THE ARMADILLO, THE MERMAID, THE BEAGLE, AND THE PLUMBER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE MAKING OF SNOOPY TENNIS
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What follows is a full history of the creation of SNOOPY TENNIS — the 2001 Nintendo Game Boy Color title that celebrates its 20th anniversary in April.
TL;DR — A two-person development team made SNOOPY TENNIS as an after-hours side project while working on the TOMB RAIDER franchise.
On the back pages of some classic video game manuals, occasionally there’s a credits list for key members of the teams that worked on the project. At the end of the SNOOPY TENNIS Game Boy Color booklet, Infogrames, the publisher, has a nice healthy list of contributors, but there on the right side of the page is a lonely logo for “MERMAID STUDIOS” with a blank space underneath where the developer names should have been.
Internet searches return similar missing information about the developer. MobyGames credits are greyed out. GameSpot info is empty. GiantBomb leaves the developer name out completely. WikiPedia is barely more than a stub. But MARIO TENNIS has a bunch of credits info. Ditto for POKÉMON and ZELDA from around the same period of time. For an indie title in the early days of video game history, this might not be strange, but here was a major publisher with a high-profile license, and also a “modern” game released years after the internet solidified a gaming community rich in data and story. Where was the info about Mermaid Studios? Who was this secret bunch that slipped past the gate and delivered a lob shot over the heads of the gaming industry?
Further Google searches reveal an abandoned landing page for Mermaid Studios here, with the enigmatic subtitle “Everything you’ve heard is true.” There’s no contact button and the DNS registry is masked. Wandering around LinkedIn, there’s a Mermaid Studios in Berlin, but it’s for IT services and wasn’t founded until 2017. Deeper in, there’s an unclaimed logistics and supply chain company by the same name in Irvine California but the website links out to a kids art studio in Pennsylvania. It’s all quite strange.
Adding industry key words to the search like “interactive” and “game design” produce a few links that list company incorporation details for Mermaid Studios Interactive registered in 2000 in the UK, with two potential leads — Brian Lau Tomczyk and Martin Jensen, listed as director and secretary respectively. Mr. Tomczyk doesn’t seem to have a profile on LinkedIn… but Mr. Jensen’s profile, down there below the fold of previous experience, between stints at Core Design and Shiny Entertainment has listed “Mermaid Studios Ltd — Technical Director”. The company name links out to that same random logistics company slash kids art studio, but the timeframe checks out to have potentially worked on SNOOPY TENNIS. After sending out a shot-in-the-dark contact message, this response came back a day later:
MARTIN: SNOOPY TENNIS has a funny story behind it.
Then Martin shares this bit of trivia:
MARTIN: The game was created by 2 people — Brian and Me.
Two people made an entire Game Boy Color game with licensed IP for a major publisher. How in the world?
Martin was generous enough to track down and loop in Brian Lau Tomczyk and the story formally unfolds.
MARTIN: At the time we were working for a games company called Core Design Ltd based in the UK. We were kind of fed up with the job and decided to create our own game.
BRIAN: A two man team is still a little on the “light” side even for a Game Boy game, but Martin is basically the Chuck Norris of programming, and I’m not completely useless at doing graphics. So we set out to produce the greatest tennis game ever made.
Pause for boss character introductions.
The Armadillo. Instead of naming their company after a French slang word for a male body part, founder Bruno Bonnell settled on the Armadillo as a symbol for their Société Anonyme (“SA” — the French equivalent of an incorporation) company Informatique Programmes, condensed to Infogrames. “The armadillo has always survived changes to its environment, from the melting of glaciers to the worst of heat waves.” said Bruno at the time. At the turn of the century, having completed the acquisitions of a wave of other game companies, they were also in the midst of a licensing melee, announcing partnerships with everything from Looney Tunes to La Femme Nikita — actively hanging their future growth on licensed IP to drive market awareness and sales. Tucked in amongst the deals made was an agreement for the rights to release PEANUTS related video game content.
