Virtua Tennis

Virtua Tennis came out of Sega's AM3 division — formally Sega Software R&D Department 3 — with Mie Kumagai producing under AM3 head Hisao Oguchi. Kumagai's brief was to make something with broader appeal than the one-on-one fighting games clogging Japanese arcades at the time, and tennis was an unglamorous, inspired answer. An early prototype tried a twisting paddle controller to switch between forehand and backhand; it was scrapped as impractical, and the game reverted to a joystick and buttons. It reached arcades on Sega's NAOMI hardware in December 1999 with eight real male pros on the roster — among them Tim Henman, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Carlos Moyá and Mark Philippoussis — and was a hit in Japanese arcades immediately.

The control scheme is the whole design. A hits the ball and the game works out which stroke you meant; B lobs. You aim with the d-pad while the swing is happening, pushing up or down for topspin or backspin, and you serve by tapping A to start a meter and A again to hit. That is it. The trade-off was real and reviewers said so at the time — hand the stroke selection to the computer and it will occasionally give you a volley when you wanted a backhand — but the exchange bought something rarer: anyone could pick up the pad and have a decent rally inside ten seconds.

The Dreamcast port is the version people actually remember, and it is emphatically a 2000 artifact. It reached the US on 11 July 2000 and Europe that September; Japan got it last, on 23 November 2000, under the title Power Smash. It settled at a Metacritic score of 92 from twenty-three critics. It was a runner-up in GameSpot's 2000 awards for best multiplayer and best traditional sports game rather than a winner, but the long verdict has been kinder than the trophies: it has turned up on best-of-Dreamcast lists continuously from 2006 to the present day.

There is a small piece of corporate history fossilized in the game's own credits. Sega broke its arcade studios into semi-autonomous companies in 2000, and AM3 was spun off as Hitmaker that spring — after the arcade game had already shipped, and before the console port did. So the 1999 arcade cabinet credits no studio at all, just "Presented By: Sega." The Dreamcast version, finished on the other side of the reorganisation, reads "© Sega/Hitmaker, 2000." By the sequel, Hitmaker had the credit to itself.

That sequel — Virtua Tennis 2, sold as Tennis 2K2 in the States and Power Smash 2 in Japan — hit arcades in 2001 and the Dreamcast later that year, and it is the one that added women to the roster: Monica Seles, Lindsay Davenport, and Venus and Serena Williams. The original had none, a gap a 2000 reviewer complained about at the time. The first game itself got a thinner second life in 2002, ported to PC and the Game Boy Advance, and the series carried on for another decade across other consoles — but the two Dreamcast discs are the ones that get remembered, and the first one is why.