The Ultimate Guide to NES Light Guns 

Do you think you’ll be able to do a video on Treasure someday? Even though they are relatively unknown nowadays, they do present a history that should be important to indie gaming.

This video needs a seizure warning. So many flashes

Can you make a Resident Evil video?

there is a light gun that does wrk with LED displays, forgot the name but with some emulators you can play duck hunt with it

We’d love to see a video about the playchoice-10. It’s a good topic because it’s obscurity and it’s relevance in the life of the NES

Happy Holidays! Hope you have a good season!

You're the best Norman, happy holidays to you

Happy Holidays Norman!

Happy Holidays!

Great work as always, Norm! Have a great end of the year.

Awesome story ❤

this was my exact first thought; could have been revolutionary for gamers with disabilities! so glad to hear it helped your brother access those wonderful experiences too

Wholesome

This was touching. Could we get a update on the family?

@@charliedarwins well, it's not exactly the happiest of endings as he passed on a number of years ago, but he was able to kick my ass at many a video game when we were kids and we all ensured until the very end that he could live as 'normal' a life as a quadraplegic could. Also, it should be noted that, especially in the 80s and 90s, an overwhelming majority of kids in his condition didn't survive puberty, even so far as when he hit that age and started having inexplicable health problems, a medical expert requested that his doctors document and report his progress for future research (i honestly don't know all the ins and outs of it, i was still a kid at the time myself). He was a rare case of a child who was paralyzed very young that made it fully into adulthood, and while he did struggle with many of the mental health issues you would expect someone in that condition to struggle with, and with good reason, he always had friends and family around him and was able to make the most of what he had. He got really into tech, messing around on his computer a lot, and always loved his video games. He was very generous to everyone around him and would often fly friends and family to his winter house. Everyone remembers him fondly and those closest to him got commemorative skull tattoos (he also liked his tattoos) in his honour. Seriously, my catholic parents getting a tattoo of anything, much less a skull, is something that would never have been on my 'things that will happen in my lifetime' bingo card. We were quite close, and i was the first person to get a call from him when he got his terminal diagnosis, and i still miss him, but i have to stress that it's not as sad as it seems as he had something like a less than 5% chance of living as long as he did and making it to middle age would have been nothing short of a miracle, so we all feel blessed to get as much time as we did with him, and us kids got some real interesting and fascinating life experience and lessons very early on that many people don't get in a lifetime and we're all grateful for it.

I remember how exciting that one was too. It took a game that was already really good into a definite favorite.

I'll never forget making the same discovery 20 seconds ago after reading your post.

@@mr.fancypants1524 I also was today years old when I discovered this lol. Been playing it for at least the last 25 years.

Wife got a kick out of flying the ducks.

Further proving that hardly anyone ever read the Duck Hunt instruction book.

Wish I need that.

Why can't you use Hyper Shot on those NES on-rail shooters? If you can play "Duck Hunt" with it, then why can't you play like for instance "Mechinzed Attack"? Is it just because of the 15pin plug or code doesn't recognizes it? IF it's just a plug incompatibility - well, just use an Everdrive cartridge and play those games on your Famicom with plugged in Hyper Shot submachine gun. Can anyone confirm/deny? Thank you! :-)

Icons WAS the inspiration of The Gaming Historian. Norm saw that on G4, and saw that no one on RU-vid was doing video game history.

@@OwlRTA all the more reason to bring him on. Make it come full circle

I would watch G4 if they replaced Gerard with Norm.

Icons was amazing! I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers

Icons was one of the good shows on G4.

Thank you for the information

A good move, IMO. It looks better than an orange tip would have. Still prefer the grey, though.

It looks pretty fly in orange and grey anyway.

@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine Imagine if they made an orange deck to match.

@@MegaRetroRocket There are some zapper guns that are actually red like the plastic didn't come out properly orange. I have about 20 or so zapper guns, use to collect a lot back in the day like 2001-2014.

Is it shown like an artifact or does the guy let others play it

Nothing stopping you from doing it today👍

The Super Guitar Bros.!!! Great covers!

Norm said it's his least favorite of the 3 first-party Zapper games but honestly it's my favorite. I played Game B with the fake town for hours.

Stop calling it content, it’s a video.

@@Rountree1985 it's not that serious. Take your meds.

@@Rountree1985 It's content and it's fantastic.

@Rountree1985 I think this person is talking about all of gaming historian's videos and calling them great.

Oh yeah? Well I'd like you to smell this: *farts* **MOANS**

Forgot to take your meds today I assume.

Another tour is way overdue

It’d be nice if there was another Blu-Ray release of the show that had just that

If anything this collection just makes me realize how amateur the Nerd's collection was, at least at the time he was making videos about old hardware.

No silly skits? You must have missed Norm popping up all over the plce from behind his couch lol

If you want silly skits and video game knowledge, watch Scott the Woz

Damn, that must have been cathartic.

☹ I would have only ever owned one game. I never beat a single game until Nintendo Hard became a thing of the past.

To The Earth was a brutal game as a kid

The unfortunate thing is, that trick would be very expensive in the modern era.

That's a good example of high difficulty high reward.

Love your vids!

how in the world do you find all of your classic clips?!

how in the world do you find all of your classic clips?!

The Odyssey doesn't screw around, and neither did Nintendo.

My little brother was talking about the power glove the other day...man NES had so many gimmicks. So many knock-off games and atrocious games for popular movies. They even had a dang robot..and I couldn't afford any of it but I got a lot of it at garage sells. I recommend parents take their kids to garage sells. Haha I got erector sets, legos, tinker toys for a steal at garage sells and that stuff sells for a ton now. Sry, just reminiscing on my second-hand hand-me-down childhood.

