SAN FRANCISCO—With every year of the Game Developers Conference, there comes a rash of panels. This being a developer- and coder-centric event, they focus largely on niche game-design topics like rendering techniques, procedural generation, and art pipelines. That's all informative and thorough, well and good, but one animator's treasure can be another programmer's trash. For nerdy panels that have something to offer everyone, we look to GDC's classic postmortems: the stories of long-ago games from the designers who led the projects and still remember a lot from those '70s, '80s, and (now) early '90s projects. This year's two best GDC postmortems landed firmly in the early '90s, with one of the games in focus, NBA Jam, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.