There’s an interesting challenge played out across adverts every time the football World Cup or the Olympics comes around. Those events’ official sponsors play a lot for their status, and don’t want anyone else gaining the benefits, so if you’re not on the list you can’t mention the event (the rule on this for the Olympics is called “rule 40”). And so you get countless oblique attempts to work around the restrictions, to determine if “football feast” or “go for the win” is acceptably non-specific or not. 

I got reminded of this phenomenon by the inlay to Psion’s Spectrum tennis sim Match Point. It places you “in the singles competition of the world’s most famous tennis championship”, on “the Centre court” and even mentions strawberries and cream. The implications barely take reading between the lines, but it carefully avoids the one forbidden word: Wimbledon.

What happened there is obvious enough, but is confirmed by an interview in Sinclair User with programmer Steve Kelly (not to be confused with Steve Kerry, artist on Jack and the Beanstalk). The All England Club which stages Wimbledon was “not enthusiastic about having its august name linked to a computer game, although it assisted by providing action photographs”. The game’s adverts even used the magic word, although since they have a photo of some tennis spectators holding umbrellas, when the text begins with “This is Wimbledon” it is arguably, technically, talking about the pictured scene and not about their computer game.

“If rain stops play on court, you’ll be able to carry on playing – with Sinclair’s Match Point”. Tennis computer games famously go way further back than 1984, but this is the first sports game I’m playing in this journey. Its attempt to tie itself to a real event, to emphasise its authenticity, is something I’m going to see a lot more of later on. Personal Computer Games reviewer CA wrote about Match Point through comparison to Pong and hailed progress with “this isn’t a game, it’s the real thing”, although left some space for potential future marvels in realism. “I wonder what computer tennis will be like in 1994?”

Trying to make games that set new standards in realism wasn’t a new thing for co-publishers Psion or for Steve Kelly. Kelly grew up in Warrington in north-west England, and only turned to programming after his time working in a warehouse was ended by a back injury. The place where he did his rehabilitation had a ZX81, and he got interested enough to join a computer programming course afterwards. This was through the Training Opportunities Scheme, a government-funded scheme which paid participants to do occupational training, established in 1972 and only a couple of years away from being closed down when it helped Kelly into a new career. After that course, he got a job at Psion and moved to London. Psion were finishing off the Spectrum version of the self-explanatory Flight Simulation, and Kelly contributed some code for its crash explosions.

  • Chequered Flag (Psion/Sinclair, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Chequered Flag (Psion/Sinclair, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

He had a more significant part to play on Chequered Flag, in which Psion applied a similar in-cockpit simulation approach to Formula 1 motor racing. Kelly was the lead programmer, working alongside Cecil Ward and Steve Townsend. They broke race tracks down to their component shapes and mathematically recreated them, although time limits prevented them from managing to include any cars to race against. It was a success, and Psion made Kelly part of their team for another sports sim.

Just before Psion released Chequered Flag, they hired a graphic designer called Ann Hughes. She had no previous background in computers (“I thought a pixel was a pistol” she told Sinclair User) and had worked painting theatre stages. She took on many of the graphical challenges of Match Point. “The game came to me with the dimensions of the court laid out so there wasn’t very much to do in designing the game itself. Most of the work went into the design of the characters.”

She worked the character animations out on graph paper before Steve Kelly made a program to quickly input and display them. They opted for a monochrome black on green look to get around the Spectrum’s problems with displaying more than two colours close together. You can see it when the further away player tosses the ball up when serving and the ball turns red as it passes in front of the area of the scoreboard with red writing. She used more colour for the crowd, which does an impressionistic version of turning heads to follow the play.

The animations worked well – “flicker free characters move smoothly across the screen” as Sinclair Programs highlighted. They play a game of tennis which is comparatively simple but still stood positively at a time when, as the same review put it, “until now, tennis programs on the Spectrum have been very bad”. You move the player around and press a button to take a swing at the ball, moving from forehand to backhand (or vice versa) each time. The direction the ball goes in is then determined largely by the exact timing of when you hit it. 

