Tennis Arcade Games publishes free browser-based tennis games and writing that explains how the genre actually works. Every game here was built by us, every article was written by us, and there is one person behind both.
This page sets out what the site is, who it is for, how it is run and funded, and what we will and will not do. If you want the short version: we make a small number of games carefully and write about them in more detail than they probably warrant, because nobody else does.
Why this site exists
The browser tennis game genre is written about badly. Search for almost any browser tennis game and you will find pages that describe the controls in one line, pad the rest with restated keywords, and tell you nothing about why one game holds your attention for twenty minutes and another loses it in thirty seconds.
That gap is not because the games are too simple to write about. It is because writing usefully about a game requires knowing what its numbers are — how wide the timing window is, how fast the meter sweeps, what reaction delay the opponent has — and almost nobody writing about browser games has access to that. We do, because we wrote the games.
So the premise is narrow and, we think, defensible: build a small catalogue of original games, and write about them and about the genre at a level of specificity that is only possible from the inside.
Who this is for
Three groups, in rough order of size.
People with a few minutes to fill. The games load in a tab, explain themselves in a sentence, and can be abandoned mid-run without losing anything. No account, no download, no progress to protect.
People trying to get better at something small. A surprising number of people will spend real effort moving a number in a two-minute game. Everything in our tips and challenges sections is written for them, and it is the writing we most enjoy doing.
People curious about game design. Arcade games are small enough to understand completely, which makes them unusually good subjects for design writing. Several of our articles are really design analysis wearing a how-to hat.
What we actually do
The games
Ten games are catalogued. Four are playable: Tennis Smash, Tennis Rally Challenge, Tennis Serve Challenge and Tennis Reflex. Six have complete design documentation and a page each, and those pages say plainly that the game is not built yet.
We do not host games made by other people. Partly that is a licensing question — the rights situation on games circulating through browser portals is frequently unclear — and partly it is practical: we cannot fix a bug in code we do not own, and we cannot write honestly about numbers we cannot see.
The cost of that policy is a catalogue of ten instead of four hundred. We think that is the right trade.
The writing
Eight articles are published, and the pipeline for the rest is listed openly on the article index — titles, angles and intended publication dates for everything researched but not yet written.
Publishing the roadmap rather than the stubs is a deliberate choice. A site can look larger by publishing sixty thin pages, and it makes the site worse for every actual reader. If an article is not worth reading, it is not worth having a URL.
How the site is run
One person writes and builds everything: Alex Carter, who has spent eight years covering sports and browser gaming. There is no team, no office and no company behind this, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise with a plural voice and a stock photo of a meeting.
The site is a static HTML site with no database and no user accounts. That is a technical detail with real consequences for you: there is nowhere for us to store anything about you, so we do not. Your game scores live in your own browser and never reach us.
How it is funded
The intention is advertising. At the time of writing no advertising is running on the site, and the pages you see reserve space for it so that adding it later will not cause the layout to jump around.
We are telling you this now rather than after the fact. If and when advertising goes live, it will be labelled, it will never cover a game or imitate a navigation control, and the cookie policy and privacy policy will be updated before it appears rather than afterwards.
We do not sell anything, run affiliate links, or accept payment for coverage. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the page where it applies.
Our content standards
Four commitments, which are elaborated in the editorial policy and the fact-checking policy:
- Everything is original. No scraped descriptions, no rewritten competitor articles, no stock listicles. If we did not write it, it is not here.
- Numbers come from the source. Every claim about a mechanic in one of our games is checked against our own code. Claims about the genre generally are labelled as observations, not measurements.
- Uncertainty is stated. Where the evidence is thin — games history, transfer effects in reaction training, browser gaming market size — we say so rather than picking the tidy answer.
- Dates are real. Published and last-updated dates reflect what actually happened. We do not refresh a date to look current.
What we will not do
It is easier to trust a site that tells you its limits, so here are ours.
- We will not claim that playing browser games improves your real tennis. It does not, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
- We will not invent credentials. Alex is a games writer, not a tennis coach, and every article that touches on the sport says so.
- We will not publish user numbers, awards, partnerships or testimonials that do not exist. There are currently none of any of those.
- We will not add a leaderboard we cannot validate. A browser game cannot verify a submitted score, so any leaderboard would be trivially forgeable.
- We will not fill the site with thin pages to look bigger.
Getting in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome and are the fastest way to improve the site. If something here is wrong, please say so — the contact page has a form and direct email addresses, and the fact-checking policy sets out how corrections are handled and what you can expect.
Bug reports on the games are equally welcome, and useful ones include the browser, the device and what you were doing. Accessibility problems get priority over everything else.