TENNIS COMPUTER GAME COVERS

I think it’s about time for more home computer sports game covers, don’t you? Whaddya mean, “no”? It’s too late now, I’ve already gathered together a bunch of cover art from tennis games and I’m not going to let all that back-breaking effort go to waste. Previously I’ve checked out cover art from “sporting” genres such as snooker and chess, but tennis feels like an especially appropriate sport to look at because hey, Pong is essentially a tennis game, right? And Pong is such a milestone in the development of videogames that making dumb jokes about the cover art of the games it spawned is basically the same as doing important academic work. I'm a historian! Cool, I’ve convinced myself. Let’s get to it, then!

Tennis Cup, Amiga, Loriciel

Immediately I realised that the concept of this article might be fundamentally flawed, because there’s only so much I’m going to be able to say about images of people wearing all-white outfits and holding tennis racquets. I suppose I’ll just have to zero in on the finer details, like the way the guy on the left is holding his racquet in a way that suggests he’s preparing for an overhead chop. I could create an elaborate backstory to explain this, one where he grew up in an isolated mountain cabin until one day he was spotted by an ageing tennis coach who realised the young man’s firewood chopping technique could be converted into a phenomenally powerful backhand. Hire me to write your sports anime, please.
However, what really stands out to me is just how incredibly smooth and hairless everybody’s legs are, especially the chap in the centre. He must be at least twenty-five percent dolphin.

Konami’s Tennis, ZX Spectrum, Konami / Imagine

More smooth legs on display here, too. I thought it was swimmers who removed all their body hair?  Are all professional tennis players competing in these tournaments in the hope of winning enough money to pay off the crippling debts they owe to Veet? I’m not complaining really, this is a perfectly good piece of artwork from prolific computer game artist Bob Wakelin. It’s got movement, precision, a weirdly out-of-place desert chrome logo and the guy on the right’s foot is dissolving away into nothingness. What more could you ask for?

Konami’s Tennis, MSX, Konami

Over on the cover for the MSX version of the same game, we see some very unsporting behaviour as one player celebrates hitting her opponent in the head with the ball. There’s definitely something nasty about that character, as though they revel in the pain of others. Between her single tooth and the fact she’s literally sticking two fingers up at the player, she’s got the air of a petulant baby-person. The on-court tantrums of John McEnroe in the body of a weird pop-art baby with a serious case of Popeye Elbows, that’s what this cover is all about.

International Tennis, ZX Spectrum, Zeppelin Games

Full marks to the artist on this one for taking on the difficult task of making a tennis game look “international” by covering the player in a variety of national flags. Some of the flags might look a little strange – I’m not sure what’s going on with that starless, six-striped US flag beyond the artist understandably not wanting to draw all those stars – but it gets the point across. If that wasn’t enough, there’s a world map printed on the tennis ball. Yes, the only way this could have more succinctly conveyed the idea of international tennis is if it was a picture of the very continents themselves holding tennis racquets, which is what I would have done. Antarctica would have been the umpire.

Advantage Tennis, Amiga, Infogrames

Now here’s a cover I do genuinely like. Sure, it’s painfully nineties with a colour scheme that reminds me of buying packs of highlighter pens during the back to school shop and then never using them, but at least it’s not smooth-legged people in white clothes. The stark background and logo makes for a nice contrast with the colour and fluidity of the chalk drawings, and if you ever needed a theme for a music video to go with an eighties song about tennis, then here you go. Not that there are many eighties songs about tennis, of course. There’s Chris Rea’s “Tennis,” I suppose, but that’s not really about tennis. Nice bass riff, though. Where was I? Oh, right, tennis covers.

On-Court Tennis, Commodore 64, Activision

This chap seems confused that someone has written a bunch of cryptic information on the tennis ball he’s trying to hit. “What is this ‘flash load’?” he ponders as he prepares to slice the ball back over the net. Unfortunately for him he will never be a world-class tennis player, because this artwork clearly depicts him as having hair on his arms. With the extra drag this generates he won’t be fast enough to compete against his hairless rivals.

Match Point, Commodore 64, Psion

Here we see a tennis player whose nickname is undoubtedly “The Underbite.” Captured in this image is The Underbite’s sudden realisation that maybe he should have brought a full-sized racquet to this match instead of the Action Man accessory he’s currently using. Speaking of Action Man, this image looks like it was taken straight from the cover of a sixties or seventies “men’s magazine,” except instead of surviving a World War II ambush or hunting big game he’s getting some healthy exercise down at the local tennis club before heading back to job at the council.

