Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
Jon the Programmer's Squinky Tennis is an Easter Egg found in various Sega Game Gear games released by Codemasters, including Micro Machines 1 & 2, Dropzone, Pete Sampras Tennis, S.S. Lucifer: Man Overboard! and CJ: Elephant Fugitive. "Jon the Programmer" likely refers to Jon Cartwright, an employee of Big Red Software who was the programmer on these games.
The game is activated at the start of the game by holding down the start button while the "Codemasters" logo animation is playing. Many kids with Game Gears likely stumbled upon it by impatiently mashing the start button while they were waiting for their game to start. The game is multiplayer only and played over the Gear-to-Gear link cable, so you need two Game Gears to play it. However, since it's found in multiple Codemasters games, that presumably at least made it a little easier to find someone else to play against.
Very, very few Game Gear emulators support link cable emulation. I'm playing this using the TwoMbit emulator which is one of the few that do. Presumably this is the same reason that I could find no other videos of it on Youtube. The game itself is a rather uninspiring Pong clone, and the gameplay is rather frustrating because the paddles move too slowly for it to be a fair game. First player to reach a score of 15 wins.
There is no sound in this video, but you're not missing anything because the game has no sound effects anyway.
Jon the Programmer's Squinky Tennis is an Easter Egg found in various Sega Game Gear games released by Codemasters, including Micro Machines 1 & 2, Dropzone, Pete Sampras Tennis, S.S. Lucifer: Man Overboard! and CJ: Elephant Fugitive. "Jon the Programmer" likely refers to Jon Cartwright, an employee of Big Red Software who was the programmer on these games.
The game is activated at the start of the game by holding down the start button while the "Codemasters" logo animation is playing. Many kids with Game Gears likely stumbled upon it by impatiently mashing the start button while they were waiting for their game to start. The game is multiplayer only and played over the Gear-to-Gear link cable, so you need two Game Gears to play it. However, since it's found in multiple Codemasters games, that presumably at least made it a little easier to find someone else to play against.
Very, very few Game Gear emulators support link cable emulation. I'm playing this using the TwoMbit emulator which is one of the few that do. Presumably this is the same reason that I could find no other videos of it on Youtube. The game itself is a rather uninspiring Pong clone, and the gameplay is rather frustrating because the paddles move too slowly for it to be a fair game. First player to reach a score of 15 wins.
There is no sound in this video, but you're not missing anything because the game has no sound effects anyway.
