NES Duck Hunt - How did the gun actually work?
Considering the fact that you have to be more than 30 years old to even have been alive when this game was released on home consoles, you may not actually know what is being referred to. Just know the Duck Hunt came bundled with many Nintendo Entertainment Systems back in 1985.
This game was quite simple as it only consisted of 2 ducks flying on to the screen that you needed to shoot with your "Zapper" that came bundled with your new NES set. There had never been anything like this available to home systems but then again Nintendo was truly innovating everything that we knew about video games at the time.
You only had 3 bullets and the ducks would get faster and more difficult to hit as the rounds went on.
This all seemed like magic as a kid, because how did the gun actually know what we were pointing at? As it turns out it is because at the exact moment that you pull the trigger just for a brief second the entire screen would turn black except for the areas around the ducks. The gun had a diode on it that could only determine if it was pointing towards a black or a white portion of the screen. If it detected white, you got a kill. If it detected black, nothing happened.
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It becomes more complicated involving multiple very fast frames when there were two ducks on the screen but when i think about how genius this is... it really is quite an innovation.
As a kid me and my friends would just move closer and closer to the tv as we tried to "cheat the system" however, as it turns out you could simply point the gun at any illuminated white surface such as a lamp, and you would get a kill every....single... time. Kind of takes the fun out of it though doesn't it.
I can't say that I really enjoyed this game because it was really just shooting some ducks... that was all there was to it. However, for anyone that is familiar with the game, you know how much you wanted to kill that damn dog that would laugh at you when you failed.
I hated and loved this game as a kid. Especially when the dog was laughing at you when you missed. I still can hear his voice today...
lol, I also can hear his laugh. I think there was a family guy episode where Stewie murders the dog. I may just be imagining this though.
I'm digging these Nintendo rewinds. I think we are probably a similar age. Now that you mention it i do recall the screen blinking a little bit every time you pulled the trigger on that game.. and all this time I just assumed it was magic!
Found this on college humor a while ago. It really sums up what we had to deal with
that's perfect. sorry for answering so slowly, i had "resource credit" issues. I bet you understand what that is better than i do.
"As a kid me and my friends would just move closer and closer to the tv as we tried to "cheat the system" however, as it turns out you could simply point the gun at any illuminated white surface such as a lamp, and you would get a kill every....single... time. Kind of takes the fun out of it though doesn't it."
Kind of like more recently (but still not current by this point, just more recent than this), playing games that involve running on the wii and just shaking the remote instead of actually running... Since those were mostly exergaming games, it kinds of defeats the point of the game.
That's interesting how the gun for the nes duck hunt worked though. I wasn't quite sure how that worked.
Have you seen the VR version of duck hunt?
i have not seen the VR version and didn't know it existed? Worth checking out?
Just looked it up again and it's actually not Duck Hunt. It's Duck Season which is a parody and doesn't directly reference Duck Hunt but it has their version of the dog in it and everything. I actually thought it was the same people / same studio parodying itself but it's not. I haven't played it myself so I can't give an opinion from actually playing it, but I've watched other people play it and it is interesting.
You actually play a kid playing the game so you can be in the game shooting at ducks (which is different graphically than the NES game) or be in the living room depending on what you are doing in the game and the concept overall is a bit different. I'm not going to spoil too much about how it is different.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/503580/Duck_Season/
I don't have a VR headset but that does look pretty wild. I do like the name of the studio involved in the production!