The Complete Guide of Retro Shooting Game - Part 2

 "Virtual Gun"

Back across the Pacific, Gunpei Yokoi had worked his way up to heading Nintendo’s internal development division on the back of the success of his popular Game & Watch line. He was about to help launch what would become the first mainstream home lightgun. The so-called Beam Gun, released in Japan for Nintendo’s Famicom console, would be re-branded for Western audiences as the NES Zapper.
Owing its design more to a Star Warsblaster than anything on the local rifle range, the Zapper came bundled with a g ame called Duck Hunt, which would wind up as one of the most famous of Yokoi’s creations.

Although effectively little more than an updated version of the old black-and-white ‘skeet shooting’ TV games, Duck Hunt’s appealing graphicsand sniggering hunting dog pal hit a chord and helped sell plenty of Zappers. The NES became the first console to have a proper lightgun game library, with titles including an updated version of Yokoi’s Wild Gunman, police target shooting sim Hogan’s Alleyand an unofficial version of Exidy’s gory arcade release Chiller. Not to be outdone, Sega developed its own Light Phaser in time for the North American launch of its Master System console in 1986, and Atari followed suit with the XG-1 lightgun in 1987. Atari’s peripheral was designed primarily for the 7800 and XEGS consoles and games like Alien Brigade and Barnyard Blaster, but could also be used with the Atari 2600. However, only one compatible title, Sentinel, was ever released. On the Master System, support for the Light Phaser was limited to simple shooting galleries like Safari Huntand Marksman/Trap Shootingbut, in the arcades, Taito was unleashing a spectacular military shoot-’em-up that would take the system by storm

Operation Wolf

Operation Wolf, with its cabinet-mounted Uzi-style gun controller, was the interactive equivalent of watching Stallone battle the entire Vietnamese army in Rambo II, and the
most spectacular game of its type so far. Although the original game used a positional
gun rather than an optical targeting system, full support for the Light Phaser and better
graphics than its NES counterpart meant that the Master System port was the most
impressive home version of the arcade hit.

The ‘Operation Wolf effect’ also spread to the current home computers, popularising lightgun
games on systems like the Spectrum and Commodore 64. Ocean Software’s home ports were huge sellers, despite being released without support for a lightgun peripheral at first. “The player’s ‘target’ was placed in the cross-hairs by joystick and fired,” explains Colin Porch, who coded the C64 version. “I remember that we deliberately put a degree of spread into where the bulletswent, since it didn’t look right if each one followed exactly the same path as the previous one.”