Code Like It's 198x

Duck Hunt

Three shots, and the dog is watching

Classic GamesSource-checked

Nintendo's 1984 light-gun game for the Famicom, sold in the West from 1985 with the NES Zapper and later packed into the NES Action Set on one cartridge with Super Mario Bros. The player shoots ducks and clay pigeons with three shots a target, and a hunting dog laughs at every miss. It took its name from a 1976 Nintendo toy that projected a duck on the wall.

Miss the duck in Duck Hunt and a hunting dog rises out of the long grass and laughs at you. Club Nintendo, Nintendo’s British club magazine, found in 1989 that “everybody that we have met who have played the game seem to want to shoot the dog more than the actual ducks”. Many NES owners met him, because Duck Hunt came in the box: first in the NES Deluxe Set with the Zapper light gun, then on the same cartridge as Super Mario Bros.. Behind the joke is a clever trick. The Zapper has no idea where it is pointing, and Duck Hunt has to work that out one frame at a time.

Fast facts

  • Publisher: Nintendo.
  • Released: Famicom, Japan, 1984; NES, United States, October 1985, with Hogan’s Alley and Wild Gunman; Britain, 1987.
  • Controller: the Zapper, or the Famicom’s revolver-shaped light gun.
  • Modes: Game A, one duck; Game B, two ducks; Game C, clay pigeons.
  • Music: Hirokazu Tanaka.
  • Arcade: Vs. Duck Hunt, on Nintendo’s Vs. System.

Three shots a duck

The rules fit on the back of the box. The dog sniffs through the grass, a duck flies up, and the player has three shots to bring it down. Club Nintendo’s guide spelled it out: in Game A one duck flies at a time, in Game B two, and “either way, you have only three shots to fire, so make sure that each one counts”. Each hit duck is held up by the “jubilant (and often comical) dog”; a miss sets him laughing. Ten ducks make a round, and “to proceed to the next round, you have to hit at least six out of every ten”. The ducks get faster as the rounds go on. Game C swaps the ducks for clay pigeons, thrown away from the player so that they shrink into the distance. In Game A a second player can take a controller and steer the duck, which Retro Gamer later described as a way for “duck-welfare enthusiasts” to save the birds.

The British press was polite rather than excited. ACE, reviewing the new NES in its first issue in October 1987, found that the Zapper still worked from five metres away and that “it actually feels like a pistol”. By 1992 Total! called Duck Hunt “a mildly entertaining Zapper game”, fine “if you get it bundled free with the Action Set but don’t buy it separately”.

How the Zapper finds the duck

The Zapper reports two things: whether its trigger is pulled, and whether its light sensor can see a bright spot at that instant. It cannot tell the game where it is aimed. Games like Duck Hunt get round this with the television. As Wireframe explained, pulling the trigger “would cause the entire screen to go black and an enemy sprite to become bright white”. If the sensor sees light, the gun is pointing at the target. With two ducks in the air, each one flashes white for a single frame in turn, so the game can tell which one was hit.

The NESdev Wiki, the community reference for NES hardware, gives the full sequence. When the trigger is pulled, the game first checks during the vertical blank, while the screen is dark, that the gun sees no light. A gun that sees light then is pointing at a lamp or a window, not the screen. Then, for each target, it draws a black screen with one white box where that target is, and watches the sensor for the whole frame.

The trick depends on a CRT television. A CRT draws its picture as a moving spot of light, about 15,700 lines a second, and the Zapper’s sensor has a filter tuned to that rate, so it ignores the steady light of a lamp. A modern flat screen holds its picture steady, which the filter treats much like room light, and it delays the picture while processing it, so the white box arrives after the game has stopped looking. That is why Duck Hunt fails on most modern televisions. The NES Zapper entry has the detail.

The first Duck Hunt, 1976

Nintendo had used the name eight years before the Famicom game. Its Kôsenjû Duck Hunt (“light-ray gun Duck Hunt”) was an electro-mechanical toy from 1976, one of the last that Nintendo made, and the product of a decade of light-gun toys from Gunpei Yokoi’s team. It cost ¥9,500 and had no screen. A battery-powered projector threw a flapping duck onto the living-room wall, and a motor-driven mirror made it fly. The player fired a toy shotgun that gave out a burst of light.

The sensor was in the projector, not the gun. Nintendo’s American patent for the design, which names Takao Ohta as inventor and was granted in 1980, puts a photoelectric cell on the projector’s own optical axis. Light from the shotgun that struck the projected duck reflected off the wall and travelled back through the same lens and mirror onto the cell. On a hit, the projector switched to a picture of a wounded duck, the mirror dropped it down the wall and a mechanism inside played a quack. The Famicom game turned this round: the television became the target and the sensor moved into the gun.

