Virtua Tennis: SEGA Professional Tennis (aka Power Smash)

Virtua Tennis (Power Smash in Japan) is a series of tennis simulation video games started in 1999 by Sega AM3. The player competes through tennis tournaments and various arcade modes. Originally released to arcades, for the home console market the game was expanded with the introduction of the campaign mode. The latest games in the series are available on all major consoles, starting with Virtua Tennis 3.

Name changes

Domestically in Japan the series have always been released as Power Smash although with the third entry in the series the name was expanded to Sega Professional Tennis: Power Smash, although Sega Professional Tennis logo and name have been prominently featured in all the games, it was only in the title of the third game. Once Sega sold the 2K name to Take-Two Interactive, the triquel was released under the original branding as Virtua Tennis 3 all updates and sequels have been under the Virtua label to date.

Internationally it was released as Virtua Tennis, to fall in the same brand as other Sega Sports games such as Virtua Striker, with the sequel the name was changed to Tennis 2K2.

History

Arcade and Dreamcast

The original game was developed for the Sega Naomi Arcade Hardware by Sega (in 2000 under the label Hitmaker) and ported to the Sega Dreamcast Sega’s home console based on the Naomi Hardware. The sequel Virtua Tennis 2 was built over original home console build. There were several upgrades made to the game. Most notably enhanced graphics, more courts, and a female roster (composed of 9 players) were introduced to the series featuring the likeness of Serena Williams, Lindsay Davenport and even lesser known players such as Jelena Dokić.

After ceasing development of video game consoles in 2001, Sega announced they would be making games for all platforms and made a deal with THQ that allowed them to make original games based on Sega franchise for the Game Boy Advance, one of which was a Virtua Tennis game.^[1] Virtua Tennis 2 was also ported to the PlayStation 2.

Sumo Digital was tasked with porting Virtua Tennis 2 to the PlayStation Portable and they released Virtua Tennis: World Tour in fall 2005, the game was an update to Power Smash 2 expanding the World Tour mode, however the character roster was the smallest the series, has featured to date.