Tainted love.
Champion Tennis kicks off the Champion line, Sega’s official designation for
sports titles released for SG-1000 and a precursor to the Master System’s
Great series. Sega published a total of nine Champion sports titles for the
platform ranging from commonplace subjects (as with Champion Tennis) to the exotic (Champion Kendou). Perhaps inevitably for the relatively anemic SG-1000 hardware, the defining trait of the Champion games amounted to “similar to sports games that would come later on other platforms, but not quite as good.”
In this case, Champion Tennis resembles the format of Nintendo’s Tennis for NES [see NES Works 1985 & ’86], which would arrive on Famicom in 1984 and largely establish the standard for the entire genre. Sadly, Champion Tennis is neither as attractive nor as refined as that game.
Compared to many of Sega’s Champion releases, Champion Tennis actually resembles subsequent video game interpretations of its sport quite closely—certainly moreso than would be the case for Champion Golf or Champion Baseball. It makes use of a visual perspective previously seen in Yuji Horii’s Love Match Tennis, also released in 1983, and which Nintendo would more or less perfect with their own Tennis. Rather than making use of a totally overhead perspective, Champion Tennis sets the camera closer to the court, behind the player’s back. In this format, the forecourt appears larger and wider than the back court does, and the entire play space tapers toward a vanishing point on the opposite side of the net from the player’s viewpoint.
Champion Tennis incorporates a relatively primitive take on this concept, as both the player’s character in the forecourt and the more distant opponent make use of identically sized sprites. This gives the opposing player a subtle but distinct advantage; the game doesn’t account for the realities of scaling, meaning that the CPU character occupies a larger percentage of the court relative to the forward player, which in turn means that they can cover their side of the court more easily than the relatively tiny player in the near field, especially against the forward edge of the court.
This might seem like a bit of nitpicking, but it embodies the subtle quirks that make this particular take on tennis slightly less entertaining than other adaptations of the sports that would follow in the coming years. The disparity in coverage creates a lopsided difficulty that largely benefits the CPU even more dramatically than you typically see in 8-bit sports games, so you really have to be on top of things to keep up with the ball on the return—and, even then, you’ll whiff the ball into the net more often than not due to the somewhat clunky and imprecise control scheme.
The one area in which Champion Tennis is not subtle is its visuals. Rather than attempting to depict a realistic rendition of the court, the graphics here instead present the sport by way of a garish neon scheme in which vivid player sprites run around a hot pink and nuclear yellow court. The bold colors make it easier to pick out which part of the court is which, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing… but, thanks to the SG-1000’s palette limitations, this game makes for one hell of an eyesore. It’s certainly the most distinct-looking 8-bit tennis game of all time, that’s for sure.
I don’t think we can pin this game’s aesthetic choices entirely on Sega or the SG-1000, however. While Sega appears to have programmed this version of Champion Tennis internally (or through uncredited outsourcing), the Game Developer Research Institute has determined through its work that Champion Tennis is essentially identical to an earlier game for MSX called Real Tennis. Real Tennis was published by Takara, but GDRI offers reason to believe that the coding was actually outsourced to TOSE, who may very well have ported the game to SG-1000 as well.
Whatever its origins, Champion Tennis makes for a pretty decent tennis sim for a mid-1983 release. As long as you don’t mind the eye-searing visuals and unrelenting difficulty, it does a reasonably convincing job of bringing the sport to your television.
