Why you can't play duck hunt anymore

Back in 2000-ish I bought a dodgy knock-off games console from an Asian stop over and at customs they asked my about this gun shaped item in the x-ray machine. This was pre 9/11 and they weren't too fussed. The opened the package, saw that the 'gun' had a cord and the whole thing (including console) weighed less than a box of cornflakes and after laughing at me for a bit they let me move on.

BUT - why did my 'all-in-one' game console need a 'gun' and why single quotes instead of double quotes? Read on... if you dare...

Shooting Stuff

A lot of games back in the day were based around shooting stuff. So a gun made sense in that regard. Before VR, AR or even the Wii being able to use your actual physical dexterity instead of press one of 8 buttons of on a flat awkward controller (sorry NES I love you really) felt like the pinnacle of technological achievement.

The Nintendo Entertainment System Zapper, what a name and what a futuristic looking piece of peripheral technology.

Launched in 1984 / 1985 depending on the part of the world that you lived in, it was compatible with 17 games eventually released for the NES. Games like Laser Invasion (shooting pixelated soldiers), Freedom Force (shooting pixelated terrorists) and Track and Field II (Umm...). Most of the games are barely remembered, one was some cowboy nonsense that's famous for failing to impress Elijah Wood and the other is the original, the legendary Duck Hunt.

In Duck Hunt you shoot ducks, a dog laughs at you and that's about it. Anyone who has played will remember that its a bit harder than it looks, not as much fun as it could be, but still really addictive. But you can't play Duck Hunt anymore, well not without trying really hard.

Why not?

Let's look into how the Zapper worked. The Zapper and other 'light guns' - not to be confused with the L118 Light Gun which weighed nearly two tons and would destroy your TV, and house, if you fired it - sadly didn't shoot lasers, or even light at all. They contained a narrow focussed light sensor in the end of the barrel. When the trigger is pulled the game flashes the screen black and then white squares over each of the targets in turn, and back to the glorious 56 colour display.

The light sensor in the gun will detect the white flash if its pointing at a target (and won't if its not). Sounds simple but there are some interesting things going on here. First the black screen - this prevents cheating by just pointing the gun at a light bulb and registering as hitting the first target on the screen. Some of the original light guns didn't have this feature - but taking advantage is only cheating yourself.

Because the targets are then flashed in turn the console can know which target you were aiming at by the timing of when the gun registered a flash. We are talking fractions of a second, faster than the human eye can discern, if you did notice all the flashing it could be seen as a clever muzzle flash effect. This precise timing is actually one of the main reasons you can't play Duck Hunt any more.

TVs then and now

For a long time TVs were big heavy devices with thick convex screens and huge deep cases. They produced a high pitched sound that I can no longer hear and an amazing ozone smell I remember fondly. These were the height of TV technology for a long time (after replacing their strange predecessors) and they worked by firing electrons at rare Swedish mud.

This electron beam is controlled by magnets and swept across the screen row by row, line by line at a great speed, completing a scan of the screen 50 or 60 times a second - depending on where you live.

TVs were simpler and directly, and immediately, displayed what they were being told to by the console so this timing could be relied upon.

Now TVs are too clever for their own good, HD, wide screen, resampling environmental effects, no lovely ozone smell unless you get really really close. The problem with this is that the TV does a lot of work to make the picture look pretty and a lot of work takes time. If we look at how the game knows where the gun is pointing, and that you are not cheating, it requires precise timing or it wouldn't even know you were pointing the gun at the screen, let alone a cheeky duck. No matter what mode the TV is in, or how flash and clever it is it cannot update the screen in the same way old TVs did. Even worse later types of light guns that were more precise and more advanced relied not on timing of flashing lights, but the actual timing of the electron beam travelling across the screen. No electron beam no more, no working light guns no more.

Except...

What about the Wii? That works pointing at the screen and doesn't need an old school telly to make it work. Well the Wii works with that sensor bar on your TV cabinet, IR and a lot of trigonometry to work out where you are pointing. It doesn't actually know anything about the screen itself, just where it is in relations to that sensor bar. That means that the games need to put crosshairs on the screen so you know where you are pointing.  And the trigonometry is hard for everyone, not just high school students - so that introduces a slight delay, just enough to be annoying. as you wave the wiimote around you can see the crosshairs lag behind while working out all the maths it needs to work out.

So you can play Duck Hunt on a new TV by combining old and new technology to get where the gun is pointing like a Wii and then flashing lights down the barrel of the gun in with the correct timing. There is even a commercial project to let you do this for only $USD90! Except you can't because its out of stock and not coming back. So you can't play Duck Hunt any more.

The End

The console I bought in 2000, in the twilight years of the Cathode Ray Tube, came packaged like a Play Station but ran games from the mid 80s, including Duck Hunt which is why it came packaged with a plastic gun that brought joy to Bangkok airport security.

Now days cheap knock off game consoles have HDMI ports and no light guns to be seen. The official NES mini consoles don't have Duck Hunt and light guns have totally fallen out of fashion for the home market.

Gun games are largely confined to back to arcades where they first started, but for 15 - 20 years from the mid 1980s you could be laughed at by a dog for missing a duck in the privacy of your own home.

Oh, and far too late now, but who knew that Duck Hunt was a two player game?