Retired pro tennis player Iain Atkinson has used Claude Code to build and release his own tennis club management sim, Tennis Tycoon.
He’s the latest amateur coder to use the AI platform to release a game without any prior experience, and follows on from Deniz Sancar’s hit football drafting game 38-0-0, also built with Claude. We also covered Josh Pavey’s spin on the idea, 38-0, recently.
Atkinson told us that the game is modelled on management sims he grew up playing, like Championship Manager, SimCity and Civilization, rather than action tennis games, which he said struggle to capture the sport’s physics and movement.
Atkinson said the game’s depth comes from his own playing career. “The reality of going from hotel to hotel, navigating injuries in a foreign country, finding coaches that balance well with you and doing all of this on a tight financial budget is hard,” he said. “That’s the unseen side of tennis management and a lot of what I wanted to bring out in the game.”
As a club manager, players face similar decisions: choosing coaches for young players, repairing a court versus hiring a scout, and balancing training surfaces before tournaments.
Atkinson says the game wouldn’t exist without Claude, as hiring a developer was out of the question. “The economics don’t work for a solo passion project and something would’ve been lost in translation” he continued. “So much of what makes the game work lives in tiny tennis-specific details I’d struggle to convey to someone who hadn’t lived them. The idea isn’t new, but the ability to execute on it is.”
The hardest part of building and launching the game was closing the gap between a working prototype and a production-ready app, a lesson he learned across several smaller projects before this one.
“The fun with building on these tools is you can do almost anything you can imagine, but what I found is the gap from a cool proof of concept to a production-ready app is massive,” he said. “That took me a lot of trial and error to get right, but with every new app I built, I learned something new until I felt like I was ready to take on this ambitious project of building a full management sim.”
Tennis Tycoon costs $2.99, with optional in-app purchases that aren’t required to progress. Atkinson said he wanted to avoid the game feeling “cheap” with ads or pay-to-progress timers.
So far, marketing has meant sharing the game within the tennis community and pockets of the mobile gaming audience interested in management and sim titles. He’s now considering social features that would let players share stats and results.
Tennis Tycoon is out now on iOS. An Android release is planned but not yet dated.
