How Did the Duck Hunt Gun Work?
The Duck Hunt gun, officially called the NES Zapper, seems downright primitive next to today’s technology. But in the late ’80s, it filled plenty of young heads with wonder
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For many children of the '80s, a good portion of your childhood probably revolved around sitting too close to the TV, clutching a plastic safety cone-colored hand gun and blasting waterfowl out of a pixilated sky in Duck Hunt (also, trying to blow that dog’s head off when he laughed at you). The Duck Hunt gun, officially called the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Zapper, seems downright primitive next to the Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, but in the late 80s, it filled plenty of young heads with wonder. How did that thing work?
The Zapper’s ancestry goes back to the mid 1930s, when the first so-called “light guns” appeared after the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes. In the first light gun game, Ray-O-Lite (developed in 1936 by Seeburg, a company that made parts and systems for jukeboxes), players shot at small moving targets mounted with light sensors using a gun that emitted a beam of light. When the beam struck a sensor, the targets – ducks, coincidentally – registered the “hit” and a point was scored.
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How Did the Duck Hunt Gun Work? (getpocket.com)