Tennis

Tennis is among the first wave of games released in 1981 by Activision shortly after its founding by former Atari programmers, who had left over disagreements about authorship credit and wanted to prove that the Atari 2600 hardware was capable of more than what Atari's own titles had offered so far. The studio at the time focused on sports and action titles that squeezed more out of the console's limited hardware than players were used to from the console's early years, and this tennis simulation was one of these early attempts to prove the quality of independent development.

The game offers a classic one-on-one tennis match viewed from a bird's-eye perspective above the court. The player moves their character with a joystick and returns the ball with a button, with the direction and power of the shot depending on exactly when during the ball's flight the player presses the button, which required practice and an eye for trajectory. The opponent can be controlled by a second player or the computer with several difficulty levels, and matches are played to classic tennis scoring of sets and games, so even a simple match could take a solid few minutes of focused play and reward patient practice of shot timing. The game also supported two-player play against each other on a single screen, making it a popular choice for shared evening play.

Compared to later Atari sports titles like RealSports Tennis, the graphics and animation feel more stripped down, but the core game loop – judging trajectory and timing the return – remains surprisingly fun even years later. For Activision, it was an important step in building the studio's reputation as an alternative to Atari and one of the titles that helped establish the idea of independent developers making games for another company's console, which helped launch the entire third-party game development industry.

Why play it: An early Activision tennis simulation that shows the roots of the sports game genre on the Atari 2600.