BOOM SHAKA LAKA.

That’s one of the most famous noises in video game history and now, thanks to this brilliant piece from Sports Illustrated, we know about the incubation of how the sounds in the game came to be. The piece tells the oral history of the lifespan of the game, but the part that always did and always will catch our attention is the soundboard.

Tim Kitzrow was the man who voiced the part, and he went on to do several other games including NFL Blitz, NHL Hitz and MLB Slugfest.

Kitzrow was a Second City improv performer before he got pulled into this industry, but we’ll let you read how the partnership began from the team themselves. It all started after he had done some voice overs for pinball games.

“Mark Turmell (Midway Developer): Tim had done some voice-overs for a couple of pinball games and he was a friend of the sound department.

Tim Kitzrow: It was a $50-an-hour nonunion gig, and when you’re young and waiting tables, that’s great money. I thought: I’ll make two hundred bucks and be on my way.

Jonathan Key (Midway Developer): I watched [real] games and listened to people announce, and I put together 95% of the Jam script. I spent at least a month doing that.

TK: It’s funny how small the script was. There were literally two pieces of paper with all the lines. I could rattle off all the classics for you in less than 30 seconds.

JK: Boomshakalaka—[Kitzrow’s line on particularly gnarly dunks]—I put that in the script at the suggestion of John Carlton.

John Carlton (Midway Developer): That’s my claim to fame. I’d been going through a funk phase, listening to a lot of bands from the ’70s, including Sly & the Family Stone. I’d just listened to “I Want To Take You Higher.” They actually say “boo-laka-laka-laka” in the song—I just misquoted it.

JK: Mark Turmell wanted a phrase for blocking the ball: “Get that s--- out of here!” Of course, that wasn’t gonna fly with the NBA. I recorded it, though, and all that stuff went into a subfolder of rejected lines—“he’s got him by the balls” and stuff like that.”

It’s amazing to think that our video game lives could have been totally different if not for that producer misquoting that song. Boom shaka laka almost never was.