The Beagle. One of the most iconic cartoon dogs of all time, Snoopy was big into tennis. Charlie Brown might be known for football, but Snoopy’s dreams were set on Wimbledon. Turns out creator Charles Schulz was quite the athlete, and became a huge fan of tennis in the 70’s, working the sport into his PEANUTS comics and even hosting his own real life tournament “The Snoopy Cup” where he befriended famed tennis star Billie Jean King. Like the worldwide popularity of tennis, the universally accessible minimalist cartoon Beagle became a smash hit — syndicated and licensed all over the world by United Media. In Japan, Snoopy’s popularity dwarfs all of the other characters in PEANUTS to the point where Charlie Brown is borderline unknown. The love runs so deep that Snoopy has an entire museum of his own in Tokyo. Professor Stephen J. Lynd attributes the cultural affinity for Snoopy to the Kawaii levels of cuteness the country seeks as counterbalance to their conservative work appearance pressures. With the worldwide scope of video games, the fact that the title is SNOOPY TENNIS instead of CHARLIE BROWN TENNIS or PEANUTS TENNIS is likely no accident.
The Plumber. Nintendo was one of the first to jump on the game licensing bandwagon with United Media, controller of the PEANUTS franchise. Even before the iconic plumbers Mario and Luigi came along in 1983, the former playing card maker released the precursor to modern handhelds with the identically named SNOOPY TENNIS for the “Game & Watch” portable in 1982.
The play mechanics found Snoopy swatting faster and faster tennis balls back to Charlie Brown and Lucy from the tree branches — art that was hard-printed onto the screen of the device. The device was massively successful with over a million units estimated to have been sold.
The Mermaid. We all know the Disney version of a fabled half-fish of the sea choosing to give up life as she knows it for the chance at a soul and two feet. But the story is originally an 1800’s Danish fairy tale. There’s a century-old statue of THE LITTLE MERMAID on the shore of Copenhagen in Denmark commemorating the legend where both Brian and Martin are from. Brian adds a bit of color about the name:
BRIAN: I can’t even remember how many stupid ideas we went through, but nothing really clicked. Martin wanted something with a Danish element or reference, and he eventually came up with the Mermaid part, inspired by THE LITTLE MERMAID, one of the few things Denmark is famous for. I then suggested the “Studios” part, and considering how long it had taken us to get to Mermaid, it was easy to sell Martin on it. It really wasn’t our best creative work.
It’s October 1998. At the Core Design quad in Derby (literally a house!), the mood was positively gloomy. The relentless grind Eidos imposed on Core for perpetual yearly TOMB RAIDER releases left Brian and Martin looking for distractions. They had been working closely on the Playstation title NINJA: SHADOW OF DARKNESS as Designer and Lead Programmer. The Game Boy Color had just launched.
BRIAN: We had always liked the idea of handheld games, so Game Boy with its relatively cheap 3rd party development kits and decent software emulators made it the ideal platform. I was a pretty big tennis fan, and Martin had always enjoyed keeping the universe safe from evil aliens.
MARTIN: Because we had to do the game in our spare time we had to choose a game that did not require too much work.
BRIAN: Since we were just a two-man team, and our ideas for a space shooter were quite ambitious, a tennis game seemed like a less daunting choice for our first project.
While Martin busied himself in his early days on machines like the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Brian’s teenage years in Denmark were spent partly in front of the PC and partly on the tennis court — his dad got him a racket to get him away from the computer. Initial hatred of the difficulty curve of the sport turned to love as his skills improved over time.
BRIAN: Tennis is not like badminton where you can just easily whack the ball back and forth. It’s very difficult to pick up. If you don’t know how to hit the ball correctly, you’re either going to send in into orbit or into the net. Having played most of the tennis games at the time, there were a few like SUPER TENNIS on SNES and TENNIS on the classic Game Boy that had elements I liked from the real sport, but many others were basically just PONG with rackets.
About 130 miles north and a little west of London, away from the Core Design offices in the town of Derby, the duo from Denmark got to work on the game. They had bootstrapped a space shooter game demo in college for the Amiga that got them both job offers from Core in 1995. Making the leap from Denmark to the UK together, the two still conveniently lived in the same building. 25 year old Brian designed the art and 29 year old Martin programmed the code. Fueled by vinegar-soaked french-fries from FatCat pub and Brian’s homemade bread, they talked over the phone, hoofing up the stairs to share Zip disks, and eventually setting up a local FTP server to save the trips.
MARTIN: Normally you would just program (Game Boy Games) using a Z80 Assembler but I found an open source C-Compiler for it and used that instead. It produced fast enough code and helped us reduce the development time.