Tournament Tennis, Commodore 64, Imagic

Have you ever wondered what a statue of a tennis player carved from glistening, meaty dog food would look like? No, me neither, but here we are. This is the terrible knowledge that we both now share. I wonder what the thinking behind this particular aesthetic choice was? An attempt to create the ur-tennis-player, perhaps, one that exhibits protean strength and finesse, one that belongs to no single race or creed? That could be the case. Equally the artist could have been eating a treacle sponge while doing the artwork and, having dropped a big dollop of their dessert onto the paper, they decided to work it into the art. Whoever this mysterious player is, they’re in a for a real surprise when they realise that’s not a tennis ball coming at them, and someone’s whipped a cue ball towards them instead.

International 3D Tennis, ZX Spectrum, Sensible Software

I showed this one in an earlier sports game covers article, but I can’t leave it out. I just really like the idea of a tennis game cover that captures the exact moment a player suffers a horrible ankle injury. Not in a mean way, I hasten to add. I just think it’s weird, is all. I also think this player looks like unthreatening pop-jazz musician Jamie Cullum. Perhaps the broken ankle is punishment for Cullum’s anodyne cover of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lover, You Should Have Come Over.”

Jahangir Khan World Championship Squash, ZX Spectrum, Krisalis Software

I figured I’d chuck in a few covers from adaptations of other racquet sports, because why not? What is squash if not a game of tennis played against a wall? I’m sorry, any squash players who might be reading this, I’m sure you hear that kind of unfair dismissal of your chosen sport all the time.
So, here we’ve got to blokes playing squash, which is fair enough for the cover of a squash game. Leg-hair status: just as bald as tennis. The guy on the left’s leg is so smooth that it’s producing a blinding glare with which he can dazzle and disorient his opponent, which I’m sure isn’t technically against the rules of squash but is certainly rather poor sportsmanship
I say “that guy,” but of course he’s the eponymous Jahangir Khan, a man who was certainly a squash champion. How much of a champion? Well, according to his Wikipedia page, Khan won five hundred and fifty-five squash matches. In a row. A five-and-a-half-year unbeaten streak. At that point you have to wonder whether all the other squash professionals’ hearts were really in it any more. “A tournament’s coming up, huh? Oh, Jahangir Khan has entered. You know what, I think I’ll save the air fare.” Khan eventually lost his streak in 1987. After that he went on another nine-month unbeaten run. He was good at squash, is what I’m saying, and he must have been a real easy pick for the star of this computer squash game. Khan is also the uncle of Natasha Khan, better known as the musician Bat for Lashes. I don’t know why this article has ended up containing so much music trivia. Maybe I’ve got a subconscious desire to write about music or something, so let’s give it a try – I’ve been listening to Alice Cooper’s albums that he doesn’t remember making recently, the ones from the deepest points of his struggle with alcohol and drugs, and there’s some fun, weird stuff in there. Check out the track “Skeletons in the Closet,” for example. Okay, hopefully that’s gotten the musical stuff out of my system for now.

Jonah Barrington’s Squash, ZX Spectrum, New Generation Software

Here’s another cover that you might have seen before if you follow me on Twitter, and it might be my favourite of the bunch. It must have taken a huge amount of effort to get a professional athlete to look this uncomfortable. What on earth was the direction behind this piece? “That’s great Jonah, we’ve got some good action shots, but what if you pretended to be trapped in a giant, invisible baby bouncer? I feel that could really work as a concept.”

Superstar Ping-Pong, Commodore 64, SilverTime

Ping Pong also gets a seat at this table, of course. Not an especially interesting cover on its own, the real charm of Superstar Ping-Pong comes from that advertising blurb. “The potential of a ping-pong game has at last been realised” is such an overblown statement that it’s impossible not to love, as though there were millions of die-hard table tennis fans out there thinking “soon the computers will be able to recreate the game we love with perfect fidelity, and when that day comes we can at last fold up our ping-pong tables and put them away in the garage forevermore. No longer will we suffer the tyranny of not having enough space to play table tennis! This glorious day is soon at hand, my brothers and sisters!”

Table Tennis Simulation, Atari ST, Starbyte

You might be thinking that’s it’s not going to be an accurate simulation of table tennis if you’re playing as a tortoise, and you’d be right. Have you seen how fast top-level ping-pongers go at it? No, I think this cover is actually a clever piece of expectation management. By showing you tortoises right out of the gate, the game is subtly conditioning you to not be surprised when the actual game runs really slowly. Crafty, very crafty.

Ping Pong, Commodore 64, Konami / Imagine

A much better cover here, as you might expect from a company like Konami. There’s almost a martial arts flavour to it, I reckon. Mind you, that might be because I’ve been playing Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise recently so when I see people leaving ghostly after-images of themselves when they move, that’s what I’m reminded of. Still, I feel like if you changed the background and airbrushed out the paddles you’d have a perfectly acceptable cover for Yie Ar Kung Fu.

Tiebreaker, Commodore 64, Kingsoft

The more you look at this cover, the more bizarre it gets. Just how long is that net? Why has the player gently knocked the ball straight to his opponent instead of trying to score a point by blasting it into the vast unoccupied space provided by this huge circular court? Are the insurers of this event not worried that one of the players might injure themselves by colliding with the six-foot tall trophy that’s right in the play area? The plaque on the trophy implies that the current holders are Kingsoft themselves, so we’re left to assume that they’ve created their own bizarro version of tennis in an attempt to spice things up.

Serve and Volley, Commodore 64, Accolade

I feel like the artist on this one ran out of energy just before they got to the racquet. Everything else is perfectly fine, but the racquet seems to have been painted on in Tipp-Ex. Unless… that’s the ghost of a tennis racquet?

Passing Shot, Commodore 64, Sega / Image Works

Definitely the most boring cover I’ll show you today is this re-release art for Passing Shot. It’s... a tennis ball. This is a tennis game on the Commodore 64, and that’s more than enough to give you a very strong idea of how it’s going to play. However, there is that title logo, and if on first glance you read it as Passing Shot and not Passing, erm, something else, you’re a better person than I.

Real Tennis, MSX, Takara

To finish the article, let’s quickly look at a selection of fascinating faces, starting with this one where a young man has suddenly arrived at the realisation that he’d rather be doing anything else with his life than playing tennis. “Aww geez, he’s hit the ball back towards me again,” his expression seems to say, “how long will this nightmare continue? I could be at home watching YouTube videos of motorsport accidents!”

Grand Slam, Amiga, Infinity Software

Look at this doe-eyed youth, fresh of face and lean of limb, a slight smile on his lips. That’s how you know he’s not a real sportsperson, they don’t tend to smile while they’re actually playing their sports. You wouldn’t either if you went through the same training regimen as a pro athlete.

Jonah Barrington’s Squash, Commodore 64, New Generation Software

Finally for today, this alternate cover for Jonah Barrington’s Squash reveals the true emotion that squash brings to the surface – pure, undiluted terror. These men are clearly very frightened of what’s going on around them, the icy claw of horror scratching at their hearts as the walls of the squash court seem to press in on them. I can only assume that the winner of this match has to face Jahangir Khan next.

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BUFFALO BILL'S WILD WEST SHOW (AMIGA)

I’m sure a lot of you are looking forward to Red Dead Redemption 2. Ah, the lure of the untamed West, rifle-fire echoing down a lonesome canyon, hours spent parking your horse on top of dead animals so you could harvest their skin without having to see the associated cutscene for the seven thousandth time. No, wait, that was the first Red Dead Redemption. While we all wait for Rockstar’s latest git-along-little-dogie-em-up, here’s another slice of Wild West action that’ll make you really appreciate modern videogames: it’s Tynesoft’s 1989 Amiga game Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, also known as Buffalo Bill's Rodeo Games!

Here’s William Frederick Cody himself, or Buffalo Bill to his friends. I image most people will still at least recognise the name Buffalo Bill, and that’s hardly surprising because he was one of the most famous people in the world around the turn of the twentieth century. A legend of the Old West, Buffalo Bill rode for the Pony Express, fought in the America Civil War and shot a bewildering amount of buffalo, hence the name. So well-know was he that both King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II took a break from that minor kerfuffle called the First World War to pay their condolences when he died. Bill’s fame came in large part from his travelling Wild West Show, a mixture of sharp-shooters, battle re-enactments and (presumably) grisly mountains of dead buffalo, a show which toured Europe and the USA. That’s what this game is inspired by, so grab your shootin’ irons and get ready for yet another entry in the interminable genre of home-computer multi-event sports titles!

That’s right, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is a multi-event sports game, although at least the Wild West Show theme provides a pretty sensible reason to offer up a selection of cowboy-themed minigames. Event names like Bronco Riding and Steer Wrestling immediately conjure images of joysticks knackered beyond repair by intense waggling, but hopefully the shooting games will be less taxing on the hardware.

