Top Ranking Tennis: The Rare Bundle That Put the Four Player Adapter in the Box
Most Game Boy boxes sell you a single game. This one sells you a whole evening. Across the bottom of the French cover, in cheerful capitals, it makes two promises: une competition acharnee pour 1, 2, 3 ou 4 joueurs, and, better still, adaptateur pour jouer a quatre inclus. A fierce competition for up to four players, and the adapter to make it happen, right there in the box. That second promise is what turns an ordinary tennis cartridge into one of the more sought-after bundles on the shelf.
A game and an accessory in one box
This is the European release of the game Nintendo sold in North America as Top Rank Tennis, here wearing its Old World name, Top Ranking Tennis. The version in the collection is the French boxing, mode d'emploi en francais, and it is really two products in a single carton: the game itself, and a Game Boy Four Player Adapter (DMG-07) packed in alongside it. You can see the little adapter drawn on the front of the box, its link plug trailing across the artwork, so nobody could miss what they were getting. In the catalogue this pairing lives as the Game Boy 4-Player Adapter and Top Ranking Tennis bundle, and it is a genuinely rare thing to find complete.
The Four Player Adapter, and why so few games needed it
The Four Player Adapter is a small grey hub with a built-in link cable and three more sockets, so that four Game Boys can be joined into one game. It is a clever little device, but here is the catch that makes bundles like this one interesting: only a handful of games ever supported four-player mode at all. An adapter is no use without software that knows what to do with it, so Nintendo tended to sell the hardware attached to a game that did. You meet the same DMG-07 elsewhere in the collection paired with F1 Race and inside the American Racing Set. Top Ranking Tennis is its tennis-flavoured companion, the box that made the four-player promise the whole selling point.
The game itself
Under the multiplayer packaging sits a surprisingly good little sports game. Top Rank Tennis was developed by Pax Softnica and published by Nintendo, reaching North America in 1993 and Europe the following year. It plays from a straight-on view of the court and keeps its controls admirably simple: a single button handles top spins, slices and serves depending on your timing and position, so it is easy to pick up but rewards a bit of touch. You can play singles or doubles, and doubles is where the box earns its keep, letting you either partner with the computer or link up with real people for a proper four-way match.
Two touches give it real character. The first is the umpire, who calls the match in a gravelly digitized voice, an impressive trick for a 1993 handheld and the kind of detail that stuck in players' memories long after the scores were forgotten. The second is the battery save built into the cartridge, which keeps your progress and your hard-won ranking safe between sessions, so the competition acharnee promised on the box could actually be a campaign rather than a single afternoon.
Why the complete box is so scarce
The same thing that made this bundle appealing is what makes a complete one hard to find today. The adapter inside was useful on its own, so once a household had opened the box the little grey hub often wandered off to live with other games, leaving the cartridge behind and the packaging thrown away. A boxed copy that still has its adapter, its manual and its inner tray is far rarer than the loose cartridge, which is common enough. Add the fur-background photography that marks everything in this collection, and you have a tidy record of one of the Game Boy's best multiplayer ideas in the exact form Nintendo first sold it.
It is a small monument to the days when four-player gaming meant four friends, four grey bricks and one cable-strewn adapter passed around the table. To see it alongside the other bundles and oddities, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.
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