Although, I didn't think anything of it.. handheld games don't draw my attention but, I saw the title screen and it reminded me of something. (I thought it was a artist I knew) actually I had a small thought it was you but didn't think that was your "project". I believe the TV Illustration for the cover was yours.. I don't recall since it was only aired a few times local TV years ago. Thought you like to know just out of spite, I would've let you knew sooner but I had no clue in hell you were working on a game project since it was kept secret. All artwork on most games is keep classified until game is about to break usually depending on company/production. It's even illegal if you post some work depending before press releases or a breech of contract in most cases.

Read your post on that when I came back to your new site a good few months ago. Even tho the game was probably real low budget, it's sad if they actually took your "exact cover illustration and used it".. with no consent. Although, to bring that up now is almost pointless since so long ago. At least you get a small sense of pride it was on TV Ad for a couple days/keep your character designs. Probably a redraw of your chars.. I think they did look a tiny bit more different.

Sometimes in artwork they make versions for different countries, maybe they used your old one for US Title cause it looked more "youthful" in the manuel, etc for US. But, yeah that is when Gameboy was rolling out a bunch of miniature titles that bombed to my memory in US.

The company that turned over the rights I guess thought they might as well put that out see if any would buy it.. but it was way late released. I remember also seeing a huge rip on all these mini gameboy games on ZDTV (TechTV now known as G4TV Channel) *Err* stop changing the channel and damn showtime names pls. On the timeslot preview by Gamespot TV if you know of that called (Extended play now known as X-Play).

As you say, all game projects are kept very much secretive from the public and everyone involved is asked to sign non-disclosure agreements stating they wont pass on any specifics about the game to to other companies and so on.

The Tennis Stars art was my first big commission (for a company) and it was all going swimmingly to start out with, but the project got put on hold towards the end- The game developers I was working for were being taken over by a larger company. This resulted in me losing out my royalty deal on the game profits and nearly losing my advance payment. I speculate that rather than renegotiate another deal with me, the company hired another artist to re-vamp my designs to help avoid any conflict with the character rights.

I think some games should try to use graphics more in their gameplay don't see too much games really design their gameplay around it. Usually it's you make the stuff we'll slap it around the polygons and call it a day.

I wasn't saying the Tennis Stars was bad. It just that it was put out way too late to hit the market. Also trying to put a Pixel game on the PS1 while the PS2 is out and that is the first pixel game on that console.. But, I guess it's better late than some other good games that are marketed really poorly. Specially some of those European games that come over in the US. I know of a few could've done well but they didn't know what they were doing in the market area...

Prices don't really mean much specially in stores. You can practically get any good game cheap after a year or so specially exp packs. But, some of the great games you'll never see them drop.