Tag: 5200
The final March 1981 release, Tennis, is another sports game from the folks at Activision, which drew attention with titles like Boxing, Skiing and Dragster in its first year. While tennis as a sport has been a standby for game-makers almost as long as video games have existed, Alan Miller’s rendition was one of the earliest attempts to make a version of the sport that was more accurate than what you’d gotten out of Pong clones the previous decade.
When discussing and playing Atari VCS games, a certain degree of abstraction is expected. Backgrounds are low resolution, and the missile and ball sprites are quite limited in appearance. As such, chunky sprites and blocks representing people, footballs, basketball hoops, cars and so on are the norm. Even by these standards, Miniature Golf, also known as Arcade Golf in its Sears release, is an incredibly abstract take on golf’s fast-paced, wacky cousin.