The Z80 Assembly language is a style of machine code that’s a half step up from typing a string of 1’s and 0’s into the console to interface with the computer processor. Really fast to run, but really inscrutable for humans to read… ”Load A from DE then Store A into HL then Increment DE then Increment HL Then Decrement BC…” The C programming language is more friendly to translate and understand.
MARTIN: I did not have an official Nintendo Dev Kit or hardware manual so I had to do a bit of hacking around to get things working. Whenever I wanted to see the game running on a real Game Boy I had to use a flash card copier. But most of the time I just used a Game Boy emulator on the PC. I think we spent about 8–12 months getting the game to a state where we could start to shop it around to various publishers. At that point it looked nothing like SNOOPY TENNIS.
The original iteration of the game was called TENNIS CHAMP (with Core Design co-workers used as inspiration for some of the character faces). With a working build, Brian began pitching game publishers, accompanied by a demo trailer with a title card that included a text quote from an 18th century Earl of Derby.
Unfortunately with the Game Boy Advance console release looming on the horizon and the next-gen Xbox, PS2 and Game Cube development efforts subsuming resources, they found that old school Game Boy publishing interest was starting to wane.
BRIAN: We initially contacted 5 or 6 publishers. The response was a bit of a mixed bag. A few were very complimentary about the demo, but said they were getting out of the Game Boy market, and a couple others didn’t reply at all. Only one came back with what sounded like actual interest. We went back and forth with them for a little while, but the talks eventually just died out.
Meanwhile, around the time of Charles Schulz death, Infogrames had entered into licensing negotiations with United Media and in June of 2000 the spend-happy armadillo entered the picture looking to quickly capitalize on their new IP deal. Having failed to acquire Eidos and Core over the summer, Infogrames found the next nearest thing, signing two of the folks that worked there for a project.
MARTIN: (Infogrames) had just acquired the PEANUTS license and needed a title for it. Perfect match!
BRIAN: They were a little bit concerned about us only being two people, though, but I gave them the Chuck Norris spiel, and we were off to the races.
Brian quit his job at Core first and went all-in with Mermaid Studios, but Martin held out until there was an actual signed contract before jumping ship from his day job.
BRIAN: Infogrames got to work on the first draft of the contract, and everything seemed to be going smoothly. I had once heard someone in a movie say you should never accept someone’s first offer, so we asked for a bigger royalty cut, if only to make it seem like we knew what we were doing. But then the contract was suddenly delayed, and soon after our contact wasn’t replying to emails or phone calls. After a few weeks of silence, we figured this wasn’t a good sign, and that the deal was probably dead.
While waiting, Martin finished up TOMB RAIDER: THE LAST REVELATION, and got a good glimpse of work down the hall by Core Design on the TOMB RAIDER release for the Game Boy Color (Published by THQ).
BRIAN: Nearly a month later, we got an email from a new guy at Infogrames named Christophe Gomez. He informed us that he had taken over managing the office, that the guy we had previously dealt with was no longer with the company, and that he wasn’t sure which projects he could greenlight, but that he would get back to us in a week or so. So, yeah, definitely dead. But then we got a super enthusiastic email from him just a few hours later saying he thought the game looked amazing, and they wanted to move on it immediately as per the original deal. Aaaand we were back in the race.
With a signed contract, royalty deal, and a nice advance in hand, Martin quit Core Design too, continuing on the quest to be added to the ledger of tiny development teams pulling off extraordinary feats. Mermaid Studios Interactive Limited was officially registered as a company on Tuesday August 8th, 2000 under business category 62011: “Ready-made interactive leisure and entertainment software development” with Brian named as Director and Martin as Secretary.
At this point, Infogrames was a sprawling operation across the world. The old Accolade offices in San Jose were fielding games, there was the old GT Interactive corporate headquarters in Cupertino, the Humongous offices in Washington, the Hasbro Interactive location in Massachusetts, the old WizardWorks and MacSoft location in Minnesota, the old Eden Studios in France known as the “Lyon House”, in the UK the old Atari offices called the “Landmark House” and the old Gremlin Studios known as the “Sheffield House”, the old Krome Studios in Australia known as the “Melbourne House”, and the armadillo was about to take over the defunct Digital Entertainment Networks offices in Santa Monica, plus they had the joint Infogrames slash Hudson Soft location in Japan.
SNOOPY TENNIS was fielded primarily at none of those places, instead being managed out of the tiny Warner Center Office Park location in Woodland Hills, California. Gregg Nolan who helped produce marketing for the game provides some context:
GREGG: At the time the Woodland Hills office was very small, consisting mostly of dev resources and some senior staff. That office was spawned really to give Infogrames a “Hollywood” presence wanting to contract a lot more studio licenses by being in that area as opposed to up north.
SNOOPY TENNIS would be one of the last games published from that location before all of the west coast hubs were funneled into the new Santa Monica headquarters amongst the ruins of DEN. The scrappy little team in Southern California had anointed themselves the “I-STARS” (or “I-HEROES” in the European manual) and Executive Producer Christophe Gomez tasked Erick Fernandez to facilitate the remaining development process for the game.
ERICK: My job as producer was to work with all the main parties involved but specifically Mermaid Studios and the Schulz team externally. At the beginning of our relationship, I actually went up to Santa Rosa, California to have a meeting with the (Shulz) family and present the different titles we were working on. SNOOPY TENNIS was one of my favorites because of how fun it was.
On the beagle side, Paige Braddock, Creative Director of Schulz Creative Associates in Santa Rosa and Jean Sagendorph, Worldwide Director of Licensing and Brand Marketing at United Media in New York kept oversight of the details of the partnership. Thousands of miles away, Brian and Martin continued the process of adapting the existing TENNIS CHAMP game to feature Snoopy and the gang with a toolkit of supplied assets from the PEANUTS creative team.
ERICK: From what I can remember there was a lot of feedback for some of the titles, like the Playstation game we were working on they wanted a lot of changes (the canceled SNOOPY MANIA and SNOOPY DETECTIVE), but for SNOOPY TENNIS I remember them liking it right away and only requesting a few small changes.
BRIAN: They did ask to have the title of the “Sudden Death” mode changed to not include the word “Death”, so that became “Sudden Win”. Similarly, we had to change a skull icon, and a few other minor tweaks like that.
BRIAN: We also expected some pushback on the size of Woodstock. He’s obviously a tiny bird, and would have been difficult to implement at the correct size. A small, yellow sprite like that would have been difficult to distinguish from the ball, never mind how tricky it would have been to have him wield a normal sized racket. So the decision was made to make him as big as the other characters. I’m not sure it was the best idea, as it does kind of look like Big Bird walked onto the wrong set, but United Media were fine with this compromise.
ERICK: The one thing I remember asking them was to have a more gradual progression to the game, because I remember the AI being really tough at the start.
Indeed. SNOOPY TENNIS on hard mode is insanely difficult, rivaling the rage-quit inducing Turbo Tunnel in BATTLETOADS, or SUPER STAR WARS, or Mike Tyson’s PUNCH OUT! in its requirement of supreme flawless concentration, timing and focus. A continuous play-through of the Championship rounds can take upwards of two straight hours. On SpeedRun, “Peanutfan22” is the current lone record-holder for winning on medium difficulty, but in twenty years no one yet has posted a winning session on hard mode. Martin is unaware of anyone other than Brian having won the championship straight through. It’s as close as mere mortals can get to experiencing what it must be like to go up against Federer or Sampras or a giant yellow bird at Wimbledon and get your keister handed to you for three straight sets.
BRIAN: We wanted players to be able to use real tennis tactics. We created a control system where position and timing were important to pulling off the shots you wanted. For instance, other than controlling direction and depth, we also had the ability to control the height of the ball over the net. So if an aggressive opponent is attacking from the net, either a well executed low slice or a dipping topspin shot means he will either have to have great timing to be able to play a winning shot, or he will have to go for a safer volley to avoid making an error, which would then put him on the defensive. We can also use the slice as a classic chip’n-charge approach shot to get to the net, which again will require good timing from the opponent to deal with. It was important to us that the controls were created to have a certain amount of depth, but without being too complicated. That kind of depth to the shot selection and execution was something that really differentiated our game from a lot of contemporary tennis games.
Unfortunately, with the time lost in awaiting the formal contract and a strange shortage of physical cartridges in Japan, completing the game in time for the holiday release window had to be abandoned.