The way the game tries to help by automatically switching you between stances as you move sideways across the court is rather annoying (it “can cause more problems than it’s worth” as Crash fairly diplomatically put it). That can be remedied somewhat by swinging wildly back and forward to increase your chances of hitting the ball. Doing so made it click for me why the gameplay felt familiar. It is essentially Wii Sports tennis without the motion controls, much more so than many tennis games in the period between the two. Match Point is unforgiving in comparison to the Wii version, but as a basic model it clearly held up.

The idea of this computer tennis game as a replacement for the real thing was one Psion were very keen to push. Even before it got its final name, managing director David Potter said “I predict that nobody will be watching Wimbledon this year – they’ll all be playing Psion Tennis!”. There was a bit of a problem with this, which is that they didn’t end up releasing the game until well after Wimbledon had finished. It says something about Match Point’s appeal that even outside of the annual British rush of interest in tennis, it reached #1 in the arcade charts for three weeks. Sports computer games wouldn’t have to be limited to association with major events, but it could certainly help, at all degrees of how explicit that association was. 

In going through the contents of Match Point, it wasn’t difficult to read between the lines and see Wimbledon. Other information takes more effort to extract. Some people spend time data-mining the code of games, and hidden within the code of Match Point there is a message from its developers:

IF YOU HAVE DISASSEMBLED THIS CODE, AND INTEND MAKING COPYS FOR RESALE, FRIENDS OR OTHER BEAR IN MIND YOU ARE A THIEF AND THAT 4 PEOPLE SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF TIME ,EFFORT AND SLEEPLESS NIGHTS PRODUCING THIS PROGRAM: – STEVE ,ANN,MARIA AND STEVE T. A FEW QUID ISN’T MUCH TO PAY.

Steve T is presumably the Steve Townsend who also worked on Chequered Flag. Combing through everything I can find on Psion and on people working on Spectrum games, I haven’t turned up any potential answers for who Maria is, though. She likely stands in for a much larger group of people who made contributions at the early outset or the development of computer games but whose names go forgotten.

That’s far from the end of the question of who came up with Match Point. Steve Kelly and Ann Hughes’ interviews read like they came up with the game from scratch, save perhaps for that one comment from Hughes that “the game came to me with the dimensions of the court laid out”. On the title screen, though, there is another interesting bit of wording: “Under licence from D&L Research”. That makes it sound like a port, but I couldn’t find an earlier release of the game on any machine under any title.

Eventually, with some assistance, I got to the answer. The D&L in D&L Research is the initials of the surnames of French developers Bruno Duriez and Albert Loridan. Together with Joël Sana, they had developed a tennis game towards the end of 1983. Yes, this barely disguised Wimbledon game, with all of its British summer associations, was originally French. The computer D&L had developed it for was Texas Instruments’s TI-99/4A. Just as they finished the game, Texas Instruments announced, on 28 October 1983, that it was pulling out of home computers completely. The game went unreleased as a result. So in January 1984, D&L took it to the Winter International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and they signed deals with American publishers Imagic and with Psion to publish versions of the game for other formats.

For Imagic, D&L themselves worked on a version for the ColecoVision console, released as Tournament Tennis. Developed in parallel to Match Point, it gives some hints as to how similar to the unreleased original game it must be, because it very much looks and plays the same. Same court design, same swinging backwards and forwards, not always in your control. A little slower, and missing the crowds and their head-turning. The ColecoVision version received similar plaudits in American magazines to Match Point – “more like a real tennis match than a glorified version of Pong” wrote Computer Entertainer.

  • Tournament Tennis (D&L Research/Imagic, 1984, ColecoVision)
  • Tournament Tennis (D&L Research/Imagic, 1984, ColecoVision)

Psion might not have come up with the idea themselves, and they might not have made their Wimbledon deadline, but they were the first to release a version of it, and its success extended outside of the UK. At the end of 1984, French computer and video games magazine Tilt published a set of awards for the best of the previous year’s games. The Tilt d’Or for the best tennis simulation went to Psion’s Match Point for the ZX Spectrum. They didn’t even mention the game’s original French creators.

Special thanks to Dave Silva for some very valuable research help via Bluesky!

Sources: