Mario's Tennis
Mario's Tennis — frequently asked questions
- Is Mario's Tennis on Steam?
- No. Mario's Tennis is not distributed on Steam, so there is no Steam Charts or SteamDB player count for it. Its live popularity is tracked here via Twitch viewership instead.
- What platforms is Mario's Tennis on?
- Mario's Tennis is available on Virtual Boy.
- When did Mario's Tennis release?
- Mario's Tennis was first released on July 21, 1995.
About Mario's Tennis
Mario's Tennis is a tennis game that was released as a launch title for the Virtual Boy. It is the first tennis-related Mario game, and would later be followed by the Mario Tennis series. You get to choose from seven different characters, all with different ability levels, to play against each other in either singles or doubles matches. You can also play in an exhibition or tournament mode.
Summary via IGDB.
Mario's Tennis on Wikipedia
Mario's Tennis is a 1995 sports video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Virtual Boy. It was one of five launch titles in Japan and the pack-in game in North America for the Virtual Boy. The first entry in the Mario Tennis series, the player participates in singles or doubles tennis matches, controlling one of seven Mario characters. Its gameplay takes place from a third-person perspective.
Source: Wikipedia (text under CC BY-SA 4.0).
Game details
- Platforms
- Virtual Boy
- Developer
- Nintendo R&D1
- Publisher
- Nintendo
- ESRB rating
- E
- Game modes
- Single player
- Themes
- Action
- Series
- Mario
Details via IGDB.
Reception
Collector value & authenticity
Virtual Boy · PriceCharting sold data · Verified 2026-08-22
Release record
| Territory | Date | Serial | Barcode | MSRP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 21 Jul 1995 | VUE-VMTJ-JPN | 4902370502251 | ¥4,900 |
| North Americapack-in | Aug 1995 | VUE-VMTJ-USA | — | — |
| Japandemo | — | — | — | — |
- North America (pack-in): Bundled with the console as a bare cartridge. There is NO North American retail SKU and therefore no barcode — the only NA boxes are Blockbuster rental units printed "For Display Only". Any NA "complete in box" price describes a display box or a Japanese import.
- Community score
- 70/100
- Region
- JP+NA
- Released
- 1995
- Authenticity
- Low
The widest gap between a loose cart and a boxed one on the platform — but the only genuinely boxed copies are Japanese imports.
Mario's Tennis was the North American pack-in, so it shipped inside every console sold there — which makes loose carts the most common object on the platform, and boxed copies scarce, because almost nobody kept the little box for the game that came free with the system they were actually excited about. Common cart, scarce box: it is the single best illustration of packaging scarcity in retro collecting.
The Japanese numbers make the point. There it was not a pack-in, so people bought it deliberately and kept the box, and the loose-to-boxed gap is far smaller. Same game, same year, completely different survival curve — caused by a marketing decision.
How it was made
Developed by Nintendo R&D1 with Tose — the studio that ghost-develops for half the industry and is credited for almost none of it. Produced by Gunpei Yokoi, directed by Hitoshi Yamagami and Masao Yamamoto. It was shown at E3 1995 under the title Mario's Dream Tennis.
Two-player multiplayer was designed in from the start, to run over the Virtual Boy link cable. The cable was announced, previewed, and never released, and reviewers marked the game down for lacking the mode — Nintendo’s own magazine among them.
But the feature was never actually removed. The multiplayer code shipped inside the retail cartridge, unreachable, and sat there for twenty-two years. Virtual Boy developer Martin Kujaczynski found it by running a modified emulator to rule out music and graphics, narrowing roughly 30,000 lines of assembly down to about 3,000, and released a patch that restores it. Two consoles, two copies of the cartridge and a Cat-5 cable now play two of the three original modes — player versus player, and player-and-computer versus player-and-computer. The third is still buggy, and stays that way until an emulator implements full link-cable emulation.
Nintendo’s own cable was real too. It is catalogued VUE-004, and exactly one example is known: it surfaced in 2014 inside a VUE-Debugger development bundle, with professionally moulded plugs marked “Nintendo” on one face and “VUE-004” on the other. As one collector put it, you do not tool injection moulds to make a single cable.
What the press said at the time
| GameFan Vol. 3 #11 | 1995 | 83.5/100 |
| Computer and Video Games | 1996 | 81% |
| Weekly Famicom Tsūshin #347 | 1995 | 26/40 |
| Game Zero | 1995 | 13.5/25 |
Well enough received at the time that both GamePro and Game Players named it Best Virtual Boy Game of 1995 — and Nintendo's own magazine still flagged the one flaw everyone else did: no two-player option. It has not aged well; Defunct Games revisited it at 39/100 in 2005, less than half its contemporary GameFan score.
Cartridge & preservation record
Cartridge ROM capacity 4 megabit (512 KB), measured from the preserved cartridge image.
Cartridge data from the No-Intro preservation database (metadata only — names, sizes and checksums, no game data).
Worth knowing
- The pack-in holds the platform’s most interesting unshipped software. The cheapest cartridge on the Virtual Boy — about $19 loose, because one shipped inside every console sold in North America — is the one carrying a complete, working two-player mode that nobody could reach until 2017. The console is remembered as antisocial, solitary hardware. It was built for two players; the platform died before the cable shipped.
- Roughly 8,833 copies sold in Japan. One of the only per-title sales figures that survives for this platform. Nintendo has never published Virtual Boy sales at all — the console is absent from its own lifetime sales figures, which list every system back to the Famicom.
Before you buy
There is no North American retail box for this game. It shipped bundled with the console as a bare cartridge and was never sold separately, which is why it carries no US barcode — Nintendo's Virtual Boy SKU sequence runs unbroken except for the single slot this title would have filled. The only North American boxes are Blockbuster rental shells printed 'For Display Only'. So a US complete-in-box copy is either a rental display box or a Japanese import, and the Japanese release, sold standalone at retail, is the only genuinely boxed version. Nobody bothers faking the cartridge itself.
Multiplayer restoration researched and patched by Martin Kujaczynski (M.K.), documented on Planet Virtual Boy — Planet Virtual Boy thread
Mario's Tennis screenshots
Watch on YouTube
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