BRIAN: Getting the amount of games produced we needed wouldn’t be possible, even if we could get the game finished and approved by Nintendo by mid-September, which was the cutoff for a Christmas release. There was also a MARIO TENNIS game coming out, so our release was pushed further back.
Development plowed ahead in the looming shadow of MARIO TENNIS, the fallout from the dotcom bubble, all the Y2K nonsense, the release of the Playstation 2, and Infogrames completing the acquisition of Hasbro Interactive and Atari. Now in the testing and quality assurance phase of the game’s development, Erick would relay bug report communications between the San Jose QA team and Brian and Martin in the UK.
MARTIN: With regards to quality assurance: we first did internal testing, then we sent it off to Infogrames for testing. The way it worked was that we produced a “ROM” (read only memory) image. It is a bit like a zip file without compression. This image is ready to be “flashed” directly on to a cartridge. Infogrames had their own ROM cartridge burners so we just sent the file digitally. The part with the sending of the ROM is a bit hazy, I think we ftp’ed it.
Sourcing information on specifics about the QA game testing team has proven elusive. Lead tester John didn’t reply to inquiries. Brain Turner doesn’t remember. David, Jack, Jason, Jose and Richard don’t seem to exist. Kingsley might have died. Was there a darkened room in California where game testers would come to play demo versions on real devices? Were they sent password protected emulator software? Were they tasked with trying out different parts of the game?
MARTIN: The bug cycle repeated until only very minor known issues were left and we/they felt that we would have a good chance of passing the submission to Nintendo for final approval.
Each territory had their own master approval process, with NINTENDO OF AMERICA in Redmond Washington being the gatekeeper in North America. For review, a game sample had to be sent at around the half-way point in development, then again after the game was completed. Per the wording in a reference license agreement, NOA reserved the right, among other things, to check that “each Game Boy Color Game must appear significantly more colorful than monochrome Game Boy software”, and that the game was suitable, error-free, and properly certified and rated by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in New York. E for everyone.
BRIAN: All in all, development went pretty smoothly, and I don’t think it took too many attempts to get it approved. Nintendo grades various aspects of the game as part of the approval process, and we scored a massive 19.5 out of 20 for gameplay, so we were very happy with that feedback.
With final sign-off from the plumber, the cartridge manufacturing process began in the winter of 2000. In San Jose, Christopher Dawley compiled the North American version of the game manual to accompany a collection of material (including the game ROM) that was sent off to Nintendo for printing and assembly.
CHRISTOPHER: We had a lot of products that came over from other Infogrames studios around the world. They would re-publish them in the US since the development cost was already spent. We would get copies of the package, label, and manuals as assets that were already complete for other markets. SNOOPY TENNIS was one of those products that landed at Infogrames US fully formed. Most of our work was just swapping out the boilerplate information like copyrights, warnings, and localizing screenshots. We’d also alter the assets to meet Nintendo Of America’s standards. There was a lot of required stuff like legal lines and warnings that all of the first parties required be on the box and in the manual.
In addition to licensee and game integrity oversight for each region, Nintendo would perform cartridge manufacturing and packaging duties on behalf of the third party publishers. The details about the real physical production of the cart are somewhat of a mystery, but Nintendo historian John Andersen sheds light on the likely process:
JOHN: Nintendo maintained strict control over quality since the Famicom cartridge days, when one publisher in Japan had permission to make their own Famicom cartridges and messed up and made a defective cartridge. Nintendo decided to control the manufacturing of all cartridges to maintain quality. At the time SNOOPY TENNIS was published for Game Boy Color, Nintendo had three factories, which are still owned and operated by the company to this day.
The factories where the fabrication and assembly occurred were perhaps in the Uji, Uji-Ogura, or Uji-Okuba plants in Kyoto (the original home of Nintendo). You can confirm this on the back of a typical Game Boy Color box or game by finding a bit of small print indicating “Made In Japan”. And if you get the light to hit just right on any official (not bootlegged) Game Boy Color cartridge, there’s dent stamps hidden on the front of the cartridge that may indicate which factory produced the cartridge. It’s unknown what this particular two-digit number means, but someone in Nintendo headquarters probably has a rosetta stone.
