SEGA Europe have announced that Sumo Digital are developing a tennis game involving SEGA characters, in much the same vein as Nintendo's Mario Tennis series. There will be versions of the game for all three next-gen machines, and also for DS and PS2.

"SEGA Superstars Tennis has over 15 playable SEGA idols including Sonic the Hedgehog, AiAi from Super Monkeyball fame, Ulala of Space Channel 5 and Amigo from Samba De Amigo. In addition to their own unique attributes, each character will also come equipped with their own superstar tennis skills, putting a whole new spin on each match played!

Exhibition mode offers the chance to challenge Sonic, or the character or your choice, to a match on one of many courts, including Sonic's home court of Green Hill Zone, or Amigo's Carnival Park court. Wherever you play there will be a host of SEGA celebrities cheering you on from courtside and by partaking in crazy doubles matches with your choice of partner, you could end up playing against some pretty unusual couples! Prove your SEGA hero is the shining star of SEGA Superstars Tennis by collecting silverware in the Tournament Mode. There will also be the opportunity to unlock a host of exciting extras which will be announced in the near future!

Complementing the Exhibition and Tournament modes, there will also be new and innovative ways of enjoying some of SEGA's classic titles, plus platform exclusive ways to play the game, including online modes for X360 and PS3 versions!"



Notice how Sonic's court is in Green Hill Zone, rather than a city or night-club. Look at the Blue Skies!

Though a predictable copycat concept, the project does demonstrate the continuation of a pro-active attitude by SEGA's European arm in recent years in exploiting the company's history in a fashion which does it justice, and in taking advantage of talented British developers.

Sumo Digital, an independently run (though recently acquired by Foundation 9) Sheffield-based studio derived from Gremlin Interactive, were first hired by SEGA to port Outrun2 from Sega's Xbox-based Chihiro arcade system, to Xbox, and later Outrun 2SP to PS2 and PSP. A mean feat given that the Chihiro system has 512mb of RAM. These games were all overwhelming critical successes, though never performed very well commercially. Sumo went on to make a version of Virtua Tennis for PSP, and earlier this year released Virtua Tennis 3 on various platforms. Sega Superstar Tennis will be their first Sega game developed from scratch rather than an arcade to console adaptation.

Sega Europe acquired two highly regarded British devcos in 2005, Creative Assembly and Sports Interactive, and went on to renew their relationship with Bizarre Creations by way of The Club, a multiplayer third person score attack shooter also out early next year. Also during this period, they formed Sega Racing Studio with talent from many other esteemed developers, who recently released an update to SEGA Rally, which is really good.

So yeah, unoriginal as it may be, it has a talented bunch beavering away at it, and a reasonable bunch of suits over-seeing it. Something to watch.