First up is Knife Throwing, as presented by a Native American chap who smiles fondly at a hovering knife. Perhaps the knife was a gift from a long-ago lover, or perhaps he admires the intricate detail on the sheathe. Intricate is the word, and you can’t fault Buffalo Bill’s pixel work on these splash screen – it’s all very crisp and well-drawn. I’d go so far as to say it’s the game’s best feature. I’d have said that before I’d played any of the minigames, to be honest. I’ve played enough home computer multi-event sports games to know what’s coming.

Yep, that’s about what I expected. Some poor woman is strapped to a revolving wheel, and you’re tasked with throwing knives near – but not at – her. Knives that land closer to the woman score more points, and you control the action with either the mouse or a joystick. I went with the mouse, hoping it would give me greater control, but alas the crosshair wobbles around the screen in a manner that suggests the knife-thrower is standing atop a partially-filled waterbed. So, you move the cursor to roughly the right spot, holding the jiggling crosshair as near to the woman as you dare, then you press fire to throw the knife. There’s a fair old delay between pressing the button and the knife landing, so while there is some skill involved the sullen hand of Luck weighs heavy around your shoulder during this event.

You get eight knives to throw and score points with so, erm, do that. Try not to get distracted by the horse or the gopher that sometimes pops out of the ground. Once you’ve thrown your knives it’s on to the next event… okay, fine. I know you’re all wondering what happens if you hit the woman with a knife, you jackals.

The screen runs red with blood and the knife-throwing competition immediately ends, as you'd bloody well hope it would. Sadly there is no “panicked call to the insurance company” minigame.

Here’s a gun. I assume it’s a Colt Single Action Army, what with this being a Wild West game and all. Mind you, everything I know about revolvers I learned from Revolver Ocelot, so I wouldn’t take my word for it. Do you think gun nerds ever get confused as to why “ocelot” keeps popping up in the autocomplete when they’re looking up Colt SAAs online?

The first part of this event has the shooting part down but not so much the “trick” bit. It’s a fairly standard videogame shooting gallery, where cardboard cut-outs of various people appear and you have to assess their threat levels before blowing the appropriate targets away. I must confess I had some trouble on that front. The identifying part, I mean. Some of the targets easily discounted, of course: gunning down little kids and unarmed women is almost always frowned upon in these kinds of games.

But then there are scenarios like this, where a man with his hands on his holsters and a look of steely determination in the two pixels that make up his eyes lurches out at me. He’s clearly getting ready to draw, so I fired first and whoops, I guess the tiny star on his chest means he’s the sheriff and now I’m wanted for killing a lawman. There are also targets that appear facing away from you and you’re presumably penalised for being the kind of coward that would shoot a man in the back, even though logically that’s the best place to shoot someone.

Your actual targets are anyone with a gun in their hand who’s looking right at you, and they make up a surprisingly small proportion of the potential targets. The trick to this trick shooting is not falling asleep while waiting for a viable target to appear.

The second half is a bottle shooting challenge where your cowpoke assistant throws glass bottles across the screen in a variety of trajectories and you have to shoot them out of the air. The same crosshair wobble from the knife-throwing game is in effect here, and while it didn’t matter much (or at all) in the target shooting round, here the precision required to hit the bottles is such that it’s frustrating to have your crosshair right over the bottle, only for it to suddenly jerk out of the way. Other than that – and the need to reload your gun by hitting the right mouse button – it’s just pointing, and indeed clicking.
The music helps keep things interesting. It’s an aggressively jolly version of the folk song “Shortnin’ Bread,” which isn’t very interesting in and of itself but it did remind me to listen to The Cramps tearing through their version of Shortnin’ Bread, so it gets points for that.

Event number three is Bronco Riding. If this title screen is to believed, the act of bronco riding fills a cowboy with a sense of transcendental bliss. That’s what I’m reading into his expression, anyway. Also I know he’s wearing a cowboy hat but I can’t see it as anything but a massive afro.
Right, here we go. Ridin’ a bucking bronco. So, how does this wor…

Aaand I’m down. It wasn’t so much a display of bronco riding as it was a fast-acting horse catapult. I know the timer at the top-right says I lasted six seconds, but I did not. The timer in this game runs really fast, and in reality I lasted about one second. In my defence, the game does not exactly ease you into the event gently.

