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Wimbledon is upon us. Starting today, the next two weeks will be a glorious gauntlet of tennis; strawberries, preferably with some cream; Henman Hill (that’s Murray Mound to the heathens); the attendant members of the royal family, stoic and stylishly dressed; and, for those who hold out hope for British tennis, the pasty glory of Kyle Edmund. Why not celebrate the thrills of SW19 with a sojourn through the storied halls of tennis video games. What follows is a list, in no particular order, of the tennis games that have meant the world to me, and there are also some other ones on there as well.
Virtua Tennis: World Tour
My memory of the summer of 2005 is akin to Keats' musings on the French Revolution: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to own a PSP was very heaven. The reason was not, as you might think, down to the likes of WipEout Pure, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Ape Escape, or Pursuit Force; it was down to Virtua Tennis: World Tour. I’ve never quite understood the name ‘Virtua Tennis.’ The first word isn’t a word, of course, but even if you charitably lend it an ‘l,’ the irony only thickens. The dictionary definition of ‘virtual’ is ‘almost or nearly as described.’ Virtua Tennis was neither almost nor nearly tennis; it played as one might imagine tennis would on the moon – low-gravity leaps, circus returns, rallies of attrition, and serves like passing comets. It was lunacy, so to speak. Also, moving your player around the court with that ludicrous little knurled nub on the PSP was a joy.
Smash Court Tennis 3
The coup of Smash Court Tennis 3 had nothing to do with skill; it was mind over body, and it got nasty. The game allowed you to challenge your opponent’s shots. Moreover, it allowed you to challenge your opponent’s shot under any circumstances – even if, say, your shot landed two or three feet inside the line. Needless to say, what ensued was a psychological game that had no less of a vicious spin on it than a nasty crosscourt slice. I would, of course, challenge under all circumstances, stunting my opponent’s momentum and chipping away at their resolve with petty, petty mind games. A good friend of mine was frustrated to the point of quitting once, and, as I look back now, I can safely say, with zero hesitation, that I have no regrets. Smash Court Tennis 3 is a minor and unremarkable tennis game, but it did have this, and so it was brilliant.
Pong
Stark, atmospheric, steeped in gloom, and with a reliance on wiry reflexes and battle-sharpened skill: Pong is the Dark Souls of tennis games.
Wii Sports Tennis
In similar fashion to Virtua Tennis, Wii Sports Tennis wasn’t really anything approaching a simulation of tennis. What it is is a theatre of scrabbling, swiping mayhem, with broken televisions and Wii Remotes strewn across a million living room floors. Due to its casual play and use of motion controls, it appealed more to the light, fun-loving tennis fan. Thus, its genius was to turn anyone who actually wanted to win a match into a version of young John McEnroe, trembling with mid-tantrum fury at play that favoured fun over power and punishment.
Top Spin 4
It’s very difficult, once you’ve had a taste of Top Spin, to play any other tennis game. So rich and rigorous are its mechanics that the tennis-obsessed – those for whom Centre Court is a cathedral – can play comfortably in the knowledge that any sense of the free-spirited and the flukey has been mercilessly wrung from the game in favour of finesse and superior discipline. Top Spin 4 gave me the sensation of being the bad guy; after a time, people didn’t want to play with me anymore because they knew that embarrassment awaited them in straight sets. It was like being king of the playground in the sombre sense that all the other children had been forced to vacate the playground with their heads bent down to the dust. It was glorious.
4D Sports Tennis
The best thing about 4D Sports Tennis, which came out on the PC in 1990, is the first sentence of its Wikipedia page entry: ‘4D Sports Tennis is a 3D Tennis computer game…’ Other than that, it looks like a cruel exercise in granular simulation – the sort that makes one think not of rendering the finer details of a sport in glorious intricacy but in Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge – without two very important things: precision (just take a quick look at this video here and you’ll see that it looks like VR if VR were powered by a panini press) and, of course, fun.
Mario Tennis N64
There are many good Mario Tennis games, but Mario Tennis 64 features Birdo. Birdo has a snout that can fire projectiles at considerable speed (in a sport like Tennis, that could be considered cheating, but Birdo seems to go unscathed by the tournament umpires). It’s also worth noting that Birdo wears quite a fetching bow, which should be considered on an equal footing with Federer’s devastating use of the bandana, as far as fashion is concerned. Moreover, in Mario Tennis 64 Birdo was a speed player, making use of its lizard-esque legs and tail to maintain the sort of agility that would be outrageous were we to see it on Centre Court. In fact, I would argue that, were the situation to arise, Birdo wouldn’t be allowed to take part in Wimbledon, and arguably that should be considered a dark spot in the tournament’s storied history.
