Collection essentials #111: Wild Gunman (NES)

This is the last of Nintendo’s three 1985 Zapper light gun games that I’m covering here. Wild Gunman is actually a remake of an arcade game from the 1970s, which was quite different from the NES game you see here. The thing is, that game used actual live footage of actors for its graphics, and obviously that wasn’t even remotely in the stratosphere of possibility for the NES, so they completely built the game up and made amusing sprites of various enemy characters for this version.

Wild Gunman is a quick draw game. The main gameplay modes involve one or two enemy characters coming on the screen to have a duel with you. You can see how fast the enemy is going to shoot in the info box near the top of the screen. You are theoretically supposed to keep your light gun around your waist as if it were holstered and then draw when the time comes and shoot first, although there is no way for the game to know if you’re cheating by holding the gun right at the TV the whole time. There’s also a third mode, “Gang,” where there are four windows and a doorway in front of you, and you have to shoot outlaws as they appear. Pretty basic stuff.

I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest Wild Gunman fan. I find it gets stale pretty quickly, and I’d much rather play one of its two peers, Duck Hunt or Hogan’s Alley. But it wouldn’t feel right to have those games without having this one also. I have mentioned before that the character “Duck Hunt” in Super Smash Bros. is built on elements from those three games. One of his special attacks is to summon one of the characters from this game who will then shoot his gun. I like to be able to have the original game to be able to point out, “Look, this is the game where they got that from!” 

This game is also known for appearing in the movie Back to the Future Part II. In the film, Marty McFly sees a Wild Gunman arcade machine and shows a couple kids how to play by blowing away a series of enemies on the screen, which fails to impress them. The arcade machine seen in the movie is totally fake, though. It has graphics from the NES game, not the arcade original. And they didn’t take footage from the NES game either, rather, they took sprites from that version and edited them into their fake arcade version. As a Nintendo fan, I still think it’s pretty fun to see one of their games used like that in a great movie!