Super Tennis Arcade
Planned full arcade match with three shot types and real tennis scoring.
Keyboard and Touch
5-10 minutes
Retro Tennis Match – Play Free Tennis Arcade Game
Two paddles, one ball, no decoration.
In development
Easy
Keyboard, two-player on one device
This game is not playable yet
Retro Tennis Match is designed and documented but not built. Rather than show you a card that leads nowhere, this page explains what the game is intended to be and why it is not finished. The playable games are on the games page.
The design
Retro Tennis Match is a deliberate exercise in restraint. Two paddles, one square ball, a dotted centre line, first to eleven. No power-ups, no meters, no particles, no combo counter. The interesting question is not whether we can build it — it is the easiest game on this list to build — but whether a modern audience finds the unadorned version compelling, and we would like to find out honestly rather than by quietly adding modern conveniences until it feels familiar.
The one mechanic it will have is paddle-segment deflection: the outgoing angle depends on which part of the paddle the ball strikes. That single rule is what turned the earliest electronic tennis games from a novelty into something with a skill ceiling, and it costs about four lines of code. It is a genuinely elegant piece of design and it deserves to be pointed at.
Local two-player on one keyboard is the default mode rather than an option. That was the original format, and a paddle game against a computer opponent is a substantially less interesting thing than a paddle game against the person next to you.
Planned specification
A planned deliberately minimal paddle game in the spirit of the earliest electronic tennis titles, with a local two-player mode on a single keyboard and no power-ups of any kind.
- Objective: First player to eleven points wins.
- Intended controls: Keyboard, two-player on one device
- Intended difficulty: Easy
- Intended session length: 3-8 minutes
For developers
Add assets/js/games/retro-tennis-match.js. This one also needs two key-pair bindings rather than the engine's shared action map — see docs/adding-games.md for how to extend the input layer for local multiplayer.
Questions about Retro Tennis Match
Will Retro Tennis Match have a single-player mode?
Yes, but as the secondary mode. Local two-player is the default because that is what the format was built for and what it still does best.
What is paddle-segment deflection?
The outgoing angle of the ball depends on where it strikes the paddle — centre sends it straight, edges send it away at an angle. It is one rule, it costs almost nothing to implement, and it is the reason early paddle games had a skill ceiling at all.
Why build a retro game when modern ones exist?
Because the mechanics hold up independently of the technology, and because a game with nothing between your input and the result has a directness that most modern designs have traded away.
Related games
Quick Tennis
Planned sixty-second score attack with instant restarts.
One button, Keyboard and Touch
1 minute
Guides that go with this game
- History of Tennis Video Games: From Oscilloscope to Browser — Tennis was chosen by the earliest game developers for a reason that had nothing to do with tennis: it is the simplest co…