Weird case of vanished game

[Gnidrologist]

I had a PS1 as a kid and mainly played various sports sims on it. One of the games i loved was what i thought very realistic (at the time at least) tennis sim. It had pretty large list of real players of that era like Agassi, Sampras, Muster, Ivanisevic, Kafelnikov, Becker, Stich, Chang etc. I was quite into watching tennis then and knew the styles of these players and that game was very good at emulating them. Serves, forehands, backhands, all the animations, pace and curve of shots was really well done given the limited tech of that era. Graphics and sound was kinda simple. There were other tennis sims available that had more modern presentation, but they usually had very poor roster, mostly fictional players and despite superior graphics, not really good at representing differing styles of individual players.

Several years ago i remembered that game for some reason and wanted to have some nostalgia, grab an emu version and fire it up, but there's a problem. It's as if such game never existed. Since then i've tried to find it via all imaginable sources, data bases, forums and what not, but to no avail. I thought it's one of the games with Pete Sampras brand, because i'm sure Pete appeared onto intro screen before menus, but i checked and none of the games match. I also searched for PSX tennis games with real tennis players and it appears that no such game actually exists. Most tennis sims of that era (90s) had either half a dozen real players + fictional/custom players or only fictional ones. The one i played had at least 20 real ones and, if i'm not mistaken even some historical. I know that McEnroe was there. Maybe he wasn't retired yet in early 90s yet. Anyhow, it was great fun for anyone with any interest in the sport and thought it would be considered classic in the genre by now, however after all the extensive snooping around i'm starting to get a feeling that i dreamed it up or it was made by some drunk russian bootleggers (it was a pirated copy in any case) and never officially released in the west.

I understand that chances are slim that anyone here would have a clue about this, but i had to get it off my back. I usually never fail to find info on obscure shit on the internets, if it at all exists. This is quite unique occurrence and it tingles my jimmies much.

 

[deuxhero]

For what it's worth, here's GameFAQs' list of all Tennis games on the PS1, and for consoles the lists are generally comprehensive for official releases. There's only 20 something of them, so just throw the title (and PS1/PSX for the more generic names) into Youtube and see if you find anything. Replacing fictional characters with real ones isn't something I'd put past pirates for lower graphic fidelity games (if everyone has the same 4 polygon head it would just be a select screen image and some text) and even if it was modded you might tell the underlying game, though I don't image any larger scale pirate homebrew being made in the PS1 era...

Actually that's a good question: Was the PS1 current when you played it? The older it was the more likely (though still doubtful) a pirate original.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Are you positive it was on the PS1? Sounds like this was Virtua Tennis 2(AKA Tennis 2K2)

 

[Mustawd]

Are you positive it was on the PS1? Sounds like this was Virtua Tennis 2(AKA Tennis 2K2)

My first thought as well.

 

[Gnidrologist]

For what it's worth, here's GameFAQs' list of all Tennis games on the PS1

Holy shit, it's the World Pro Tennis 98. Strange that i didn't find it previously. Looked into Moby Games and other lists and checked every game by screenshots. Doesn't have any footage in youtube. Must be really obscure shit even in its own time. Thanks man.

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

It always warms my heart when mysteries such as this get solved.