ‘You cannot use my voice, cannot be copied and used for AI in future,’” he says. “Hopefully, there are going to have to be lots of guards on that.”

But he doesn’t sound defeated, partly because he doesn’t think the hard part of his job is just “sounding like Tim.”

“Broadcasters respond in real time,” he says. “Actors have to recreate energy for hours and still make it feel like it just happened. You’re in a tedious, long session of hundreds of names, a hundred different inflections, and you’ve got to not feel bored, you’ve got to dial up the energy. That’s acting.”

The Second City kid who chose games and found the bigger stage

Kitzrow is disarmingly reflective about the path not taken. Surrounded by a murderers’ row at Second City (Carell, Colbert, Fey, Farley, Odenkirk), he jokes he didn’t “make it to the big leagues” then catches himself. Games out-grossed Hollywood a long time ago, and his voice has probably reached more people than any hit sitcom ever could.

“I’m the only Second City guy I know who became a prominent writer-performer in games. That’s something I’m really proud of.”

There’s an alternate universe where even that doesn’t happen. Towards the end of the Blitz era, a young Keegan-Michael Key was lined up to take over announcing duties when the NFL licence shifted.

“He came into the studio while I was working on SlugFest,” Kitzrow recalls. “They were going to record for Blitz next. It was literally like, here’s my replacement. So I said, ‘Let’s do some improv.’ We had this bit of me in the booth with him coming in and taking my seat, the awkwardness of it!”

What’s next?

Right now, the focus is on making sure MFL’s next outing lands with the impact he thinks it deserves when it releases next month. There are celebrity collaborators lined up to have their own in-game teams, licensed tracks being discussed, and that all-important marketing plan still being hammered out. Tim tipped me off that rapper Lil’ Flip is one name we are okay to talk about, and there is exciting stuff on the way there.

He and Mendheim joke sometimes that they’re dinosaurs from the ’90s – relics from the arcade era clinging on in a live-service world. But there’s a golden ticket feeling here too, a Willy Wonka partnership where each needs the other.

“Michael and I, we’re kind of symbiotes,” he says. “We need each other. We’re the dinosaurs from that era that understand the arcade style, but now, with all the new technology, we can make the game look bigger, better, stronger, funnier, more creative. We work really well together.”

They’d love to spin MFL’s energy into other sports – their own spiritual successors to Jam, Blitz, SlugFest, and Hitz – and they’d love to do it with enough marketing muscle that people actually hear about them this time.

Because underneath the jokes, Kitzrow is deadly serious about one thing: sports games forgot to be fun for a while, and he’s not done dragging them back.

“If you want the sim experience, it’s out there,” he says. “But if you want the crazy, fast, loud, colourful game where you’re laughing while you play? That’s what we do. That’s what I do. I’m still that guy in the little booth, trying to give you a show.”

Mutant Football League 2 comes out of Early Access on December 10th.

Meanwhile, you can see another of Tim’s latest projects – Legend of Boom on Steam, a fast-paced RTS-Lite Battle game where Tim is the voice of presenter, Flip Rimrod. You can take the boy out of NBA Jam….