The high demand for the Wii continues in large part because of Nintendo’s inspired decision to include Wii Sports. In this series, Geek Out New York looks at the 8-bit progenitors of Wii Sports. Are the modern Wii games really so much more fun than the sports titles we played “back in the day”? Yes, yes they are.

Today: Tennis.

Nintendo has gotten tennis right in recent years. Big N nailed the feel of tennis for Wii Sports, and I count Mario Tennis for the Nintendo 64 among the five best sports games I’ve played—even in those pre-Wiimote days, the spot-on rhythm of play proved engrossing.

It took some trial and error to get to that point, though. While Wii Sports makes you feel like you are actually on the court, NES Tennis make you wish you were actually on the court. Instead of playing NES Tennis. The players swing through the ball very s-l-o-w-l-y, which hurts the realism, although if Nintendo had retitled the game Underwater Tennis, they might have had a winner.

Then there’s the perspective problem, which was a bear for many early sports games. Simply put, it’s hard to portray the height of the ball (i.e., all three dimensions) with 1985 video hardware. Nintendo’s designers solved this problem with sound, by exploiting the well-known phenomenon that balls, when lobbed high in the air, go BEEEEE-YOOOP. Younger gamers, this may seem like a bizarre effect to you, but note that soundless tennis balls were not invented until 1989. What a privileged world you live in.¹

Naturally, real-life tennis champions saw NES Tennis and wanted a piece of that mediocre-sports-game pie. So Chris Evert and Ivan Lendl combined their white-hot star power into Top Players’ Tennis Featuring Chris Evert and Ivan Lendl. “Featuring” might have been too strong a word, as Evert and Lendl don’t make any substantial appearance aside from the two-frame title-screen animations, as seen in this gameplay video from NESguide:

You might have noticed that the intro features voice synthesis that, by NES standards, is quite good. Unfortunately, the TPTFCEAIL programmers got a little carried away with their toy, so throughout the game, you’re subjected to halting robotic announcements like “THIRTY…FORTY.” and “ADVANTAGE…SERVER.” It’s like playing tennis with your answering machine. BREAK…POINT. YOU HAVE…TWO…NEW…MESSAGES.

TPTFCEAIL may boast big stars and voice robots, but Rad Racket: Deluxe Tennis II had another trick up its sleeve: radness. This cartridge, from the venerable Idea-Tek, was so rad that corporations clamored to attach their brands to it, marking one of the first instances of video-game product placement:

“Dudes With Attitude” later became Microsoft, of course, and “A.V.E.” is better known today as…? That’s right, McDonald’s Hamburgers.

Gnarly corporate synergy aside, Rad Racket offers all the typical tennis amenities: forehand/backhand controls, realistic physics, a bonus rat, and so on and so forth.

Yup, there’s a rat that scurries onto the court from time to time. The verminous conditions are bad enough, but where does the referee get off yelling “YUK A RAT”² in the middle of a point? Can we please have some decorum here?

I suppose I should explain the rat, but be realistic. It’s a bonus rat in a tennis game. Is there any explanation that would satisfy you? Good lord, I hope not.

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1. Bonus bit of Tennis audio trivia: Nintendo reused the Tennis theme song in its 1986 Pro Wrestling game, apparently guessing that there was not much overlap in the two fanbases. ↑

2. I’m not sure if he’s disgusted (“yuck”) or letting out a horselaugh (“yuk yuk yuk”). Either way, not appropriate, dude. ↑