Embedded onto the enclosed circuit board, memory chips would be sourced from a variety of places including Texas Instruments, Sharp, or in the sample in the unit pictured — OKI Semiconductor in Tokyo according to software developer Joonas Javanainen (aka Gekkio). For budget reasons, the mermaid had to forgo the onboard battery (MARIO TENNIS has one) that can help hold game save data, opting instead for passwords to remember progress.
Sandwich a couple billion transistors onto a green silicon wafer, weave them together with hair-thin copper conductive rivers, add a quartz crystal from Daishinku to keep the electrons in time, flash the game into permanent physical memory, add an iconic Game Boy Color transparent shell with the inner components visible for all to see, paste on the label and the cartridge is good to go.
Sliding into the back of a Game Boy Color console and powered on, electrons flow from the two AA batteries along the magic of semiconducting silicon doped with arsenic that can toggle the direction of energy through a vast nanoscopic array of logic gates into the main unit to initiate the display of the “Nintendo Game Boy Color” logo. Then energy travels through the left-most pin of the 36 pin connector, and flow of control switches to the cartridge read-only-memory, sending instructions back to the main unit to emblaze the screen with the Licensed By title card, the loopy unraveled Armadillo logo, the Mermaid, (In Japan the Hudson Soft logo next), then the language choice, and finally Snoopy in deep thought — back sprawled on a giant tennis ball — a colorized 8-bit version of the first panel of that Snoopy Tennis Book comic strip from decades ago.
After the Kyoto plants in Japan would do their own manufacturing quality checks and package the whole collection together into those signature square Game Boy Color boxes, they’d send big batches back to the states either directly to Infogrames warehouses or perhaps via the Washington State warehouse facility before making their way to the publisher’s operations hub.
DERBY TO WOODLAND HILLS: 5335 Miles
WOODLAND HILLS TO KYOTO: 5660 Miles
KYOTO TO DERBY: 9394 Miles
From notes in their annual reports, Infogrames inherited the domestic shipping and logistics setup from GT Interactive with warehousing from Arnold Logistics and Transportation provided out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Shipments from Japan likely ended up there in February 2001 at the latest, shuttling along the newly installed Dorner Sortation System, to be fanned out along conveyor belts and out to the freight trucks destined for the Walmarts and CompUSAs and Babbages of the country in time for the scheduled release.
In advance of the launch date, the marketing team kicked into high gear. Headed by Marketing Director Jeff Nuzzi and Marketing Manager Gregg Nolan, a solid campaign of audio visual material was crafted and coordinated including this bit of internet video memorabilia:
The press wave began as well. In February, the PEANUTS licensing agreement and release date was finally formally announced to the public (making it seem like the entire game was developed in under 60 days). Then the month after MARIO TENNIS was featured in a massive 8-page spread in Nintendo Power, SNOOPY TENNIS snagged the hero position in the Game Boy section with a 2-page spread, edging out Disney, Nickelodeon, Lego, and Warner Bros for the spot (THE LION KING, 102 DALMATIANS, SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS, LEGO ISLAND 2 and TINY TOONS).
BRIAN: Reviews were very positive. Most of them were in the 80–90% range, and generally compared us very favorably to MARIO TENNIS. Nintendo Power had our favorite quote. “If MARIO TENNIS is Venus Williams, then SNOOPY TENNIS is Serena…as close as it gets to matching a near-perfect game.” We obviously really liked that quote, and it’s only gotten better with time, as Serena went on to eclipse Venus’ accomplishments.
GAME BOY MAGAZYN 8/10 | NINTENDO ACCIÓN 90/100 | GBX 58/100 | ALLGAME 4.5/5 | GAMEPRO 4/5 | NINTENDO GAMER 78/100 | GAME INFORMER 7/10
An ad page ran in a variety of publications, as well as internet banners, the trailer, and marketing material across the interwebs to be in market in April when the game was in stores. Among the tie-ins, the perennial Welch’s license (maker of those collectable PEANUTS cups) was tapped for a sweepstakes on the Welch’s site called the “Center Court Challenge” to win a copy of the game.