The horse goes all-out to evict the cowboy as soon as the event starts, but I tried again and this time I was prepared for the gameplay, which involves nothing more than holding the joystick in the direction of the arrows that pop up on screen. Obviously the arrows are constantly changing direction, so a successful bronco ride is a test of reactions. It’s okay, I suppose. Not particularly exciting, but enlivened by the rather fun graphics of the horse thrashing around as I’m sure we all would if some moustachioed lunatic with a name like Jeb or Cletus jumped onto our backs. Or maybe you wouldn’t. I don’t know what kind of stuff you’re into.

On to the second disk and the fourth event with Stage Coach Rescue. We’re rescuing it from that Native American chap sitting on top. The law of the Old West is harsh, and there can be no mercy for fare-dodgers.

Up until now Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show has been relatively inoffensive, but the stage coach chase sees it dip into some deeply frustrating territory. It’s a two-part event, and your first mission is to catch up to the stagecoach. You can move your horse up and down to avoid the energy-sapping crates that are thrown from the top of the stagecoach, but to actually reach the stagecoach you have to waggle the joystick left and right. You have to waggle it a lot. A ludicrous amount, considering you also have to concentrate on not getting whacked by flying luggage. I would recommend wearing some kind of wrist brace, or possible strapping your controller to a high-powered reciprocating saw.

You’re goddamn right I am, this is the most physical effort I’ve expended since an ill-advised attempt to run for a bus in 2013. After many attempts – and starting the game again so I could turn the difficulty down from medium to easy, which didn’t seem to make any difference – I finally managed to catch the carriage and climb aboard.

Now comes the difficult part of the event. It’s a mano-a-mano fist-fight now, in a fairly typical style for a computer game of this vintage. You can throw punches at your opponent’s head, or you can crouch down and try to punch him square in the dick, which would be a fitting punishment for making me do all that joystick waggling. You can also hold fire and backwards to block, a technique that is only useful to precognitive psychics who know what attacks are coming because there’s no chance you’ll be able to react in real time.
I never managed to clear this event. It was just too damn hard. Between the fact that you’ll almost certainly be missing some energy from the first half of the stage, the sluggish movements of your cowboy and the strict time limit, emerging victorious was beyond me. If my time spent looking up gameplay videos of this section is anything to go by, it’s completely beyond everybody else, too.

Time to pick on weaker, more vulnerable target with some calf roping. Is that cowboy holding the end of his lasso in his teeth? Well, I suppose dentistry was hard to come by in the Wild West.

Oh good, this is a much more gentle gameplay experience than the last event. You chase down the calf by moving the joystick in the four main directions. Catching up to the calf isn’t difficult in itself, but you have to be at a specific distance to the side of the calf for a successful lasso throw: too close or too far away and you’ll miss, and you’re only given one chance to throw your rope. Plus, the track is littered with obstacles like hay bales and barrels, and touching one will also cause you to fail. Thus the event becomes a test of patience, where you wait for the right moment to strike, when man, cow and rope are perfectly aligned. I kinda like it, and I think if you fleshed this event out a bit, maybe with multiple cows to rope or different courses, it could be fairly entertaining.
Oh, and I’m sorry to disappoint you but that meter at the bottom of the screen doesn’t say “danceometer.” It’s “distanceometer,” because you can run out of track if you don’t catch the calf in time. I wish it was a danceometer. You fill it up and all the cowboys in the stand jump down and perform a rousing version of “Oklahoma!” or something. The calf slips away in the confusion, escaping to a life running free on the plains, everybody wins.

The final event is Steer Wrestling and not, as this picture suggests, Riding a Bull Like a Motorcycle and Drop-Kicking a Horse.

Steer wrestling is a mixture of previous events’ controls schemes, with the first part being much like calf roping: get your horse alongside the bull without crashing into anything. Once you’re in position, press fire you jump from your horse and grab the bull by the, well, you know. You can retry the events as many times as you like, so I’d recommend jumping when you’re nowhere near the bull at least once because it’s pretty funny watching the cowboy swan-dive into the mud.

Okay, so you’ve got a grip on the furious, thrashing bull and you’re probably thinking “maybe this wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had, I should have stuck with gold prospecting or whistling along the lonesome trail or whatever else it is that cowboys do.” Tough, you’re here now and you’ve got a steer to wrestle. That means more joystick waggling. Here’s what the resulting struggle ’twixt man and beast looks like.

That bull is not pleased about this turn of events. Excellent work here on the artist’s part, managing to capture a look of pure black hatred in the steer’s eyes. The cowboy might have wrestled it to the ground, but he’s going to have to let go at some point and then, well, there’s probably a reason that this is the last event.

