Tennis (Activision)

Tennis

Atari 2600 - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Activision Publisher Activision Published 1981-??-?? Platforms Atari 2600 Genres Action, Single-screen, Sports Themes Sports Multiplayer Simultaneous versus Distribution Commercial

Tennis is a primitive tennis sports video game developed by Alan Miller and published by Activision in 1981 for the Atari 2600.

The game handles the basics of tennis — you're trying to hit the ball over the net in a way that prevents your opponent from returning it, and the scoring is mostly the same — but a lot from the actual sport has been simplified. For example, you can serve anywhere, the ball never goes out of bounds, the ball can't hit the net, etc.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes. Beat games 1 and 3.
Finished	2024-07-12.

I didn't have this game growing up, nor did I play it after I learned about emulation because I assumed I wouldn't be interested in it since I don't care much for tennis. While researching games for my list of winnable Atari 2600 games, I discovered the game had an AI you could play against, so I decided to beat it.

Review

2	4	2	1	3

Best Version: Atari 2600

Good

• The game does provide a pretty fast-paced game of tennis for the Atari that looks a lot better than Video Olympics.
• How and where you hit the ball is pretty easy to determine after playing for a while, so the controls feel pretty good.

Bad

• After your serve, the game only uses the position of the characters to determine if and where the ball will be hit. This means all the player is doing for the majority of the game is just moving around the screen, basically making the game not much more than a glorified version of Pong.
• Defeating the AI is just a matter of returning the ball at an obtuse angle opposite of your opponent's position. Since this is pretty much the only way to score on the AI, you just have to practice maneuvering your character so he's always just barely able to reach the ball, which isn't very enjoyable.
• Because the game uses actual tennis scoring rules where you have to outscore your opponent by a significant margin to win, games between two equally matched players tend to take a long time. This wouldn't be such a problem, but the game is so repetitive it drags on for a long time. And, unlike with real tennis, there isn't any physical motion draining a player's stamina, so you can't rely on that to expedite the game.

Ugly

• The game is media challenged. The graphics are nothing more than stick men, there is no music, and the sound is awful.
• Like so many other Atari games, you see everything the game has to offer in the first minute; everything after that is just honing your skills.
• Setting the difficulty switch to ignore wide angle shots makes for extremely long tiring games against the AI. Even if you play perfectly, the AI can always catch up to your shallow-angle hits, so you have to wait for the AI to fail to return a serve, which it does every 100 swings or so in my estimate.

Media

Box Art

• 

  USA.

Documentation

• 

  Manual.

Videos

Game play - Game 1 - with wide angles.

Game play - Game 3 - no wide angles.

Play Online

Atari 2600

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are no women.
Bechdel test?	Fail	There are no women.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	Race isn't clear.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no clear queer characters.

Credits

Role	Staff
Entire Game	Alan Miller

Links