It's new to me: Paddle Mania

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Paddle Mania is not at all what it looks like — it’s a game that I (passively) avoided playing for some time, not out of dislike but because the imagined premise didn’t immediately grab, and this is said by someone who enjoys tennis games. It turns out the reason that I didn’t know anything about this tennis game in advance, though, the reason that I never heard anything about it being a standout tennis offering from the 80s worth checking out, is because it’s not a tennis game at all.

There might be tennis players in the art and marquee, but Paddle Mania has far more to do with the Olympics and air hockey than actual tennis. Consider: there is a sumo wrestler in Paddle Mania, but their presence does not make it a sumo-wrestling game, and the appearance of surfers does not make this a surfing game, either. Why should something as inconsequential as the existence of tennis players within Paddle Mania make it a tennis game, then?

The first hint that this isn’t a mere tennis game comes on the title screen, where a giant Olympic-style torch sits near flags on a starry night, and is lit by someone clearly meant to evoke that gladiatorial Olympian image of the era — chiseled, bandana, short shorts, flowing locks, the whole cartoonish ideal. And yes, those are definitely Olympic rings half-obscured at the bottom right of the title screen, existing as an implication instead of the full thing to keep from getting sued. You don’t want to involve yourself with the legal mess that is displaying the Olympic rings if you can help it.

So if it’s not tennis, what is it? It’s not exactly the Olympics, either, because you are playing just one rather than myriad sports — well, sort of — but that’s the fun of this 1988 arcade weirdo. It’s a bunch of sports thrown together and made into something entirely new that isn’t tennis or any Olympic event represented here or otherwise, and also isn’t even quite air hockey, even if it’s more air hockey than it is Pong.

A friend and I once made up a game in his backyard using the materials available to us, that was a little like baseball in that you had to hit a ball with a bat, but the bat had to be used like a hockey stick, and the ball was both much larger than a baseball and rolled. You weren’t just trying to hit the ball as far as possible, but to set target areas in order to score, and actually had different starting areas for “batting” much like golf has different tees for different holes. With the way the ball moved when struck by an object it just wasn’t designed to be struck by, chaos ensued, which is where the fun emerged from. Paddle Mania feels a lot like that straight-faced absurdity of just rolling with what you have on hand and not being exactly sure of where it will take you, and also there’s a sumo wrestler.

There are tennis players in Paddle Mania, but they are not competing in tennis: they are using the tool of their trade, a tennis racket, to play the Not Tennis before them, in the same way my buddy and I used a baseball bat like a hockey stick to play a third, unrelated sport. You might serve and volley in Paddle Mania, but that happens in volleyball, as well — it’s not like those actions or terms are exclusive to tennis. Oh, and you’ll face volleyball players in Paddle Mania, too.

You start out against a fellow tennis player, trapped in the same game you are, attempting to not just get the ball by them but to get it past them and into a designated scoring area. It’s got a little Pong in it in this regard, but the movement of your player is more air hockey than anything: their movement is unnatural for a person, and looks — and feels — like dragging an air hockey paddle around, down to the direction of your wrist flicks determining where the ball is going to go after it’s struck. The ball also acts less like a ball and more like a ricocheting puck regularly — if your brain understands the angles and speeds of air hockey, then Paddle Mania will, somehow, make intuitive sense.

Defeat this tennis player and move on to face athletes from other sports, with only the occasional other tennis player mixed into what become more and more elaborate courts that require better and more precise timing and locating from you in order to score. You don’t have to score a set number of points to move on, just more than your opponent before the timer expires. Each matchup is its own game, basically, with the physics, rules, and strategies, slightly different in ways that mean you might not excel or struggle in a linear fashion as you move through these fellow Olympians.

You won’t just face a volleyball player, but a set of three of them, and they will pass the ball around a bunch to setup a smash onto your side of the court — there is no fence in between your sides like there would be in both volleyball and tennis and even ping pong, which your paddle seems to look like it belongs to, but the center line still divides the sides into distinct sections that can’t be exited or encroached upon. Getting a ball by three volleyball players working as a unit is a lot different than getting it by one tennis player, but not necessarily more difficult, since the way they manipulate the ball is different, as well: you are playing two different sports at each other here instead of with each other.

Volleyball players have their own physics and strategies to overcome, as does the sumo wrestler, who is somehow like a tennis player but with even more reach. And then there are the synchronized swimmers, who swim in a court that’s half pool, half… well, court… and kick and pose and serve and return. And the surfers, against whom you’re not trying to get the ball past and into a specific target area, even though that’s what they are doing to you, and in alarming numbers, too, an endless parade passing by and chucking balls at you from the safety of their board. No, your role here is to make those boards unsafe: hit the balls back not just to avoid having them turn into points against you, but also to knock surfers off their boards by slamming the ball back into them directly. That eill nt you your points in this scenario.

