Best tennis games: 7 smashing games you need to play

It’s strange really, but in 2022 the sport of tennis is woefully under-represented in video games. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the yearly iterations in the genre, attempts at 3D and more, but these days they just don’t seem to happen as often.

There was even a rivalry to match FIFA vs PES at one point, with Top Spin and Virtua Tennis facing off every now and then, and just like the football games, both were excellent, offering their own spin (get it!?) on the sport.

But just because developers don’t make them anymore, doesn’t mean we can’t remind you of some of the best tennis games to ever grace a console or PC. These classics will soon have you serving like

Matteo Berrettini

and hitting monster groundstrokes like

Dominic Thiem

.

01

Selfie Tennis

It may seem odd to start with a game you’ve likely never heard of, but Selfie Tennis is one of the most exciting and daft VR games you can play. An early launch title for the HTC Vive and published by the aptly named VRUnicorns, this one puts the virtual racket right in your hand and lets you play tennis with yourself. After you hit the ball you’ll be transported to the other end of the court and have to return the shot. It’s fun and gets you moving, so is even a healthy way to recreate the sport. Well, it would be, if it doesn’t eventually devolve into seeing if you can knock the oversized friendly tennis-ball-head characters over, or exploring the surrounding arena to see what secrets it hides. What fun, and you look totally cool when playing it, we promise.

02

Wii Sports

The tennis game in Wii Sports was a favourite among gamers

© Nintendo

Surely you’ve already played this one, right? The thing is, with all the excitement of the Switch, people have forgotten just how incredible Wii Sports was. Aside from bowling, tennis was one of the best renditions of motion-controlled sports out there and this game was monumental in how much it grabbed the attention of young and old alike. Get your parents involved, get your granny involved, but whoever you play with, hook that Wii back up and get swinging that Wiimote again. Oh, and if you’re feeling really adventurous, grab Wii Sports Resort for Wii U and play Table Tennis with the motion plus accessory for one-to-one (or near enough) recreations of holding a bat.

03

Virtua Tennis 4

The Virtua Tennis series was hugely popular

© Sega

Arguably one of the best tennis games ever made, Virtua Tennis 4 not only refined the long-running series’s qualities and gave us the latest roster of players, but even went so far as to offer a 3D version of the game, provided you had the correct TV and glasses. It may seem like nothing given the technology we all boast in our homes these days, but in 2011 this was insane to see and it actually worked. The best part is that even if you’ve packed away your older consoles, this one got a solid PS Vita port as well, so it should be fairly easy to play nowadays, while it’s also available on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.

04

Top Spin 4

Legends of the game in Topspin 4

© 2K Sports

Speaking of games we don’t see anymore, the big competitor to Virtua Tennis was last seen in 2011, with it being cancelled by publishers 2K shortly afterwards. While it never quite hit the popularity of Virtua Tennis, Top Spin offered a genuinely different way of experiencing tennis. While the competition offered an arcade experience (given SEGA’s background in arcades it’s hardly surprising), Top Spin offered the thinking person’s rendition. You’d have to think about the next shot and be one step ahead. The idea was that you sort of pre-loaded the shot as the ball came at you, which gave you massive control over where the ball would go.

05

Super Tennis

Ah, Super Tennis. What a game, and the most surprising omission from the

SNES Classic lineup

released back in 2017. Something highly underappreciated about Super Tennis is the sound and music. For a SNES launch game in Europe back in 1991, it was miles ahead of its time, but it also played really well, and still does. Fast-paced and with a gorgeous, colourful look, even more than 30 years later, Super Tennis is well worth a play, if you can find a way to do so.

06

Mario Tennis Aces

Mario Tennis Aces was extremely popular on the Nintendo Switch

© Nintendo

The Mario Tennis series started off all the way back in 2000 on Game Boy Color (technically an earlier game in the series appeared on Virtual Boy, but nobody remembers that). You’ll have to go to the virtual console on Wii, 3DS, or Wii U to actually play it unless somehow you’ve got the original game cart. Or – you could check out the latest version on Nintendo Switch, Mario Tennis Aces.

This sugar-coated, eye-popping game of bat and ball and Bullet Bills is the series at its finest, with charming graphics masking deceptively deep gameplay; picking your shots isn’t so much a game of chess as it is a kind of fighting game, that requires you to know your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses inside out, especially since a well-timed smash can actually break their racket. The single-player mode is fun but it’s in multiplayer where Mario Tennis Aces really shines.

07

Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis

Now, this may be cheating, but bear with us. Not normally known for sports games, let alone table tennis ones, Rockstar surprised everyone by announcing this game in March 2006 and then releasing it in May of the same year. Even more surprisingly, it was tremendous fun. Difficult to master, but rewarding it you could do so, this isn’t traditional tennis, but we just had to include it because of how crazy it seems for something like this to happen. Imagine if Rockstar suddenly announced a volleyball game. That’s how out of left-field this was, but one thing is for sure: it’s still well worth a play.

Bonus game: Pong

Think about it, Pong is the earliest example of a racket sports game. Well, it’s actually one of the earliest examples of a game full stop. Released in 1972, it’s an electronic ping-pong experience that has two ‘bats’ at the side of the screen, and you just move them up and down, creating a rally until someone wins. At the top of each side of the screen there’s the score, and that’s it. One thing’s for certain: we’ve come a long way.