As the project progressed, the game’s material and marketing were localized and customized for the international releases. The team from the joint partnership with Hudson Soft in Tokyo (the Japanese manual does not include a credits page like the UK and US versions) lined up a slot in the third anniversary issue of McJoy, the in-store monthly promotional magazine from McDonalds in Japan. Flipping past the Hawaii “Oahu Ohana” summer travel section, the movie review of SAVE THE LAST DANCE, the ads for Snoopy branded credit cards and Snoopy branded Swarovski watches, the beagle was included in the “Presents” page where McDonald’s credit card members (yes, McDonalds has a branded credit card) could send a postcard in for a chance to win a copy of the game.
In the UK, the armadillo tasked the “Landmark House” team headed by Brandon Smith to produce the adaptation for the European markets.
BRANDON: That is probably me in the credits, but unfortunately I didn’t actually work on SNOOPY TENNIS…at least I don’t think I did. What often happens in the games industry is the manual from one game is used as the template and copied over to the next and not always thoroughly updated on the publisher side, especially for smaller titles. There IS another Brandon Smith in the business and he is a developer. We’ve never worked together, but it’s certainly possible he was with the developer on Snoopy and that is actually him!
MARIO TENNIS hit the market first, landing in Japan in November 2000, and then Europe and the US markets in January and February 2001. SNOOPY TENNIS would drop in April in North America, then over the summer in Japan and in the fall of 2001 in Europe.
With the phased roll-out dates between territories, Brian and Martin took the time to continue to refine the game — coding features into the European and Japanese releases that are missing from the North American version.
BRIAN: We added a few minor AI tweaks, as well as short celebrations and racket smashing animations after each point.
Against the 40+ development team that worked on MARIO TENNIS, this whole achievement is stark. For a lone programmer and designer hustling for the majority of development on nights and weekends only, the game is all the more surprising in its depth. SNOOPY TENNIS includes a dozen characters each with unique play styles, a challenging competitive AI, multiple court environments, and multiple game modes including “squash mode” where you can play the ball off the side walls. Martin and Brian even managed to build in local two-player functionality via the game link.
MARTIN: The networking did complicate the code a bit. I had to test using real machines, which was a pain. It used a method called “lockstep”. You basically have to make sure that everything on the two machines is completely the same when you initiate the connection so all memory and variables have to be cleared out. When that finally worked I was quite happy.
Side-note… One of the remaining mysteries of the game is why Snoopy donned the sunglasses for the cover of the European release. Did the Brits expect a kinder more gentle tennis Joe Cool version of beagle than Americans? Are they more protective of eyesight then other countries? Maybe someday we’ll know for sure.
MARTIN: Normally when you work for a game company you receive one copy of the game you worked on if you’re lucky, but for SNOOPY TENNIS and since we were “a company” we received over 50 copies which was a crazy experience as we were only 2 people.
BRIAN: We were almost more excited about getting our hands on those than getting the final milestone payment. And although we had seen physical copies of other games we had worked on before, it was definitely a super exciting moment, when we got the box with all the international versions and gazed upon our creation. But if Martin tells you I would spread my copies out on my bed and roll around in them, that’s a total lie. IT NEVER HAPPENED!!!
In the Infogrames annual earnings report, the cost and revenue for all published titles is aggregated so it’s tough to tell how many individual units were made and how financially successful SNOOPY TENNIS itself was, but the armadillo did provide a breakdown by category:
FORM 10-K: During fiscal 2001 (June 30, 2000 — June 30, 2001), the Company’s product mix consisted of 65% PC games, 23% Sony PlayStation games, 6% Sony PlayStation 2 games, 3% SEGA Dreamcast games, and 3% Nintendo Game Boy games. Approximately 65% of revenues were related to PC product revenues and 35% of revenues were related to console games.
Performing some very bad math, net revenue was reported at $310.5 million which would leave $108.7 million (35%) for the console market, of which $3.27 million (3%) might have been from total game sales for the Nintendo product category.
There were 10 Game Boy Color titles released by the Infogrames divisions that fiscal year in North America. Dividing by ten leaves approximately $325,000 thousand as a potential benchmark for SNOOPY TENNIS net revenue. David Fremed, the CFO at the time has not responded to inquiries to confirm.
