Starting Five

Full-court basketball. No install, no account, no waiting.

Five on five, real rules, real clock. Or three on three on a street court where you have to clear the ball past the arc before you can score.

Starting Five is a 3D basketball game that runs in a single file. Open it and you're playing — there is no launcher, no patch, no sign-up. If you want to run it from your desktop instead, there's a build for Windows and macOS.

What's in it

Play a game. Full court, five a side, against the computer or a friend on the same machine with two controllers. Quarter length is yours to set, from one minute to twelve.

Win something. An eight-team knockout cup, or a full home-and-away league with play-offs.

Play someone else. Online games, five a side or three a side, with a code you share.

Run a club. A full manager mode — market, cap, draft, scouting, staff, injuries, morale, sponsors. There's a section on it below.

Practice. An empty court, no opponents, no clock. Work on your shot or your footwork for as long as you like.

Built for tournaments

There are no real clubs, no real players, no licensed logos anywhere in this game. Every team and every name is invented.

That is a deliberate choice, and it's the thing that makes Starting Five easy to compete on. Nobody has to ask permission to stream it, record it, put it on a poster or run a paid event on it. Organisers get a basketball game they can build a bracket around without a rights conversation first.

The rest of it points the same way. Matches are arranged with a code you pass to your opponent, five a side or three a side, and a manager league can be run by several people at once. Every game can be recorded and shared as a link, so a disputed call gets reviewed in 3D from any angle and a final can be rewatched by people who weren't in the room. And since you can put your own images on the courtside boards and the floor, the arena carries your event's branding instead of somebody else's.

The manager side

This is not a thin layer on top of the match engine. It's a game in itself.

Take over a club and run it properly: the transfer market, contracts and the salary cap, scouting, the draft, training, your coaching staff, injuries, squad morale, sponsors and the balance sheet. Simulate the matches you don't care about and play the ones you do — you get handed the court, and afterwards you're back in the office with the result already in the table.

Three ways in: manage an existing club, build a franchise from nothing, or start in the fifth division and try to climb to the first. There's a Hall of Fame for the players who made it, and a multiplayer league if you'd rather argue with real general managers than beat the computer.

Things you might not expect

Record a game and send it. Press R and the game stores what happens — not a video, the game. Whoever opens the link plays it back in 3D and can move the camera anywhere: behind the rim, on the baseline, wherever. Five minutes of basketball fits in about four hundred kilobytes.

Make the court yours. Drop your own images onto the courtside LED boards, into the free-throw circles, at centre court, or in the corners of the floor. Any format — they get resized to fit.

Five languages. English, Italian, French, Spanish and German, switchable from the menu.

It looks like basketball. Eighty-nine animations, all of them reachable: step-back jumpers, hook shots, floaters, reverse layups, dunks, defensive slides, and referees who actually signal the call they just made.

Substitutions can be called at any time — the game pauses while you decide, and the change happens at the next dead ball, the way it does in a real game.

Nothing is uploaded unless you ask for it. Careers, tournaments and customisation live on your own machine; the only things that go anywhere are online matches and the recordings you choose to share.

Requirements

The desktop build is available for Windows and MacOS.