Ultimate Tennis (v 1.4, Japan)

Arcade Video game published 31 years ago:

Ultimate Tennis (c) 1993 Art & Magic.

In 1993, the first Art & Magic's game has been compared with a tornado in the arcade's world. Based on a clever system of scrolling planes this game looked like a 3D game. The graphic's quality and the extremely good gameplay pushed "Ultimate Tennis" to the 2nd place in Germany and to the 14th place in the Japanese charts and was successfully diffused all around the world : 5.000 boards have been sold worldwide and among them more than 500 boards in Japan!

- TECHNICAL -

Main CPU : Motorola 68000 (@ 12.5 Mhz), TMS34010 (@ 5 Mhz)
Sound Chips : OKI6295 (@ 8.08 Khz)

Players : 2
Control : 8-way joystick
Buttons : 3

- TRIVIA -

Even if titlescreen says 1993, Ultimate Tennis was released in January 1994.

Art and Magic was founded in 1992 by Yves Grolet and Franck Sauer, respectively the coder and the graphics artist behind some of the most technically advanced Amiga titles of all time : UNREAL by Ubi Soft (1990) and AGONY by Psygnosis (1992) which is also the first title published under the Art and Magic logo.

Yves Grolet started his career on the Commodore 64 in 1986 at only 19 developing 2 titles: the graphical adventure NO published by Lankhor and the conversion of Iron Lord by Ubi Soft.

After Art and Magic Yves founded the PC adventure games developer Appeal S.A. in 1995 and released OUTCAST after 4 years of work, and in 2002 he became CEO of elseWhere entertainment.

Ultimate Tennis was their first arcade game, as they were still trying to adapt to their new platform, digitised sprites (all palette swaps of the same footage) were used as a proof of concept - later the artists would develop their caricature style to make cel-animated sprites. Approximately 5,000 units were produced.

- STAFF -

Artwork : Franck Sauer, Iwan Scheer
Software : Yann Robert, Yves Grolet
Music : Franck Sauer, Christian Dutilleux
Starring : Eric Dardenne
Hardware designer : Deltatec