The game
You run a basketball club. You draft, you trade, you make the payroll work, you pick your starting five — and then you sit in the stands and watch the team you built play the game. Thirty clubs, an eighty-two game season, playoffs, and a front office that remembers everything you did to get there.
Every management screen is one text program on one blue display, the way these games looked when they ran on a DOS machine in 1989. No menus sliding over menus. Numbers, in columns, that you learn to read at a glance.
Two leagues
Start a dynasty in ARCADE and you get an invented league with its own thirty clubs, its own stars and its own history, which becomes yours the longer you play it. Start one in PRO mode and you get the real shape of the modern game instead. A dynasty is one or the other from the first day to the last, and they keep separate records.
Historical scenarios
Drop into a season already under way with somebody else’s problem to solve. Chase seventy-three wins. Hold a defense together in Detroit. Take Boston at its height and keep it there. Survive a lockout, or an expansion club’s first miserable winter. Each one starts you mid-stride with a job and a deadline, and you find out quickly whether the thing that actually happened was luck or management.
Arcade unlocks
Sixteen of them, earned by playing rather than bought. Some are small jokes — a commentator who says the thing he should not have said. Some bend the game hard: a payroll with no bottom, players who never get hurt, a draft class stacked with talent, a squad that stops ageing. Two of them rewrite the league’s whole clock — one keeps your players young forever while the drafts roll on, the other freezes the population at one generation and lets every man in it climb as far as he can go.
You keep them once you have them, across every dynasty you start.
Watching
Games are not a results screen. The arena fills, the crowd reacts to what actually happens on the floor, two announcers call it, and the cheerleaders come out at the half. You can watch every possession or skip to the final and the result is identical either way — the game is simulated before the first tip, so nothing you do while watching can change it.
Download on the App Store
iPhone · iOS 17 or later · $4.99
Support
Write to us with a bug, a crash, a save that will not load, or anything the game does that it should not. Tell us your iPhone model, your iOS version and what you were doing when it happened.
we@makeawesome.com
Privacy
Five on Five collects nothing. There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party SDKs. The app makes no network requests of any kind, so there is no server for your information to reach and nothing for us to see.
Some things are kept on your iPhone so the game can carry on where you left it. They stay on the device, they are never transmitted, and we cannot read them:
- Your save files, one per franchise slot.
- Settings: the display theme, the playback speed, what a bulk simulation stops for, and the music player’s volume and track ticks.
- Which explanatory cards you have already seen, and which arcade unlocks you have earned.
- The date a save file was last written, shown beside the slot on SAVE FILES so you can tell which dynasty you played last.
Deleting the app removes all of it. Nothing survives anywhere else, because there is nowhere else.
Because the app collects no data, it collects none from children either, and it shows no advertising to anyone.
If this ever changes, this page changes first, and the date below changes with it. Questions about any of it go to the same address as everything else: we@makeawesome.com