The later tennis players you face off against will have things like moving walls behind them to block the ball from scoring unless both the location and timing of the hit are perfect, which can be tough to pull off — the incessant flailing that saves you against a fleet of surfers firing off endless balls at you will keep you from even accidentally scoring against opponents that require intention and precision. One thing that’s vital in these matchups is exactly what powers the win against the surfers, however: hit the ball right back at the opponent, and hope it knocks them over to give you an opening to score.

The computer will certainly attempt this against you to open up a lane, and it’s devastating when they do; you might pop back up fast enough to avoid being scored upon, but that will feel like an impossibility while your character flails on their back like a turtle struggling to right itself. Use this strategy to create opportunities for your own offense, however: the fact that these matches are timed means you can’t just play high-quality defense until you get lucky and score. You also need to create offense, especially as the complexity of the stages increases and both adds in and removes elements of luck.

Paddle Mania isn’t just a single-player experience, but has a wealth of multiplayer options, as it’s got not just versus multiplayer but also cooperative arrangements. There are three difficulty levels, as well, which can let you both ease in and challenge yourself further, depending. While it released exclusively in Japanese arcades back in 1988, Digital Eclipse and NIS America partnered with SNK for the 40th Anniversary Collection featuring pre-Neo Geo titles and eventually brought the game, officially, outside of Japan.

It’s surprising that it took so long for Paddle Mania to make its way out of Japan, considering how obviously innovative and enjoyable it is once you play it. However, it’s possible that, with the way it was marketed with its art and name, it was assumed that the underlying wackiness would never be given a fair shake stateside, either because it wasn’t what it looked like and so people might be disappointed in that, or because it would be dismissed as “just” a tennis game or late Pong clone of some kind. That, or SNK also wasn’t yet SNK yet, at least not in the way people think of it now, so couldn’t afford to just distribute anything with their name on it internationally.

Regardless of the why, you now know Paddle Mania exists, and that it’s not a tennis game even if it features tennis players and art and sure seems as if it were marketed to make it seem like tennis. Trust the name of the game here over that marquee and flyer, though: there are paddles, yes, and also mania.

Covering SNK games is difficult these days. There is no formal boycott of them in place, such as with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) move against Microsoft and in turn its Xbox division for its continued partnership and profiting off of Israel’s violence against Palestinians. Without guidelines and organization, it’s a bit of a wild west situation where everyone takes this all into their own hands and makes their own decisions. Over at Read Only Memo, Wes Fenlon did a great job of breaking things down and explaining that, at the least, you can't hide from the idea that the coverage of and purchasing of SNK games means further enriching of the government of Saudi Arabia, given the storied developer and publisher is wholly owned by the same Public Investment fund that it utilizes for “sportswashing” its country’s image. If the United States government fully owned a developer and profited off of its existence and then turned around to use those profits to spill blood, there would be questions to answer about their games, too.

Through that fund, Saudi Arabia has acquired small pieces of entities like Capcom and Nintendo, as well as bankrolled an attempt to take over EA. With the first two and similar cases, I haven’t seen a need to back away from coverage of newer or older games — that’s not a case where the PIF gives the government of Saudi Arabia any control, even if it’s all larger than something like getting a return on a 401(k) investment. SNK is the opposite situation, however, and so I’ve had to consider my own coverage knowing just how much of the studio is under that level of control. Where I’ve landed is that it’s worth writing about SNK games that fit this publication’s purview, but not with intent to get you to go out and buy whatever modern release of them exists in the present — play if you want, but remember that emulation exists, and don’t expect any “Re-Release This” or “Past Meets Present” columns for these titles going forward.

The main thing here is that it’s a bit complicated, in that these are older titles that deserve to be mentioned as part of the history of a company that’s as old or older than plenty of people reading this, but the lens through which it’s all looked at, at least, matters. Whereas there has been a total shutdown of coverage of Microsoft-owned games in this space — even ones that aren’t commercially available in the present, I don’t even want to give Microsoft an idea to work with until it’s complied with BDS demands — that seems like overkill here as far as an individual decision sans organized boycott goes. So, there will still be the occasional SNK game covered in this space like has been the case, but if a new, say, Metal Slug arrives, you won’t find any coverage of it here, as it’s not something I’ll be picking up or getting behind a megaphone to shout out.

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