How 2K Sports brought its tennis video game back to life

After sitting dormant since 2011, the revival of 2K Sports’ TopSpin tennis sim game was a Herculean effort. Remi Ercolani, a game director for 2K’s Hangar 13 game development division, broke down how TopSpin was resuscitated -- technically, at least -- to appeal to the gaming community of 2024.

“The first step is to look at the players we have in our roster and to identify which ones have a truly unique or recognizable style for either their serve, forehand, backhand or return idle, and to capture video references of each,” Ercolani said. “Then, we create what we call a ‘shot list’ for motion capture, which is a list of individual animations we want to capture.”

For forehands and backhands, Ercolani said each movement has nine individual animations that display based on factors such as the ball’s direction, height and speed -- before the player hits it. Then, once Hangar 13 finalized all the shots they wanted to capture, designers moved on to the mocap (motion capture) stage.
“On the day of the shoot, we get Hangar 13’s mocap crew, animators and designers together, our team of semi-pro tennis players suited up in that pretty cool-looking mocap suit to serve as our actors and actresses, and we’re ready to go,” noted Ercolani. “We show our actor/actress the motion we would like to capture and watch the video references with them to identify all the key poses and elements that make this motion unique. When the actor/actress is ready, they start practicing the motion to get a better feel for it, and then we record it, replay it on the monitor on the mocap stage, and compare it with the video reference.”

The design team’s artists then work on making the character look male or female. Ercolani: “Our artists then apply the data to a male or female character. At this stage the animation still looks very rough, so the animators clean up all the posing, making sure that it doesn’t look broken, but also that it looks as close as possible to the style of the pro player.”

For players like Roger Federer and Serana Williams, the main cover athletes for TopSpin 2K25, “we were able to spend time with them on the motion capture stage and record their actual serves, forehands, backhands and return idles, so the final result in the game is even closer to their real style,” said Ercolani.