Sampras Tennis 96
1995 video game
Sampras Tennis 96 is a 1995 tennis video game for the Sega Mega Drive developed by Codemasters. It is the sequel to Pete Sampras Tennis. Like its predecessor, it was one of the few titles released on the J-Cart format, which provides two additional controller ports for multiplayer games. The game was followed by Pete Sampras Tennis '97, which was released for the PlayStation and personal computers.
Features
It was endorsed by Pete Sampras, one of the best-known tennis players of the late 20th century. It features a first-person behind-the-back view of the court with player's choice of multiple male or female players and pick of several different styles of play, including head-to-head and mixed doubles.
Description
The Europe-only sequel to Pete Sampras Tennis, Sampras Tennis 96 includes new features, such as a reworked graphics engine with parallax scrolling, new shots and aftertouch controls, with an Indoor court joining the previously available grass, clay and hard courts.
Compared to the prior game, the ball reacts differently in each court and it is harder to control the direction of the ball, meaning the powerful forehands that could win a game in minutes of the first game are much harder to perform. Services now must be perfectly weighted in both power, direction and timing, facing the risk of hitting the net or going off bounds, with a speedometer showing how fast the best serves went. All these are controlled using the three buttons of the gamepad and the d-pad, with the A button for lobbing the ball, B to make passing shots and C to dive for a direction.
“Sampras Tennis 96” enters the record as 1995 video game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sampras, Tennis and video can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3470929. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sampras Tennis 96” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.