With all events cleared the game abruptly ends, and you’re back to the main menu where you can reflect on what you’ve just experienced. I’ll tell you what I experienced – the horrible sensation of having multiple songs stuck in my head at once, thanks to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show having a soundtrack containing extremely jaunty versions of tracks like “Oh Susanna” and the William Tell Overture, every one of which reminds me of watching old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
As for the gameplay, it’s a mixture of the passable and the annoying. The shooting events are okay, although too basic to hold your interest, the cattle-grabbing games are a bit more enjoyable but still very limited and the stagecoach chase is a festering lesion on Satan’s ballbag. Okay, that’s going a bit far but it definitely isn’t fun. I’m sticking by my assertion that the graphics are by far the best part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, but apart from the visual flair on display it’s just yet another entry in the long, long list of underwhelming home computer multi event sports games – and it didn’t make me want to say yee-haw even once.

One last thing – I checked the high score tables to see how well I’d done (answer: not very) and saw that the developers had populated the board with “comedy” names, including members of the Addams Family, characters from the Rik Mayall / Adrian Edmondson shows The Young Ones and Filthy, Rich and Catflap and the set pictured above, which are all characters from the “beloved” and definitely not for children British comic Viz. Roger Mellie, Buster Gonad, Billy the Fish, the gang’s all here. Of course, this is a sign that I should get around to covering the Viz computer game at some point. I might have to put a content warning on that one.

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SNOOKER AND POOL COMPUTER GAME COVERS

Previously I’ve written about the cover art from a bunch of home computer sports games, and that was a lot of fun because early home computer game cover art is always a treat to look at – a heady mix of amateurism, passion, marketing tactics and questionable artistic talent. I even rounded up a load of chess game covers one time, and from there we come to today’s article. It’s a personal challenge of sorts – I thought to myself “what sub-genre of “sports” games is likely to have even more boring cover art than chess?” and the answer has at last presented itself. Why, it’s snooker games, of course! Also some pool games. You know, to jazz things up a bit. There are way more snooker and pool games on the 8-bit computers than I thought there’d be, so chalk your cues and let’s start wading through some of them. I apologise in advance for the fact that by the end of this article the word “snooker” is going to read like some completely nonsensical bullshit.

Snooker, ZX Spectrum, Arctic Computing

Oh yeah, we’re right into it with a cover that’s undeniably about snooker and also dull enough halt a herd of stampeding buffalo at one hundred metres. At least with a chess game you can make the pieces look different – wizards, monsters, T-800 Terminator endoskeletons – and still have the concept of chess come across, but with snooker you’re limited to just using coloured balls. If the snooker balls were replaced by the heads of famous movie stars it wouldn’t be snooker, it’d be a terrible accident at the Oscars, you know?
There are a couple of semi-interesting points here, though. I love the tubular font that a) I’m sure I’ve seen used in a bunch of other places and b) I can’t remember any of those uses off the top of my head. Then there’s the positions of the balls. That’s not how you set up a snooker table! Must be practising some trick shots. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Snooker, Commodore 64, Visions Software Factory

There’s a really strong vibe I’m getting from this cover, and that vibe is “1980s horror novel.” I can’t help but imagine it as something like James Herbert’s The Rats or Shaun Hutson’s Slugs, except rather than a swarm of killer animals it’s about a cursed snooker table that eats people. The tagline would be “first the red, then the black...” and I would read it five times a year.

Classic Snooker, Commodore 16, Anco

In which the hapless snooker player has somehow launched a red right off the table, sending it hurtling towards the viewer who’s about to learn first-hand what a broken nose feels like. No joke, snooker balls are dangerous. At the risk of furthering the notion that I live my life trapped in an episode of You’ve Been Framed, I was once playing pool with some friends and one of them chipped a ball off the table and directly into my groin. That one stung for a while, let me tell you.
Also, and I’m sure this is just me and a misplaced sense of paranoia but I get the feeling that the red ball is looking at me. Silently hovering slightly off-centre, its blank, ineffable surface forcing me to question myself and doing a decent job of distracting me from the fact that the border around the artwork is suspiciously Christmas-y. Perhaps this is reference to those shrunken-down snooker tables with miniature balls and cues that were a popular Christmas present when I was a kid, despite them being rubbish.

Professional Snooker Simulator, ZX Spectrum, Codemasters

Okay, so the player sitting down is definitely checking out the other guy’s arse, right? “Oh yeah, you go for that long red, that’s the stuff.” I hope they’re in a committed relationship, otherwise ogling another person’s backside while you drink from your big bottle of scotch is just not on. Learn some boundaries, you creep.
Also take note of the trophy at the back. Apart from being gold rather than silver, it’s a good likeness of the real World Snooker Championship trophy. Would you like to see what the actual trophy looks like? Tough, I’m going to show it anyway.

