Not even the NBA 2K developers can keep up with Stephen Curry

We've never seen anyone shoot like Stephen Curry, and that's now a problem for more than his opponents.

The makers of the NBA 2K video game series are having a heck of a time balancing what's been an ongoing battle against "3-point cheese" — a user's annoying but effective reliance on long-distance attempts to swing games — with the reality that Curry is doing exactly that in real life, according to Forbes Magazine.

NBA 2K gameplay director Mike Wang told the magazine his team has even developed formulas to discourage this practice, making it more difficult for a gamer to attempt too many or too difficult 3's.

Except, Curry seemingly can neither take too many 3-pointers or attempt too difficult a trey. Exhibit A:

A player putting up "video-game numbers" is a cliche all too common in the basketball vernacular. Except, with Curry, that's actually an understatement. When he dropped 51 points and finished 11-of-15 from 3-point range against the Wizards earlier this month, ESPN Stats & Information asked NBA 2K to run 50 simulations, and the results came in well short of his 29.8 points and 4.7 successful 3-pointers per game.

Curry made an NBA-record 286 long-distance tries last season — his third straight year leading the league in that category — and he's on pace to eclipse that mark by more than 100 this April. Despite attempting 10.8 shots from beyond the arc each game, including some from 30-plus feet and others with a near-impossible level of difficulty, Curry's 45.5 percent success rate ranks third in the league, which is downright ridiculous.

So, the NBA 2K team finds itself in a quandary, unlocking that "3-point cheese" they spent so long game-planning against solely for Chef Curry, potentially swaying the game in Golden State's favor.

 

Per Forbes:

“To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,” says Wang. “He’s a ‘rule breaker’ when it comes to jump shooting … he becomes a problem in the video game world where we’ve been trying to train our gamers [to know] that certain types of shots should be rewarded versus others.

[...]

“We’re going to have to invest even more time in future iterations to really let Steph be Steph in future versions of NBA 2K.”

The five most unstoppable video game characters of my lifetime were probably fictional Arizona Diamondbacks slugger Mark Meenahan from MLB '98, Saul from Team USA in Little League Baseball, Bo Jackson from Tecmo Bowl, Jeremy Roenick from NHL '94 and Tom Chambers from Lakers vs. Celtics.

Somehow, real-life Curry is better than all of them. The reigning NBA MVP is a cheat code unlocked.