7 Best NES Light Gun Games

Barker Bill's Trick Shooting was made by Nintendo R&D1 and came out on the NES in 1990. It is based on Barker Bill's Cartoon Show, an animated series from the 50s, so the people most likely to recognize Bill were middle-aged adults. Bill is a mustachioed circus ringmaster who runs a carnival shooting gallery with his assistant Trixie. In Balloon Saloon, the dog from Duck Hunt hides behind the scenery and sends balloons floating up. Shoot him and it counts as a miss. Revenge at last, and it costs you.

You start with ten credits that drop with every miss, and shooting diamonds wins some back. One critic called the Trixie stage "one of the best implementations of the Zapper light gun" and saw the game as an early version of Namco's Point Blank. It did not make the player ranking. It is here because retro critics keep recommending it as one of the best undiscovered NES games.

Chiller started as a 1986 arcade game by Exidy, the company behind Death Race, a once very controversial game about running over stick figures with your car. On paper it is a normal shooting gallery: shoot enough targets to bring the Monster Meter down to zero before time runs out, and nothing ever shoots back. The problem is what you are shooting. The first two screens are a torture chamber with human victims chained to the walls.

The NES version came four years after the arcade one, as an unlicensed release. It is a pretty faithful port, with the levels in reverse order and a lot less blood, and you can play it with the Zapper instead of a fiddly cursor. One critic found it "rather difficult to truly enjoy." That is fair, but critics also call it an oddity you should not miss.

Gumshoe is one of the strangest ideas Nintendo ever had for the Zapper. It came out in North America in 1986 and never in Japan, which is unusual for a Nintendo game. You never control the hero directly. Detective Stevenson walks forward on his own, and to move him you shoot him, which makes him jump. Get the timing wrong and he walks straight into whatever is in his way. Falling rocks and bombs kill him in one hit.

There are four levels, each with a secret bonus area you reach by collecting at least twenty balloons. One reviewer summed it up: "this game is hard." One player who went back to it recently gave up on the first level, then returned and stood close enough to the TV to aim by eye. Retro critics still single it out as the light gun pick among undiscovered NES games.

Wild Gunman is older than the NES itself. It began in 1974 as an electro-mechanical arcade game by Gunpei Yokoi, and Nintendo turned it into a Famicom game in 1984. In North America it was a launch game for the NES in 1985, with the Zapper. It is a western quick-draw duel. An outlaw stands in front of you, and you wait for his eyes to flash and a speech bubble to tell you to fire. Then you shoot, and you had better be fast.

Most people know it from Back to the Future Part II, and in Part III all that practice gives Marty the skill to shoot a real revolver. Nintendo put it on the Wii U Virtual Console on October 21, 2015, to coincide with Back to the Future Day. Players still use it as the yardstick for quick-draw shooting, and newer games with a showdown in them keep reminding them of it.

Hogan's Alley is named after a real place: a shooting range for law enforcement training, first built at Camp Perry in Ohio in the 1920s and later redesigned for the FBI Academy in Quantico in 1954. Nintendo's game came out on the Famicom in 1984, and in the United States it was one of the original 17 NES launch titles. Three cardboard cutouts slide into place and turn to face you. Some are gangsters and some are innocent people, so the skill is knowing when not to pull the trigger.

Later rounds move to a city block with five cutouts at a time, and unused ammunition earns bonus points. It was a major arcade hit in the United States and Europe too. Players tend to name it in the same breath as Duck Hunt, as the other half of their Zapper memories.

Konami made The Adventures of Bayou Billy for the NES before its first brawlers in the arcades. Billy is a hillbilly from the swamp who looks a lot like Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, and his girlfriend Annabelle is kidnapped by a mobster named Godfather Gordon. Most of the game is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, but in stages 2 and 7 it turns into a first-person rail shooter you can play with the Zapper. Other stages put Billy in his jeep.

It is also brutally hard. Even by NES standards it is far too hard, and the Japanese version, Mad City, is the better way to play it, with weaker enemies and four different endings. Players who had it as kids remember the pain well. The American version added an announcer saying the title when you start, and one player still has it stuck: "I can still hear that crackly intro in my head."

Duck Hunt came out on the Famicom in Japan in April 1984 and as an arcade game in North America on the Nintendo VS. System, then became an NES launch game in North America in October 1985. Europe got it two years later. You aim the Zapper at the screen, one or two targets appear, and you have three tries to hit them before they get away. That is the whole game, and it was the NES pack-in.

As one retro writer put it, this is "the one we probably all started with." In the minds of nostalgic players it sits not far behind the original Super Mario Bros. It came back on the Wii U Virtual Console in 2014. Players recommend it more than ten times as often as any other Zapper game, and they still measure newer shooting games against it.