In these modern times when soccer titles are two (or one and a half really), basketball has been reduced to what 2K takes every year, and the rest of the sports depend on the skins and the change of year of EA It is incredible to think that the 90’s were not like that but not at all.
Soccer video games there were a dozen: FIFA, International Superstar Soccer, Champions World Class Soccer, Pele, Striker, World Championship Soccer, Tecmo World Cup.
Basketball videogames were also several, with the NBA Live, NBA Jam, Pat Riley Basketball, Bulls vs Blazers and the NBA Playoffs, NBA All Star Challenge… there was even one called Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball and it is exactly what you can imagine. The son of his good mother that was Bill.
Baseball, American football, ice hockey, golf, boxing, all popular sports especially in the US were represented from decent to excessive.
TENNIS
And of course, tennis was no exception. The Yankees were not going to miss out on exploiting the friendly rivalry between two Americans that dominated men’s courts at that time. I am speaking of course about Pete Sampras and André Agassi. In the 90’s the top ten of the ATP had four Americans. The two named (who were 1 and 2) were joined by Jim Courier, number 1 in 1992, and Michael Chang.
But before that, let’s take a brief tour of the history of tennis titles. It is quite correct to say that the “Pong“Is its most venerable predecessor although its name logically refers to” Ping Pong “which is neither more nor less than” table tennis “. When it comes to gameplay, the comparison makes sense.
However, for the millennial (old) gamer and the generation X gamer, the first tennis fixture would surely have been the simply named “TENNIS”From NES / Family Game. That famous video game was one of the 17 originals from FAMICOM when it came out and it was really very successful. Although it is true that by no standard acting is “playable”, for the time it was almost revolutionary since it had double modes and several levels of difficulty. The “TENNIS”Was one of those that came in the 7 in 1 cartridge that I named them several times accompanied by other classic video games such as Super Mario, Hogan’s Alley, Duck Hunt, Pac Man, F1, and Sky Destroyer. If analyzed in detail, the genres were very well distributed, especially if the Family was acquired with the pistol.
In the 16-bit era, a dozen tennis titles appeared either licensing players (Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, Jimmy Connors, Jennifer Capriati) or emulating the circuit.
For me there were two video games that defined that era and shaped those that would come later. The first is not the goal of this review and was the title of EA Sports: IMG International Tour Tennis. As would be a constant throughout history, the delivery of the High Score developer, published by Electronic Arts, would seek an experience closer to simulation and an integral environment with its other sports games. The interface was very similar to that of the FIFA for instance.
Let’s draw a historical line and say that IMG was the Top Spin of the generation.
And if there was a Top Spin, there was a Virtua Tennis that it was totally arcane. And that is our file to review.
ATP Tour
I’m going to make another hateful statement if you’ll allow me. I am not very clear why at home we were fans of ATP Tour. It is true, the 90’s for Argentina, at least in tennis, meant little more than Gaby Sabatini who, in the end, would retire super young in 1996 at just 26 years old with an illustrious career and a friendly rivalry with the number one , Steffi Graf.
However, in that (infamous) decade, paddle tennis, a sport similar to tennis but without representation on the small screen of any kind, had become enormously popular. And that is why many of us enjoyed tennis video games. In a curious way, paddle tennis was a sport (in life I say) more accessible than tennis. Paddle tennis rackets were cheaper than rackets, and the rent for the paddle courts was a fraction of that of the tennis courts. I don’t know if they still are, but I sense it.
Coming back to the topic, I suspect that’s why we enjoyed tennis cartridges.
The ATP Tour I rented it for the first time in mid to late 1995 and both my brother and I were addicted. The system of creating a player and advancing through the rankings until you compete with the eight legends while we do the real circuit of 1995 with its 32 main players in order. The different types of shots (two front and two back to choose), the types of court (cement, clay, grass, folder) the doubles, the enormous possibilities with the difficulty dial and game speed.
It was a very malleable and adaptable title to our abilities and we rented it so much that I ended up buying it because it ended up being much cheaper in the long term.
And the battles began. Given that my brother was in his last years of industrialization and I was only in elementary school, my practice possibilities were more flexible than he had. However, he defended himself very well in the handling of Pete Sampras whose greatest virtue was having a cannon in his right arm. In my case, I used to choose Michael Chang who had the quality of being a tremendous ball retriever.
It is not surprising because it is what most entertains me in almost every sports video game, but I enjoyed more when we shared doubles. I was never a big fan of the competition. My greatest enjoyment is found in the cooperation and combination of virtues. In that sense when we did doubles against the PC, my brother was an aggressive net tennis player (like Sampras) and I was an effective long distance runner with Michael Chang running the line.
He said that IMG was the “simulator” versus this title that is more characterized as an arcade. However (and you will see it in the video at the end), it was not entirely easy to master the fall of the ball. Modern arcade video games such as Virtua Tennis accustomed us to a rather wide hitbox in which the racket stroke was executed with a good margin of success, not being well positioned. The ATP Tour is halfway there. Once the square around the tennis player is mastered where the blow COMES OUT, the video game becomes a frenzied and super entertaining round trip.
The Developer
If I have to get into conspiratorial mode I would say that the existence of ATP Tour It is due to a recycling of assets of the Wimbledon 2, sequel to the original (Game Gear and Master System) that was going to come out for Genesis and finally only had a Master System release. The title even had an advertisement for SEGA’s 16-bit console, but for unknown reasons, it was removed. The graphic similarities between the two files make some plausible argument in this regard.
SIMS Co, the company that developed it, is less well known for recreating the Ninja gaiden (originally created by TECMO) for the Master System console.
To his credit he has around thirty titles for SEGA between sports, fishing, and platformers. Mainly it was dedicated to making adaptations for SEGA consoles because for many years it was a subsidiary. In 2004 he became independent and today he could be part of the yakuza as far as he knows because no other project is known to them.
I repeat myself, but in 2021, where sports video games are reduced to some solitary saga, and many sports have a null or mediocre representation, the time when we had dozens of titles to choose from that adapted to our taste or ability is strange.
It is not the only thing that causes nostalgia of course.
The couch co-op with loved ones may cloud the memory.
ATP Tour Championship Tennis
We remember a great SEGA Genesis video game and probably one of the two best tennis games of the many that the 16-bit console received