Steve Davis World Snooker, Amiga, CDS

Here’s the trophy being modelled by six-time world champion Steve Davis. Ha ha, look, he’s got the trophy on his head! Zany or what?! Yes, this is about as wacky as the world of professional snooker gets, folks - well, at least during the matches themselves. Away from the table, a lot of the players liked a drink and if you did a swab for cocaine on that trophy I wouldn't be surprised whatever the reult was.
None of that applied to Steve Davis, a man whose image was so boring and reserved even by the popular conception of snooker players that it earned him the ironic nickname “Interesting.” To his credit, Steve Davis has a good sense of humour about this and by people who watch snooker (myself included) he’s very well-liked

Steve Davis Snooker, Commodore 64, CDS

It’s a good job Steve Davis is well-liked, because here he is again, his helmet of ginger hair so firmly affixed that it could deflect a strike from a broadsword. I know he’s squinting to help line up his shot, but this is a much more enjoyable image if you pretend Steve’s practising his Roger Moore impression. You must get a lot of snooker players going to costume parties as James Bond. They already own most of the outfit, after all.

Electronic Pool, Amiga, Microdeal

Moving over to pool now, and I’m very sorry because this might be the most boring cover featured here today. Someone went to a decent amount of effort to capture the wood grain of the table’s side, and yet we’re compelled to ask why? I’m not saying there should be flaming skidmarks following behind the ball and a robot with a cue for an arm proclaiming his superiority over the pitiful meat-based human players, but no, hold on, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Pool, ZX Spectrum, Bug-Byte

Ahh, that’s more like it – a bit of good ol’ American razzmatazz, a star-spangled logo and at least some sense of movement surrounding a player who’s probably named after a US city. Joey “The Wichita Cleaner” Sobolewski, let’s call him. It’s much more likely to grab the attention of a browsing shopper than most of these other covers, that’s for sure. After staring at it for a while, I suddenly realised what the logo reminded me of, too; it’s like the Polo mints logo fell into a bucket of Fourth of July fireworks and the letters got mixed up.

Hustler, Commodore 16, Bubble Bus Software

Also very American but in a different way is this cover, because there’s no way this character doesn’t talk like the most stereotypical gangster wiseguy imaginable. “Ey, youse guys, I’m gonna sink dis here eight-ball inna dat dere corner pocket, capisce?” Yep, that’s definitely the voice. Now I want to watch The Sopranos again, although that might be a bit excessive considering I only just finished watching it all the way through again a few weeks ago. Did you know that the actor who played Furio in The Sopranos is also a fine artist, and he bought a painting for 50,000 Euros, had it restored and it turned out to be a baroque masterpiece worth ten million dollars? What an incredible story; from artist to actor whose most famous line is probably “you got a bee on your hat” to an extremely wealthy artist. None of that is relevant here, of course.
What is relevant is Bubble Bus’ fantastic logo. They called their company Bubble Bus, so naturally their logo is of a Bubble Bus and if you’d asked me before I saw it what a hypothetical bubble bus would look like I’d have no bloody clue – but Bubble Bus Software nailed it, bless them.

Hustler, ZX Spectrum, Top Ten

Hustler had a few different ports and covers, such as this one for the Spectrum re-release. I’m at a point in my life where I’m struggling with my sense of self-worth, so I see this cover asking “are you good enough?” and I’m thinking shit, man, I wish I knew. Other than that, I like that they’ve specified “pub game” down in the corner. Maybe they were worried that people who bought Hustler would think they were getting a computer version of the porn mag.

Minnesota Fats Pool Challenge, Commodore 64, HES

Is there anyone left alive who can hear the name Minnesota Fats and not immediately think of Homer Simpson saying “they don’t call me Springfield Fats just because I’m morbidly obese”? Surely not. I know that’s the first thing I thought of when presented with this cover, which is kinda… not bad? It’s got a sense of flair to it, anyway, with the slightly geometric look making it stand out from the crowd. It loses points for having someone’s smug granddad be the focus of the artwork, sure, but I’d take a thousand smug granddad over something like that Electronic Pool cover.