INFOGRAMES GAME BOY COLOR RELEASES: JULY 2000 — JULY 2001
TEST DRIVE CYCLES, ROCKY MOUNTAIN TROPHY HUNTER, Q*BERT, GALAGA DESTINATION EARTH, FROGGER 2 SWAMPY’S REVENGE, LOONEY TUNES MARVIN STRIKES BACK!, TEST DRIVE 2001, LOONEY TUNES RACING, SNOOPY TENNIS, POWER STRIKE PRO BEACH VOLLEYBALL
But anyway, continuing the terrible math, the game retailed for $29.99… assuming a conservative 40% retail markup and 40% wholesale margin, that’s a per unit cost of around $4.80 which seems plausible with economies of scale, putting total units at around 70,000 sold, rounded up.
That number is wrong, but could very well be indicative of the impact the upstaging plumber had on its competition. For comparison, MARIO TENNIS sold 1.1 Million copies. With two tennis games in market at the same time, but one backed by the Nintendo first party publishing juggernaut it was inevitable that one would be overshadowed. Could it have been that the manufacturing of MARIO TENNIS was the convenient reason for the “cartridge shortage” that kept SNOOPY TENNIS from being able to hit stores first? Had SNOOPY TENNIS made it to market first in time for that holiday rush in 2000, the story might likely have been different — the plumber would have been compared to the beagle rather than the other way around.
MARTIN: For me it was always a strange feeling when the game you have just worked on for ages hits the shelves — Completely euphoric but at the same time so final and empty.
SNOOPY TENNIS would be the one and only published game capitalizing on the five-year license Infogrames had for the PEANUTS brand (Namco snagged the license when it came up for renewal in 2005).
Once the game was completed, Brian and Martin briefly looked to make a go of it as an independent game company with Infogrames as a client.
BRIAN: Infogrames were trying to get us onto another project for them. They were taking bids from developers for a MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and a SUPERMAN game. We actually put together a rough, but kind of cool looking playable Gameboy Advance demo of a SUPERMAN game, but neither project ended up going ahead. I was a little disappointed we didn’t get to do the GBA version, as I’m a huge SUPERMAN fan.
After three years together at Mermaid Studios, Martin and Brian parted ways — with Jensen moving to California briefly to join Shiny Entertainment in 2002 (soon to be another inescapable Infogrames company acquisition). The undying love for tennis did lead Brian to get Martin to team back up again under the Mermaid Studios shingle to create POWER PLAY TENNIS (aka TENNIS MASTERS) for the Nintendo DS, released in Europe in 2007 by CodeMasters and System 3 Software. You can see their names “Martin|Brian” in the screen shots of the scoreboard.
From the “I-Stars” team, Christophe is now co-founder of “50 Productions” for AR/VR games and projects out of Los Angeles. Erick is owner of “ApexWins” creating visual content for social media out of Italy. Jeff is Co-Founder of “Like Pizza Studios” creating video games and animation in Pasadena, California. Gregg is now a stunt double and sky diver for the film industry.
As for Martin, he’s back in Denmark fielding contract work for game development and is consulting for a new app that mixes gaming and dating.
MARTIN: I had so much fun working on SNOOPY TENNIS and to this day I still consider it one of my best games.
Brian continues to create art and design for game developers as well as contract work for the creation and editing of promotional web and video content.
BRIAN: Revisiting Snoopy Tennis has made me wonder if maybe it’s time to do another tennis game. Nintendo Switch seems kinda fun.
Now, in celebration of the 70th anniversary year of PEANUTS, the 40th anniversary of the original SNOOPY TENNIS Game & Watch, and the 20th anniversary of SNOOPY TENNIS for Game Boy Color, someone get out there and claim the SNOOPY TENNIS trophy on hard mode in a single play-through as Snoopy himself. Good luck, Chuck.
Special thanks to these folks for their contributions to this story: Martin Jensen, Brian Lau Tomcsyk, Erick Fernandez, Gregg Nolan, Brandon Smith, Brian Turner, Christopher Dawley, Michael Haller, Ronald Rudolph, Laddie Ervin, Joonas Javanainen, Stephen J. Lynd, Craig Harris, John Anderson, Dave Taylor, Jake Simpson, Sarah Breaux, and Alex Pham. Also a moment of appreciation for the Internet Archives and the Wayback Machine, without which much of these gems of nostalgia would have been lost to the internet plumbing ruptures.
Correspondence were traded via email and LinkedIn messaging in late 2020 and early 2021 and have been edited for grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. Additional information beyond what is hyperlinked was sourced primarily from old Infogrames quarterly and annual reports.
