Great Courts 2

Summer 1992, sweltering heat, blinds drawn down, and I'm hammering away at the keys on a 286, trying to get the ball back over the net. Tennis games were a strange genre back then — either you believed in the court movement, or you just watched colored squares moving across the screen. Great Courts 2 by Blue Byte belonged to that first group.

It's a tennis game released in 1991, available on DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST, among others. Blue Byte, still before its strategic fame with The Settlers, attempted to create a solid sports simulator. No story, no campaign in the modern sense — you step onto the court, play tennis, win or lose.

The view is third-person, with the camera tracking the court from behind — a classic perspective that suits tennis games even today. The controls were reasonably precise for their time — timing your shot mattered, you couldn't just mash the button and hope. The ball physics weren't perfect, but they made sense. What bothered me then and bothers me now: the computer opponent could be suspiciously consistent at times, which in coding language means "it cheats."

The graphics were genuinely solid for 1991 and DOS. The courts looked like courts, the players moved smoothly enough to fool the eye. Blue Byte clearly put in work compared to the first installment, and it showed. The sounds — well, Sound Blaster delivered what it could. The ball pings and the splashes of a fall are things nobody remembers with affection from tennis games of that era.

Great Courts 2 isn't a game that wrote its name in gold in the annals of its genre. But in 1991 on DOS, there weren't many better choices if you wanted tennis without too much arcade flavor. Today you can play it in your browser via DOSBox emulators without installing anything. It'll appeal to retro sports fans and those who remember when you could make a decent game without a thirty-person team. Don't expect the depth of modern simulators — but twenty minutes on the court will go by in a snap.