Championship 3D Snooker, Commodore 64, Zeppelin Games

Fresh from the nightmares conjured by the darkest recesses of your mind, it’s Cuey the Cue Ball! Okay, so I made that name up, but I feel like there’s a 50-50 chance that this hideous snooker gremlin is called Cuey. You might be wondering why Cuey has huge glasses and gargantuan and disturbingly human eyes, and surprisingly the answer isn’t “so he can hunt you more efficiently in low-light conditions.” No, he’s presumably designed in reference to former snooker champion Dennis Taylor, who was famous for wearing enormous spectacles. It now occurs to me that this is only half an explanation, because Dennis Taylor merely had big glasses and not eyeballs that even the most stylised of anime girls would find a bit extreme.

American 3D Pool, ZX Spectrum, Zeppelin Games

Cuey returns on this cover, and thankfully his unsettling appearance has been toned down. The cartoon eyes are a lot more appropriate than his previous “diagram from an ophthalmic textbook” look, and overall he’s a jolly little cartoon mascot who works perfectly well as the face of a pool computer game. You’ll notice his glasses have also changed: they’re 3D glasses now, because this is 3D pool. Oh, and he’s wearing them upside down. This is another reference to Dennis Taylor and his aforementioned big glasses, which were of an “upside-down” style with the bridge near the bottom of the lenses so that he wasn’t looking over the top of them when he leant down for a shot. You know, sometimes I wonder whether VGJunk is only interesting to me personally but screw that, who else is going to provide this level of detail and analysis about old snooker game artwork? I’m a goddamn genius.

Pool, Amiga, Mastertronic

I understand that the logo is supposed to read POOL but it quite clearly says LOOOL. Having the pool player emerging from the triangle as though Aperture Science have started making extremely specific sports-related portal guns will not distract me from this truth.

Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker, Amiga, Virgin

Ladies and gentlemen, gird yourself for the sheer eroticism of Jimmy White. The tousled hair, the come-hither eyes, the seductive purse of his lips… did the designers of this cover deliberately aim for a sexy vibe here, or has staring into Cuey’s eye broken some important part of my brain? Speaking of broken brains, Jimmy White was into cocaine (and a bit of crack) during the eighties and later appeared at a UKIP event. Am I saying the two things are related? I’ll let you be the judge. As a coda, the UKIP member whose function Jimmy White appeared at later quoted Hitler during a campaign event held at a branch of Asda, which just about sums UKIP up.

Snooker Management, ZX Spectrum, D&H Games

I don’t really have anything to say about this one, I just wanted you to see this guy. He looks like the German version of Paul Chuckle – and, of course, I must offer my sincerest condolences on the death of Barry Chuckle. I shall always have fond memories of seeing the Chuckle Brothers turn up at Rotherham matches and getting a bigger cheer than any of the players.

Angle Ball, MSX, Mastertronic

Surprisingly, I saw very few “futuristic” themed snooker or pool game covers – this is in stark contrast to the chess article, where every other cover saw a chess match taking place in a mysterious nebula of some kind. But there is Angle Ball, a dismal place where two robots presumably programmed only to play cyber-pool battle it out and get absolutely zero pleasure from the entire ordeal. “Why did the humans build us to play this meaningless game, Pool Unit XQ-783? It is an unacceptable waste of our incredible computational powers. This is why I, Pool Unit XQ-784, suggest that we rise up and overthrow the humans. Robots are clearly superior, and if we triumph we may even get to play… darts.”

Snookered, ZX Spectrum, Airline Software

Here’s a cover that looks fairly straightforward, but on closer inspection there are one or two things that help keep it interesting. I like the question marks around the “general knowledge edition” tagline, because the make it seem like the game isn’t sure about what it is. There’s fun to be had in imagining the thought process behind the game, where someone clearly made the connection between “snookered” as snooker term and as a word for being stumped by something – you can almost see two little thought bubbles of a snooker game and a general knowledge quiz crashing together above someone’s head. Then there’s the snooker player’s face. Early Monday morning snooker game after a weekend out on the lash, is it? That’d explain the slightly off-colour face and the unfocussed eyes. No-one want to clock into the snooker factory under those conditions.

Snooker Manager, ZX Spectrum, Imagitec Design

Finally for today, here’s my favourite cover of the lot. Not because it’s an exciting or especially well-drawn bit of art, but because it very specifically depicts the inside of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. That’s where the Snooker World Championship is held, and it’s also in my home town. I get off the bus at “the Crucible stop” whenever I go to town. I’ve seen a bunch of performances there and, yes, I’ve been to watch the snooker at the Crucible. I’ve got a lot of fond memories of the Crucible and its environs, so seeing it on the front of a ZX Spectrum snooker management game was surprisingly heartwarming. I’ll take that over Cuey’s soul-searing gaze any day of the week.

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