Thanksgiving Special: Duck Hunt

 

Okay, okay, I know that traditionally people eat turkey on Thanksgiving, but there is no game that I could find in existence that has the word "turkey" "Pilgrim"or "Thanksgiving" in it. So then I thought why not find a game with the word "bird" in it. Then it dawned on me...Duck Hunt on the NES. In some holiday traditions, it is custom to eat a goose or duck for dinner, so this is as close as I will come to a turkey themed game. Enjoy.

The first place I remember seeing Duck Hunt was in the arcade. I maybe played it

a handful of times, but would usually pass it by for other favorites like Castlevania or RoadBlasters. Then the game started to appear in the basic Nintendo home console system, and was bundled with  the already popular Super Mario Brothers in the only dual cartridge I think I have ever seen. I am quite sure the Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt cartridge became one of the most widely available pieces of hardware ever made. In fact, the only times I see the original Mario Brothers for sale these days, it's usually the dual cartridge.

So what exactly is Duck Hunt? Well, it's a game where you blast ducks from the sky using the light zapper gun. You also have an option to shoot clay pigeons if you are a not in to shooting 8-bit animals. In either case, the goal is to shoot as many of the ducks/clay pigeons in the round as you can. The higher the score the better. As you might imagine the game gets old quickly, and if you were one of the billions of people who got the dual cart, you found yourself switching over to Super Mario Brothers rather quickly.

Yeah Duck Hunt is not one of the most popular games made for the NES system, but almost everyone has probably owned it at least once, since it was bundled en mass with

Super Mario Brothers. Even though it's not one of the more popular titles from the NES days, I would argue that it is still an iconic game. It was the first game I remember that used the light gun. To bad you couldn't shoot that damn dog that popped up and laughed at you whenever you missed.

Anyway. That's about it for Duck Hunt. Nothing more than a simple 8-bit target shooting game.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!