@@wheelmanstan Did you get one of the games for that robot? There's only two vs. the 17 or so for the Zapper.

@@Chaos89P I got the robot at a garage sale and it didn't work, but I remember getting the game, haha I don't think I could do anything with the game with the incomplete robot, I think it was incomplete, I just remember it was this weird stacking game

@@wheelmanstan So you ended up with Stack Up instead of Gyromite. The latter could technically be played by one person, but it was rather clunky to do so or you needed a peripheral like the NES Advantage. The former, if I remember correctly, had more "programming" options for the robot, but was otherwise worthless without it.

Still have my copy of To The Earth and man was it hard.

Oh nice, idk if i’ve ever heard of it. Do you consider it pretty obscure or do i just not have enough knowledge about the NES library ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jsFgEFA3-I4.html

Right! Make me laugh.

*_"Kinda defeats the purpose, right?"_* Jokes and references aside; you could simply play with the controller on your hand and don't shout at the microphone funny enough, it is completely optional to use it after all.

Watch the Angry Video Game Nerd's episode on it lol.

@@Nicholas_Steel Added quote symbols to avoid confusion between the reference.

@@Nicholas_Steel Yes, I saw it a while ago, lol.

true. Also not many people know you can play 2 Player on duck hunt... the controller can control the ducks,

Now I have to check that out on MAME

I remember cheating duck hunt by directly pointing the gun at the screen lol

I only knew about that one by Konami. Turns out you can shout whatever you want and the "firing action" will still work (if this isn't addressed in the video). Of course, since I was watching it in action in an AVGN video, the most logical of extremes was used.

The only third party Zapper game I knew about when I was a kid is called Gotcha. And I didn't hear about Bayou Billy until years later

Be thankful you didn't own the Playco wireless one. I had one as a kid, it is an even bigger piece of junk than Norman said it was.

The safety-orange ones were original Nintendo equipment, too. They were just manufactured after federal legislation mandated that "toy guns" have safety-orange tips to differentiate them from real ones. With the way the Zapper is built, it was easier (and looked better!) to make the majority of the gun orange instead of just the tip; they didn't change the way it fits together, they just changed the color of plastic they used.

Yup! Made my little sister hold right on controller 2 so I could use cheat codes. Good times

Yeah, TGH is totally quality over quantity. Im totally ok with that!

They’re basically mini-docs or full fledged documentaries, either way it’s always a treat

The story is not for the faint of heart tho.

Wabbit season!

Also didn't know that he had been working at Sharp before Nintendo- didn't see that in the obituaries I read about him. Guess Nintendo were lucky they had Gunpei Yokoi to facilitate that recruitment.

Nintendo’s a pretty unique company in that regard ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jsFgEFA3-I4.html

People look to stuff like the DS and Wii as Nintendo just being quirky and trying different things. But Nintendo has *always* been trying different things. The company was practically built on that. They don't always hit the mark but you can't say they dont try when it comes to applying existing technologies in novel ways.

With the latter being grossly exaggerated by unfairly biased people looking soley to be self-impressed by the sound of their own baseless whining.

> Likes reached 64 My work is done.

Well I did. It came with the 2 in 1 cartridge of Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. The other zapper game I had was Shooting Range. Didn't know about Wild Gunman much until, you guessed it, Back to the Future Part II. It's interesting to see the vs. Arcade versions of Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley. I can see why they'd be popular in the arcades. They were so popular in the arcade that there was a boom of light gun popularity soon after. Sega Master System also had their own light gun and this wouldn't be the last time Konami released one thanks to the Justifier that came with ports of Lethal Enforcers. It's just satisfying when playing a light gun game.

I was also thinking that gun had a Zillion vibe to it.

Simply save, his neighborhood Learn here?

@@lucasrem1870 Did you have a stroke writing that?

@@md_vandenberg Learn new thing about the 80th? Meant that adult Joker, too busy after heavy covid...Bob Begat is no more..

Even better idea would be to incorporate an A button into it!

3d print 🖨 it

Did they have those old light shooters in the pinball museum?

We just colored over it with a permanent marker. Of course, we were also lucky enough to have plenty of older toy guns that didn't have it.

@@Derek-kj9mt I drilled them out, pried them out, even melted a few out on some metal toy guns. Good times.

I think the roumor of it working if you pointed it at a light might have come from some of the OTHER unlicensed games floating around for it. because some of those where of dubious quality. The only lightgun NES game I've played personally is duckhunt, so I can't confirm that.

@@DFX2KX maybe this should have been a more of a post to GH, but the rumor most likely came from the quick draw segment of Wild gunman, or somebody had a lightbulb that flickered

Shit take. Your opinion is bad

@@TheTrueNorth11 Sure... what did I want when I was 9? A Water Gun! Did I care if it didn't look like an M16? No! What do kids want a lot now of days? Water Guns! Do THEY care if they look like an M16? No! They'll buy them anyway. So tell me how my 'opinion is bad' when in another time and place, we wouldn't have toy guys at all?

@@Plasmawarrior What unintelligible babble, holy shit.

I mean, the most recent light guns were on the PS2...but then HDTVs came out...

@@esmooth919 They weren't very precise, like That Wii-mote. I always just used The Controller. 🎮

@@user-em6ie2be7x the PS2 lightgun was precise, it was the PS3 one that used infrared like the wii mote. PS2/PSX original guncoms were more accurate than the nes light gun since it captured the video sync as well.

@@knight0fdragon I still preferred the controller. I guess I was just more accurate with the controller than the Guncom.

"ahead of it's time" techs already 50 years old by the time Nintendo make it lmao