DAVID CRANE’S AMAZING TENNIS

Developer/publisher Absolute Entertainment Format SNES Release 1992

We had put out a tennis game while I was at Activision which Alan Miller wrote. I had played tournament tennis for decades and I used to play in doubles tournaments with Alan. I never had any drive to make a tennis game until I saw the Super Nintendo. It was a great console with lots of capabilities and I figured out how to make a parallax scrolling system [for it]. The game has 22 different parallax planes that could move independently. I took a video camera out to a tennis court and set it up six feet high – the eye level of a tennis player. I shot some footage and realised I could give a 3D experience in a console which doesn’t really do 3D.

I had been lamenting that I hadn’t been playing enough tennis due to all this videogame stuff, so I enrolled at an expert tennis class being run by the local junior college, Cañada College. It was one of the best tennis schools around. I got to play with their team and became a supporter. I wanted to include a tournament mode in Amazing Tennis which had AI players, so I took snapshots of the entire team, which I sent to the artists and animators, with their stats. Most of the players in the game are from that team. Those are real guys!

It is easier to play the game from the foreground court than the background court, but I have no regrets choosing the perspective I used. In real tennis, you have wind and sun, so each side of the court has its advantages and disadvantages. That’s why you switch sides after every two games! So in Amazing Tennis, you play in the foreground and the background. And I love the controls in the game. Your shot is affected by where you position your player, but you can also hold the pad in a direction and press a button and adjust your shot. You think the guy is going to go down the line because of where he positioned himself but then he goes crosscourt. I had some fabulous games with Garry!

As for having my name on the box, it had been a founding principle at Activision to give credit to the designers. A book has the title and the author on the cover, and by the time I was doing Amazing Tennis, my name was recognisable, so it was nice to think my name might help to sell the game. And it was an amazing game – I was happy to have my name on it.

Audacity’s games are aimed at collectors, so Circus Convoy includes a full-colour manual, just like the old days. Unlike the old days, however, the game also features a QR code feature, which allows players to upload their scores to Audacity’s servers