For over a year now, it seems like every day has featured a headline for the ages. Between the sudden death of a sports icon, a global pandemic, and a neverending political circus, news has become increasingly synonymous with doom and gloom. This is no such news story.

This is a simple story about two universal mysteries that fatefully converged on a YouTube video created by our friend and special contributor, Seth Wesley, of 4th Take Productions and Aug Bball.

About a week ago, one of Seth’s videos started a viral upswing. The kind of stuff YouTube dreams are made of. The relatively humble production went from 62 views and zero comments on February 16th, to over 40K views and 122 comments at the time this is published. 

The video itself is nothing fancy. It’s a 49-second clip from NBA 2K15 that features a player getting ejected from a game. The scene is mildly hilarious in its Disneyesque depiction of a heated NBA confrontation. “What?! You gonna toss me? You should kick his sorry butt out.”

What’s so mysterious about that? Well, this particular video was uploaded 6 years ago and has received no promotion whatsoever! Not only that, but the YouTube account itself has been inactive for months. So the curious content creator naturally asks the million-dollar question: What the hell made this YouTube video go viral?!

Avid NBA 2K fans may remember the days of player ejections with a mix of nostalgia and dull irritation. For us, it led to a second million-dollar question: What the hell are the developers of the NBA 2K franchise doing?!

The graphics for the 2K21 version of the game are only slightly better than the 2K15 installment. A straw poll of the comment section reveals that many players actually prefer these unpredictable – if not silly – game additions, to the current add-ons that only seem to prod players toward microtransactions.

Also within the comments is a clue to the first mystery: Why the hell is this video going viral?! It seems that most of the commenters found the video through YouTube recommendations. Of course, that raises another question. Why would YouTube all of a sudden recommend a forgotten, six-year-old clip from a videogame that is almost certainly no longer being played? 

We may never know the answer to that question or the other half of this mystery: What the hell the NBA 2K developers doing. And while we can offer theories, we have no sources on this front so your guess is as good as ours. One thing we do know is that the player ejections and cutscenes we found going down this NBA 2K rabbit hole are some of the hilarious and cringeworthy content you will see on the internet today.

If you or someone you know is a Georgia/South Carolina-based gamer that would like to be a special contributor to Zone706, contact us!

If you’d like help streaming your own production, or you simply want to ask Seth why he was losing so badly to the NBA 2K A.I., you can reach him at sethwesley87@gmail.com