Many of the late Millenials and early Gen-Zs were introduced to gaming through consoles that you can connect to your TV. These were not PlayStation or Xbox but much more affordable and capable of running games that are released for much older platforms like NINTENDOs, ATARIs, SEGAs, etc., which were prevalent since a long time in developed nations. Their accessories usually included joysticks, keyboard, and LIGHT GUN.
DUCK HUNT
These consoles supported a wide variety of games during their time and a popular one was DUCK HUNT. This game features a duck that flies non-stop across the TV screen, accompanied by a dog watching it. You are supposed to shoot the Duck by pointing your gun at it. If your target is missed or timed out, the duck flies away and the very next clip would be, the dog laughing at you in the most irritable manner. From personal experience, more than the duck, this dog has the potential to drive you mad after a couple of misses.
The gun you use to kill your duck is called LIGHTGUN. The remarkable thing with this light gun is that you just have to point it at the TV and fire. While trying to shoot the duck, it’s like a bullet had travelled straight through the TV to give your duck a hit. But the gun hardly has any moving part and of course, there is no bullet, even though some guns had a slide which you can pull to reload. The nozzle of the gun is fitted with a lens which I’ve thought to be the culprit behind this magic and tried poking it as much as possible, eventually ended up breaking it.
How do they work?
A Light gun is fitted with a photodetector inside it which sends an electric signal when a photon falls on it after passing through the nozzle lens. If this is the case, then pointing your gun at any part of the illuminated screen should let too many photons fall on it and there is no way that a photodetector could differentiate whether it is a duck or some other part of the screen you are pointing at. This is where your TV screen needs to co-ordinate with your gun.
When you pull the trigger, a trigger signal is sent to your console and is then sent to your TV. So the very moment of shooting, your TV goes completely black for a moment (let’s call this Calibration Frame) and in the next frame, it illuminates only the duck in the form of a WHITE block (let’s call this the White block frame). This would prevent photons from other parts of the screen and only the photon from the white block, which is the only illuminated part now, will travel away from the screen. If your gun is pointed exactly at the white block, your photodetector would catch these photons. This determines whether you’ve shot the duck or not, as pointing in black parts of the screen yields no photons towards the gun. After determining hit or miss, the screen again comes back to its previous state. All these happens in microseconds, hence we could never notice the screen going blank and working out the magic in front of our eyes.
Where are they now?
Though light gun supported games can be found in gaming arenas of malls and some public places, we don’t see them in any of our latest gaming consoles despite the fun it could give. This is because of modern televisions like LED/LCDs that didn’t go well with these guns. There are usually two reasons that are stated when describing the failure of light guns with modern televisions.
First, there is a response lag in LCDs between the trigger signal and the appearance of the white block frame. In older CRT TVs, each frame is drawn from top to bottom and the TV responds by placing the white block in the very next frame as soon as the trigger signal is received and this is the exact time at which the Lightgun will be expecting the block to appear on the screen. In Modern LCDs, this response time is delayed as the LCD screens are made of crystals that move to modify the pixel colour. This motion of crystals is what makes them less responsive as compared to CRT Televisions.
Another reason being, Photodetector in the Lightgun can detect each time the pixel on the screen is turned ON and OFF. Between the Calibration frame and the white block frame, there is a sudden spike in photons entering the gun and this gives you accurate information on whether the white block has popped up on the screen or not. But in LCD screens, blacks aren’t true black as it is always lit from behind the panel and the colour contrast you notice between the Calibration frame and white block frame is not up to the one produced in CRTs. Despite these issues faced in modern TVs, NINTENDO introduced their Wii Remote to give a lightgun like experience, and even it ended up suffering from lag as you move it across the screen.
Still, you can play Duck Hunt with your modern televisions after attaching some additional accessories, but the smoothness of gameplay can never be matched with the one you have in CRTs. With OLED TVs intruding the market, we could expect a come back of this light gun, as the pixels in OLEDs unlike LCD/LED TVs, produce their own light without needing any backlit lamps and seems to have a better response time on par with CRTs.
DIVE-IN DEEP
Even before the introduction of video games, light guns were in use. A game made by Seeburg, similar to duck hunt was popular in carnivals and stores from the late 1930s. Here you’ll shoot a toy duck or some other moving objects placed behind the glass, using your rifle. Instead of fitting photodetectors inside the gun, they’ll be fitted on the moving object. Each time you shoot, a narrow and intense ray of light will be produced from the gun which when struck with the photodetectors, will give you points.
References
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