The original test version of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition featured more secret characters, including an Elvis Presley character named "Elviscious", a gorilla with bull horns named Kongo, the Grim Reaper, another unspecified Elvis character, and most notably some guest characters from the Mortal Kombat series: Raiden, Reptile, and Sub-Zero. However, all of these characters were removed before the game's release at the request of the NBA.

The Sega Saturn and PlayStation ports of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition feature no credits. Decades later, interviews with Iguana Entertainment employees confirmed that these ports were mostly co-developed by Darren Tunnicliff and Chris Kirby respectively at the studio's UK branch. The two ports shared much of the same C code translated from the arcade version's assembly code, despite being released on competing hardware.