REMEMBERING WHEN: An all-time favourite video game

By Keith Schell

Today’s video games are absolutely amazing. The digital detail, the graphics, the storylines and the intensity of play. While they are very impressive today, they are also so common nowadays that they are largely taken for granted.   

But not so in the beginning. When video games first came out in the early to mid-1980s, they were an entirely new and ground-breaking entertainment technology.

And one of my favourite video games that emerged from that time was:

DUCK HUNT!

Low-tech, cheesy, and absolutely hilarious, Duck Hunt was state-of-the-art in every way for video games of the time. It was probably the first video game I ever played and the first one I ever fell in love with because it was such a hoot to play!

When video games first came out in the 1980s, they were very expensive in relation to the average wage of the day. They were very certainly beyond the financial resources of our family at the time. And because they were not a necessity and we had more important things to spend our money on, our family never really got on board with the video game phenomenon until they were much more affordable down the road.

But that did not mean we never got to play any of the new video games when they first came out.

Our family always did our weekly shopping in our small town to meet most of our basic needs. But every two or three weeks or so, we would make a pilgrimage out of town and go half an hour south to one of the larger cities in our area for a bit of variety and a little shopping spree to get things that were at times not readily available in our own little town.

The city we journeyed to back then was large enough to have its own freshly built shopping mall on the outskirts of the city. New and exciting back in the day, it was a big deal for the local people when that fashionable new mall opened in 1975. And one of the anchor stores in that newly built shopping mall was Kmart, a prominent retailer at the time, and having such a fashionable store featured in our newly built mall back then was a very big deal for us local shoppers.

We always did a bit of shopping at the Kmart when we were at the mall and we kids certainly made a point to sneak off and check out the toy department while we were there!

And there, in that Kmart toy department, at the end of the electronics aisle, was the first home video game I ever saw. It was a Nintendo demonstrator set that had a sign on it inviting people to try it, and the game featured on the screen at that time was ‘Duck Hunt’.

My two younger brothers had already beaten me to it and were playing it, and when I approached them, they waved me over with a chuckle and urged me to give it a try.

I took the orange plastic gun in my hand and began shooting ducks on the screen as fast as the hunting dog could flush them out. Of course, there was a learning curve when you first played the game, learning how to lead the ducks properly with your gun in order to hit the target.

I usually missed more ducks than I hit, and every time that happened, the dang hunting dog would turn to face me, point, and start laughing at me! 

Of course, when the dog started laughing at me as I was missing the ducks, I couldn’t help but start laughing myself, but I couldn’t take that insult lying down! So I unsuccessfully tried to shoot the dog several times, all the time laughing as I did so. I only found out much later that in the original version of the game you couldn’t shoot the dog as you played the game, no matter how hard you tried. But in some later versions of the game, rumour has it that you finally got the opportunity to shoot the dog at the end of the game if you won, a little reward from the programmers for all the humiliation the dog heaped upon you as you played the game. But never having won the game myself, I never got that opportunity. 

I cannot tell you how much happy time we kids wasted in our youth in the toy department of that Kmart playing the Duck Hunt demonstrator game at the end of the video game aisle. Obviously, not as much time as we would have liked because we would just begin to get into the game when our Mother, annoyed that we had snuck off and left her, would finally track us down to the end of the video game aisle and tell us to “Come on, we have other places to go” (“AW, MOM!”). And so off we would go to other parts of the mall to pick up a few more things.

And any time after that, when our Mother couldn’t find her kids in the Kmart, she always knew where to look. We would always be in the toy department, laughing and happily wasting time at the end of the video game aisle, playing on the store demonstrator unit, and enjoying what became one of my favourite video games of all time:

DUCK HUNT!