Pro Tennis: World Court is a tennis sports arcade game that was released by Namco in 1988 only in Japan; it runs upon Namco System 1 hardware, and was inspired by the 1987 Famicom game Family Tennis. In August 1988, the game was ported to the PC Engine console, in which a new tennis-based role-playing quest mode was added, and was later ported to the North American TurboGrafx-16 console by NEC under the title of World Court Tennis in 1989 – and a sequel named Super World Court was released in 1992, which ran on Namco NA-1 hardware and allowed up to four players to play simultaneously.
At the start of the game the players must select either “singles” (Player 1 v Player 2) or “doubles” (Player Team v CPU Team); they must then select one of twenty different players (ten male, eight female and two robot) before selecting one of three different courts (New York hard, London lawn, and Paris clay). They must then select whether they want the match to be one or three sets long – and, once they have done so, their two (or four) chosen players will come out, and take their positions on the court. The players must use an eight-way joystick to direct their chosen players around their half of the court and two buttons to hit the ball with their rackets; but just like in a real tennis match, faults, net balls and deuce can occur (but the “Deuce” setting in the options menu can be turned off).
World Court