From Pro Tennis to Game Development: Iain Atkinson on Tennis Tycoon

Former pro tennis player Iain Atkinson builds the tennis management game he wanted to play

Tennis Tycoon is not another tennis game built around match action. It is about the club, the coaches, the finances, the facilities, the surfaces, the injuries, and the decisions behind the sport.

Created by former professional tennis player and college All-American Iain Atkinson, Tennis Tycoon is a premium tennis management sim for mobile, available now on iOS with Android planned.

Players begin with a single tennis court, five members, and limited cash. From there, the aim is to grow a club, manage coaches, handle facilities, develop players, and work toward producing the next Grand Slam champion.

What makes the project stand out is Atkinson’s background. He shared public tennis links for his ITF / ATP profile and Wake Forest college tennis profile, giving the game a real sports angle beyond the usual management sim pitch.

Iain Atkinson, former professional tennis player and college All-American, is the solo developer behind Tennis Tycoon. Image courtesy of Iain Atkinson.

Tennis Tycoon Trailer

Tennis Tycoon focuses on the management side of tennis: club growth, coaching, training, player development, court surfaces, finances, and long-term planning.

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Tennis Tycoon

Release: Available now on iOS, Android planned

Genre: Tennis management simulation

Developer: Iain Atkinson

Platforms: iOS / Mobile

Website: tennistycoon.com

App Store: Download Tennis Tycoon

Interview with Iain Atkinson

For readers who may not know you yet, can you introduce yourself and your background in tennis?

I’m Iain, the developer of Tennis Tycoon, a former pro tennis player and college All-American. I grew up in Durham, England before moving to the USA for college. I started playing tennis at the age of 5 and before long found myself traveling nationally and then internationally playing tennis tournaments.

My career highlights include being ranked #1 junior in the UK, winning the Queens Club Junior Championship, and reaching a career-high ATP ranking inside the world’s top 1,500. After college I pursued a career in business, and I’ve spent the past 15+ years in SaaS sales and executive management.

How did the idea for Tennis Tycoon start?

As a kid I was obsessed with Championship Manager and later Football Manager, so much so that I persuaded my dad to let me build my own computer tower so I could run multiple games. Sim games and turn-based strategy games have always been where I can find myself spending hours of time without even thinking about it.

Last year I found myself wanting to pursue some passion projects. My original concept was a more tennis player-focused match tracking app, but I quickly found myself disillusioned with it being too dry and lacking engagement drivers.

As I started to think about what I’d enjoyed doing for hours at a time, I came back to my childhood and figured, “what if there was a Championship Manager game but for tennis?” That was how this journey started.

What made you want to build a tennis management game instead of a more traditional tennis game focused on match action?

Having played tennis to a highly competitive level, I’ve always found the realism, mechanics, and physics of tennis games somewhat lackluster. I realized that when I was playing the first iterations of Championship Manager back in 2001–2002, they didn’t even have a virtual match engine. It was all text-based, and yet I was hooked because of the strategy behind running a club.

I started working from that same construct and as I got deeper into the game build, I realized there was so much more to tennis than just a match itself. While most fans see a two-hour match, the players find themselves working countless hours in gyms all over the world, balancing injuries, bouncing from training academy to training academy, and shuffling through coaches finding the right fit.

All of this is the untold story of what it’s like to be a tennis player and to be part of a tennis club. With my career in business, I started to design the game to blend these worlds, bringing together what I knew about life as a tennis player and in the tennis community, alongside my understanding of managing finances, building a business, and navigating the dynamics of people management. It’s that intersection that I think brings the game to life for players.

How much of the game is inspired by your own experience as a player?

A massive amount of the game’s depth wouldn’t be possible without my experience as a player. Details like the dynamics of how to manage an injury, being frustrated with a mismatch between your playing style and the coach, the variety of playing styles and their interplay, or the value in developing youth talent to invest in a future pipeline of players and much more.

These are all elements I’ve lived and felt, so my goal in developing Tennis Tycoon is to make this depth accessible to any gamer.

Tennis Tycoon tracks player skills, morale, fatigue, training focus, and development potential. Image courtesy of Iain Atkinson.

What are some details in Tennis Tycoon that only someone with real tennis experience would think to include?

Some of my favourites are buried deep in the engine. How a matchup between two players shifts based on court surface, recent form, fatigue, and the combination of all three. How court capacity becomes a real constraint as your club grows, slowing player development when coaches are overworked or courts run at max.

And the role of surfaces: hard courts are durable, which is great for club finances, but players training on them may develop aspects like movement and groundstrokes more slowly than they would on clay or grass. These details are invisible on the surface, but they’re what make the game continuously engaging, and also hard to build!

You chose a premium model with no ads or timers. Why was that important to you?

Player experience and enjoyment was a central tenet as I set about building Tennis Tycoon. We’ve all played games that basically require you to pay to get to the next level or throw in an ad every time you open the app.

I’ve always believed that if the product is high quality and engaging enough, those tactics aren’t necessary. I’m striving to make Tennis Tycoon the deepest tennis management sim on the market, and if I can do that, I think players will be willing to pay the $2.99 for a game they can enjoy limitless thereafter.

What has been the hardest part of building Tennis Tycoon as a solo developer?

Wow, I could go on here because there’s so much I’ve learned on the journey so far and I feel like I’m just getting started. I think the hardest thing though was forcing myself to actually release v1.0.

It’s strange to say, but there’s a vulnerability about that moment when you release something that you’re so personally passionate about and spent so much time working on out into the world, and you brace yourself for feedback from the market.

Tennis Tycoon is on iOS now, with Android coming soon. What can players expect from future updates?

The idea list is long! In the most recent release we made a big update to post-match reports, giving users a richer, more visual analysis of a player’s match to help inform coaching and strategy. This mirrors professional tennis’s adoption of analytics and data to drive improvement.

The next release will introduce the role of a club assistant manager who can support the club operations as your club scales and you have to navigate an ever-growing responsibility list of sponsorships, media, and financial transactions.

Further out, I’m looking at building a training plan customizer, rival club acquisitions, and tournament bidding / hosting. The underlying driving force will continue to be how can I bring new elements to the game that mirror the real depth of tennis management in an engaging and dynamic format.