Duck Hunt in the arcade

Nintendo also put the game into arcades on its Vs. System, which ran games on common hardware and changed only the software. Computer Gamer found Vs. Duck Hunt in British arcades in April 1986, with a gun attached to the cabinet by a cable. Its screens alternated between ducks and clay pigeons, and it added the revenge that home players never got. In a bonus round, ducks flew out of the undergrowth, the dog sometimes came out with them, and “you can get your own back by shooting at him”. He then limped back “on crutches and with his arm in a sling”.

Bundles and later life

In America the Deluxe Set of 1986 packed Duck Hunt with Gyromite, the Zapper and the robot R.O.B.; a November 1986 mail-order advert listed it at $149. Mattel’s British launch in 1987 kept the same pairing in its Deluxe set. Nintendo then combined Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. on one cartridge for the Action Set, which Total! priced at £100 in Britain in 1992 with the console, two joypads and the Zapper. In 1988 Nintendo Power announced the Power Set, whose single cartridge held Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros. and World Class Track Meet for the Power Pad.

The game outlived the Zapper and the CRT. A version played with the Wii Remote came to the Wii U’s Virtual Console in 2014. The same year the dog and a duck became a playable pair in Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. games for the Wii U and 3DS, and they returned in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Sources

  • Club Nintendo (UK) issue 1, 1989, p. 4: the Deluxe Set, three shots, six ducks in ten to go through. Issue 4, 1989, pp. 2–4: the Zapper games, Games A and B, the dog, clay shooting, “everybody… seem to want to shoot the dog”.
  • ACE issue 1, October 1987, p. 20: the NES Deluxe Set and Duck Hunt (the Zapper’s range, “it actually feels like a pistol”).
  • Total! issue 4, April 1992, p. 46: the Action Set, £100 with the Zapper and the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge. Issue 5, May 1992, p. 71: “a mildly entertaining Zapper game”.
  • Computer Gamer issue 13, April 1986, p. 26: Vs. Duck Hunt in the arcades (the cabled gun, alternating screens, shooting the dog in the bonus round).
  • Videogiochi (Italy) issue 32, December 1985, p. 44: Vs. Duck Hunt shown at a trade fair (three shots for two targets, ducks or clays in turn, the laughing dog).
  • Digital Press, May/June 1993, p. 5: US release dates of the first Zapper games.
  • Ahoy! issue 35, November 1986: the Deluxe Set at $149 (see R.O.B.).
  • CRASH issue 41, June 1987: Nintendo UK advertisement (“You’ve only got three shots to bag this duck”); the British Deluxe set (see Nintendo Entertainment System).
  • Nintendo Power issue 2, September 1988: the Power Set (see Power Pad).
  • Retro Gamer issue 38, 2007, p. 68: Duck Hunt released in 1984; the second player steering the duck.
  • UGVM issue 6, August 2003, p. 7: light-gun history (Duck Hunt released in 1984; three shots, Games A to C, a game that “got faster and harder”).
  • Wireframe issue 20, August 2019, p. 40, Rik Cross, “Create your own 2D shooting gallery”: the black screen and one-frame white flashes of light-gun games such as Duck Hunt.
  • NESdev Wiki, “Zapper” (web, secondary): the output bits, the sequence of operations, the 15 kHz filter and display lag. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Zapper
  • NESdev Wiki, “List of NES music composers” (web, secondary): Hirokazu Tanaka for Duck Hunt. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/List_of_NES_music_composers
  • Before Mario, “Nintendo Kôsenjû Duck Hunt (1976)” and “Nintendo Kôsenjû Duck Hunt – How it works” (web, secondary): the 1976 toy, its projector, shotgun and price, and how it detects a hit. http://blog.beforemario.com/2012/09/nintendo-kousenjuu-duck-hunt-1976.html
  • US patent 4,229,009, “Light-emission gun amusement machine for home use”, Takao Ohta for Nintendo Co., Ltd., filed 15 May 1978, granted 21 October 1980. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4229009A/en
  • Wikipedia, “Duck Hunt” (web, secondary): release dates, the Action Set, the Wii U Virtual Console release and the Super Smash Bros. appearance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Hunt
  • Nintendo, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fighter page, “Duck Hunt” (web). https://www.smashbros.com/en_US/fighter/59.html

See also

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