As if one International Tennis wasn’t good enough for the Commodore 64, Zeppelin Games decided to release a second one in 1992. And it’s actually really good. Definitely much better than Commodore‘s previous 1985 version.

Programmed by John Carlyle with graphics by Neil Hislop and music by Adam Gilmore, Zeppelin‘s 1992 release, International Tennis, goes for a traditional overhead – with players playing vertically – type of view, and it definitely works better than the side-to-side view. It uses a sprites-in-the-border technique for on-screen messaging, and for extending the top player’s serve animation into the border above (which is a little glitchy, but it’s still impressive).

With some practise you should quickly get used to player positioning and button-press timings, which are essential if you want to win. There are occasional, uncontrolled spasms, where the player whacks the ball straight out, but the game is fairly lenient with randomness and does allow you to play quite hard and get some decent rallies going. Maybe even win a match or two…

Overall, this is the better International Tennis, for the C64, of the two that I know of. And it plays more like Super Tennis than anything else on the C64. Which makes it the best tennis game on the system.

More: International Tennis on CSDb