While ROB the Robot was responsible for the NES’ success – and make no mistake, the NES would not have lasted that first year without it – it didn’t last long as a peripheral and soon faded into memory. One launch peripheral that did survive and got decent support for a time was the Zapper light gun. Plugged into a controller port, this thing allowed you to shoot at the screen (a classic Tube Tv and not the modern HD screens which require a fucking sensor) similar to an arcade game. While a number of Zapper games were released, none are more fondly remembered than the pack-in game Duck Hunt.
Duck Hunt offered nothing special: just a simple shooting gallery that has you shooting down ducks and clay plates in an alternate mode. However, most fondly remember the game because of its simple premise and the ability to shoot down flying animals with an orange (or gray) plastic gun. I certainly remember when I played this at my cousin’s house, who had just gotten the NES Action Set (a later set-up which included the Zapper and SMB/Duck Hunt multicart). I also distinctly remember playing a different type of game and pretending to gun down all the would-be players with the Zapper while the sound effects were playing on the title screen. Yeah, the Zapper was a toy and it was a fun one at that, too.
But I digress.
The idea behind the game is pretty simple to understand: along with your trusty hunting dog, you took aim at various colored ducks (flying either one at a time or two at a time depending on the game mode selected) and if you let the ducks fly away, your mutt would come out of hiding and laugh at you for your miserable performance. The laughing dog didn’t really bother me so much at the time, as he was simply playing the role of the buddy who also laugh at your pisspoor performance in a video game as simple as Duck Hunt, but as I would later discover, the dog had given people many nightmares to the point where people would actually program little Flash games that allowed you to shoot the dog. Where were the PETA people when this animal cruelty program was unleashed upon thousands and millions of children around the world? They must have been pissed… but apparently not pissed enough to keep this game from being a success.
So Duck Hunt was a fairly decent game for its time and is still fun to play today if you can find a working NES and Zapper, which was fairly responsive up to a certain range as most peripherals of this type were. If you actually shot down all or most of the ducks, you progressed to the next level where the ducks move faster and more sporadically. The game with two ducks is a bit harder because, as you only have three bullets per round, you can’t screw up that much. You don’t have to shoot down all the ducks, but missing more than a certain amount of acceptable losses merits a game over and gives your trusty dog one last laugh at your expense. Finally, there’s the clay shooting mode, where you have to shoot down some clay plates launched from behind you. Curiously enough, the dog is nowhere to be seen in this mode. Probably the player’s character kicked him off the cliff after being laughed at so many times.
Ah, the memories. But alas, Duck Hunt and its Zapper peripheral didn’t set the world on fire and bring Nintendo to prominence for years to come. That role belonged to Super Mario Bros.
dtm666 