The Complete Guide to Retro Shooting Game - Part 1

FROM DUCKS TO GUNSLINGERS, KI LLER CYBORGS AND ARMIES OF THE UNDEAD, THE TH RILL OF THE COMPUTER-GENERATED SHOOTING RANGE HAS, IT SEEMS, REMAINED UNDIMINISHED. MIKE BEVAN LOOKS AT THE HISTORY OF ONE OF VIDEOGAMING’S MOST SUCCESSFUL SUB-GENRES

 From Humble Beginning

Interactive gun games have been around for decades in one form or another. Our more mature readers might recall mechanical amusements involving sinking battleships or harpooning sharks, or the Western-themed rifle ranges that were a common feature of pier-top arcadesand Eighties theme parks. The act of physically aiming and squeezing the trigger on a virtual target has a tactile appeal that separates lightgun shooters from other combat-oriented videogames and, as the technology has improved, they’ve evolved from blasting archaic white dots to playing peace-keeping cops, Rambo-style freedom-fighters, big game hunters or the last hope against the zombie apocalypse.



But it all started with a primitive rifle shooting game and a mechanical duck…In 1936, a jukebox company called Seeburg produced theRay-O-Lite, the world’s first light-activated shooting game. It featured a rail-mounted ‘flying’ duck equipped with a sensor that would register hits from a light-emitting rifle. A hit on the duck made it fall. The principle of using a light beam to detect where a player was aiming soon became common in amusement arcades, with notable mechanical shooting games like Sega’s Periscopeand Killer Sharkin the late Sixties and early Seventies. With the onset of electronic videogames, it was a natural progression to apply the idea to an on-screen target and, of course, one of the pioneers was the remarkable Ralph Baer.In the late Sixties, Ralph had been working on the Brown Box project, a prototype of what would become the Magnavox Odyssey – the first commercial home videogaming system. “It became immediately obvious to me when we had one spot on the screen that we could shoot at with a gun that had simple electronics,” Ralph remembers.
After
experimenting with an optical gun for the Brown Box, he designed the firstcommercial lightgun, the Shooting Galleryhardware/  game combo for the Odyssey in 1972. This consisted of a hunting rifle-shaped peripheral and four simple games, which used paper overlays that were placed over the glowing targets on the screen.While previous arcade shooting titles had
used targets equipped with light sensors, Ralph’s optical gun was different – it used
a sensor placed in the gun barrel itself. This meant that the gun could register hits from
other luminous objects, such as a light bulb. It seems that Ralph wasn’t too concerned about
this capacity to cheat the game. “We couldn’t care less, as long as it worked just fine when
aimed at a bright target spot on a dark TV screen,” he chuckles, “and that it did.”


Over in Japan, a fresh-faced toy designer by the name of Gunpei Yokoi had been working on several electro-mechanical projects for Nintendo. Fascinated with the idea of shooting games, he had created the Nintendo Beam Gun, a cheap lightgun toy that included a set of targets fitted with solar cells of the same type found in pocket calculators. Applying similar technology to the arcade, in 1974 he designed Wild Gunman, a target shooting game consisting of a lightgun hooked up to a 16 millimetre projection screen that displayed pre-recorded footage of gun-slinging actors. Players had to out-draw, and out-shoot, their on-screen opponent in a simulated Wild West duel.Gunpei’s influence on the world of lightgun games would turn out to be massive, but more on that later. On the home front, the Seventies’ glut of Pong-inspired videogame consoles like the UK’s Grandstand and Binatone TV Master turned bouncing squares into targets for pack-in lightguns, becoming big commercial successes. But, when these monochrome platforms were superseded by the colour Atari VCS and Intellivision, home target shooting games had fallen out of favour. The new systems launched without lightgun peripheral support, and the arcade was again the only place to fi nd new and exciting games using the technology.