A year and half before the Nintendo Entertainment System would make it’s North American debut, Japanese games were playing a new type of video game. There was no controllers, just an electronic sort of gun called the NES zapper. The game was Duck Hunt, a simple game that has manged to stay alive long past it’s 1984 debut.
The game play is simple. Using the zapper, you must shoot down the ducks that fly across the screen. You must shoot down a certain number of ducks to clear a stage. The other game uses clay pigeons. That is it, a simple shooting game. So why has this game continued to endure? Why are the main characters in a fighting game and making a cameo in a Hollywood movie?
The answer to this is simple. The dog. It would be a hard sell to call the dog an a partner. He does make the ducks fly up and he does retrieve them after you shoot them. Most gamers don’t remember that, all they can remember is missing a duck and the dog rising up in the middle of the screen, his paw coming to his mouth and chuckling. You grew to hate the dog, firing some shots in the vain attempt to hit him. The legend that you could shoot the dog came from the arcade version, where the dog appeared during a bonus stage and could be hit. He survived, but the bonus stage was over.
You would think that Duck Hunt would hold no surprises in the present day, but you would be mistaken. Recently, Seth Rogan set off a mini voyage of discover when he tweeted that a second player could control the direction the duck flew. Gamers were shocked, but it was the truth. There were three modes of play in the game and Game A did allow a second player to control the duck. One might be grateful that they were not allowed to control when the dog popped up and laughed.
The light gun genre had a surprising short life on home gaming systems. It fared better in the arcades. One can trace the evolution of these game to the first person shooters of today. Duck Hunt was special, the game that was included with Super Mario Bros when the NES was bought. The way things are going, we will still be talking about it in another 35 years.