On Duck Hunt, the Intention of Play and Hardware

Back in July of 2024, it must have been around the 20th or so if I’m not remembering things wrong or screwing up the math, me and a friend had to go back to our town after a trip with some other pals to the Mediterranean coast; we took a bus to the capital, spent an hour or two with another friend on there, and prepared ourselves mentally the best we could for the 9 hour long bus trek back home—during which the lights screw up and wouldn’t turn off so we ended up getting like an hour or less of sleep. Fun!

Ignoring the insomnia, there was another… interesting thing (?) that happened during those never-ending hours, and as dumb as it was, for some reason my brain kept coming back to it, something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

There were some sort of small screens/tablets in front of each seat; it wasn’t the first time I had seen one of those, but it was the first ever I saw them working! They were what you would expect, a thing to watch films or connect your phone to, nothing special…but then I noticed a certain section with the name ‘’Games’’ on it. Now, I am not what you would call tech-savvy, but it did intrigue me what kind of games the kind of machine that struggled with menu transitions could run, so I clicked not really knowing what to expect aside of maybe checkers or something… and then I see Duck Hunt .

I don’t know why, but they had fucking Duck Hunt, and I just had to check that out ‘cause I still didn’t really know what it actually was. Like, it was knock-off? A bootleg mobile port? Maybe they just decided to add a NES emulator just because (it definitely wasn’t that, but it would have been really funny)? Well… I’m still not sure what it was. Probably the second option since the game itself was apparently the exact same thing with but with touch controls, extreme lag and slow-downs, and the texts in the Movie Maker font.

You don’t really know what it’s like to be completely out of your mind till you play Duck Hunt like that at fucking 4 in the morning on a moving vehicle. I didn’t play for long, only half an hour or so, and that’s when that should have ended: a mildly bizarre occurrence, which I thought was pretty funny, which I would forget about and not pay much thought about right afterwards… suffices to say that wasn’t what really happened.

My friend who watched me play and tried it did forget about it as any human being with a functioning brain with more than three neurons would. Sadly, I don’t enjoy such luxury. After that I just stared at the screen for a moment. Looking at the game’s section, seeing the Duck Hunt cover art plastered on it. Feeling myself during a metamorphosis that would turn me into the most pedantic version of myself. And I could only think one thing.

…Did I actually play Duck Hunt?

In the strict meaning of the word, yeah, I probably did, but… did I really?

Duck Hunt is, to me, the quintessential ‘’toy videogame’’, the forefather of a whole home-console genre, at least partially. There isn’t really a final objective, you pick up the light gun and shoot ducks or discs till you fail, that’s it. Comparing it to other light-gun games is a losing battle, there ain’t a real sense of finality you can get of Duck Hunt ‘cause it lacks a sense of final victory. Hell, it technically does end, but it’s more-so a by-product of an in-game error than an actual presence of ending.

You don’t play Duck Hunt with the intent of getting from an A to a B point, you play it for the sake of the experience of playing it, just like a toy (and even then, I use the term very loosely considering that there ARE toys that offer some kind of objective; you can argue that shooting ducks and going through level to level is a form of objective in of itself, and it’s a fair point, but it’s a never-ending one.)

So then, that leads to the question: ‘’What is the experience of Duck Hunt?’’, and I don’t think anyone would argue that the Zapper is that experience, or at least makes up for a huge portion of it. So then, that leads me to another question... What happens when you take the Zapper out of the equation?

Video games are such a deeply fascinating medium in which the system tends to be as important as the game in question, or at least in a far more noticeable way than anything you could find in most of the audiovisual spectrum. Touch-screens, unique controllers, accessories, even a dumb novelty of something like Toys-to-Life reminds us that the way this whole industry came back after a massive crisis was through a grey brick of a console and a slow-moving toy robot.

This blabbering is getting more and more deranged as it goes and I know it, but it isn’t a rant about emulation itself because there isn’t much to discuss: the best emulation tools are always gonna lend a hand in matters of… well, emulating the game through and through. So, the reality is that playing a game as it was ‘’intended’’ is more of a matter on the hands of the players themselves. That or the conditions surrounding them, whichever they may be, preventing them from engaging with it by those means.

Would experiencing a tech demo such as Wii Sports, so intrinsically designed around motion controls, without a proper way to replicate the control system actually qualify as having played it? Is there any point to playing something like Kinect Sports without a goddamned Kinect? Would playing Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction without a Sixaxis invalidate your whole experience with it?


It's a fucked-up question not because it’s necessarily a hard one to answer, but because the answer may be unsatisfactory.

There isn’t a definitive yes or no, it’s even hard to pinpoint where the kind of would be. It’s inevitably gonna matter, especially in most of the cases which I’ve focused on which hardware and software are designed with one and other in mind, and don’t even get me started in some Arcade machines. You’ve probably hard people say something along the lines of ‘’You have to play it on a original machine to get it ’’, and those statements hold a ton of truth. Dames can be elevated or even diminished by the ‘’intended’ experience, and even when it’s the latter, there’s just something unique about it that poor or buggy feeling, something that makes them what they are, even when what they are isn’t good. There’s something so incredibly memorable when you get to see them through those eyes.

But then there’s the other side of the coin, the side of accessibility, emulation and even re-releases. Some games may be a completely different experience, others may be improved but become distant from what they once were, yet nothing changes the fact that you are playing them. Maybe missing that added depth, but in turn you’ll get a perhaps more personal experience. I still think it isn’t exactly idea to distance the developer’s voice from their art and give the player the meat of the deciding factors in how to engage with it in every aspect, but in an era of piss-poor preservation where so many machines are either lost to time for some or outright left to rot, it's not only the one choice available, but one that brings its ups.

Nobody is gonna come to your house and threat you to gunpoint if you decide to emulate Gyromite and play it without R.O.B or a second player… well, maybe the No.1 Gyromite purist, but you know what? Fuck ‘em!

Would it be a 1 to 1 experience? Absolutely not, but those who want it will undoubtedly chase it with all the means they have, I should know because I’m one of those nerds, but not everyone needs to be on that boat. Sometimes you want to sit down and play the fucking game, and you want it not to be a headache. Or sometimes, life puts in front of you a horrible version of a game it doesn’t have any right to be in that state, yet there is, and even when it's different, even with those changes, you are still playing it.

The experience of Duck Hunt as it released was through a CRT screen and a Zapper. But when that’s out of the question, what’s wrong with making do with what you have?

So, in a way, I did play Duck Hunt, an uniquely bad Duck Hunt, yet unique nonetheless. A Duck Hunt I may not get to experience ever again. A Duck Hunt on the country highway late at night, barely functioning yet still moving.

A Duck Hunt that I’ll remember.

Originally published on Backloggd on Novemeber 22nd, 2024, with changes made for a better reading experience. I'm also taking this chanve to confirm, I am indeed still intending in moving most of my Backloggd write-ups to here, little bu little, tho I'm struggling with those that don't really fit into the single blog post format, and I don't want to clog the site with older write-ups so soon. Maybe I'll do some extravaganzas/collections and upload them in batches that I think will fit? Let me know if you like the idea, and I might go for that and put some of them up on here from time to time. Until that, thanks for reading!

Thank you so much for reaching this point.