As a certified middle-aged gamer, I’ve done my fair share of writing about sports games of the past in my time with Operation Sports, and I look forward to more of it, as there’s just something special about the games you played as a child, even if they aren’t as flashy or powerful as what’s around today. Older sports games may not have been working with the same processing power or graphical fidelity, but many of the best games still hold up years, or sometimes decades, after their release.
For as much fun as I had playing games like Waverace 64, NFL Blitz, or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 for hours on end after school, there is likely no game that ate up more of my after-school hours than Virtua Tennis. This tennis game was the crown jewel of my Dreamcast game collection, and I was always down for a match or six whenever my brother or friends wanted to take an L. Now more than a quarter-century old, Virtua Tennis is still held up as one of the best tennis games ever made, if not still the best. Here’s why it was so special if you missed out on it.
It Starts With The Controls
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The bells and whistles of a sports game can be important, with side modes and tactical depth key components of some of the greatest sports games around, but at the end of the day, a sports game will live and die by the quality of its gameplay. Accurately replicating a sport in digital form is a challenging task, and many games have failed to do so effectively.
To say that Virtua Tennis nailed its controls would be an understatement. Even today, more than 25 years later, the game feels incredibly smooth to play. When you get your hands on it for the first time, it just feels viscerally correct.
My peak years with the game also came during a brief flirtation with tennis as my primary sport that didn’t quite stick, but which did leave me well placed to be an arrogant little teenager who went, “nah, this is not what it’s like at all.” Virtua Tennis never gave me the chance.
Movement with your player was fluid but responsive. The different shot options all worked effectively and allowed a gamer who learned to mix up their hits to truly throw opponents for a loop, running your opponent all over the court to inevitably set up a killer smash into the open court or a delicate dink to punish an opponent who was hanging too far back. Playing a game of Virtua Tennis made you feel like you understood the game enough to go dominate on the real court, even if trying would have led you to see how much less effectively you struck the ball than the pros in the game.
Minigames That Were Actually Fun
While the in-game tennis was excellent and enjoyable, it was not the only thing that made Virtua Tennis so fun. The game also featured a variety of minigames to play, and the designers understood something fundamental about sports minigames: it’s much more important that they be fun on a screen than practical on an actual court.
While whacking inflated cubes off a court as quickly as possible with your shots, or knocking down bowling pins on the court, may not be what brought Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal to the top of the sport, they did help gamers master their control on the virtual hardcourt, grass, and clay. On top of that, the breezy timeframe and genuinely engaging challenge the minigames presented kept them fun every time.
Even the use of the Dreamcast’s Visual Memory Unit, a quirky addition to the console’s memory cards which featured an LCD screen and Gameboy-style controls, was well-served by Virtua Tennis. Although, indeed, playing a match by watching on the small LCD screen in your controller was not actually bringing anything new to the game, it was also executed well enough that an experienced player could fight their way to a victory without ever once looking up at the actual screen. As a child on the lookout for ways to talk trash with your friends, it was hard to beat 40-Loving someone while you played on a screen with the size and graphical depth of a Nokia brick.
A Career Mode That Took An Arcade Approach
Career modes are standard fare in modern sports games, usually with some level of scripted storytelling and motion capture performances to guide you through a story that largely adds some padding around an otherwise standard Be A Pro campaign. Virtua Tennis came before this era, however, and instead took an arcade-style approach.
In your career, you started lowly ranked and needed to earn your right to participate in the higher-rated competitions if you wanted to climb the rankings. This was done through a combination of playing matches in tournaments and taking part in those excellent minigames.
The more you achieved, the more options unlocked as you slowly but surely worked your way up to be #1 in the world, taking out the game’s assortment of real professionals along the way. Each came with multiple levels to clear, and each rewarded you with both money to spend in shops and, when completing a minigame’s final level, some new gear to rock your next time out.
In the intervening years since Virtua Tennis first released, Sony has put out four new generations of consoles, Microsoft joined the market, and SEGA left it entirely. Despite the massive changes in the video game landscape, the fact that many gamers would still choose this game if asked to play a tennis game for an afternoon speaks volumes about what the team behind it pulled off. Virtua Tennis was a timeless classic and is well worth checking out if you have a way to play it.
