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While Nintendo is now a pillar of the video game industry worldwide, there was once a time where the company's fortunes seemed much less assured. No North American retailers wanted to touch video games after the US gaming market crashed in 1983, so Nintendo had to be very careful about how it marketed its first console in the region. That famously included a complete visual redesign of the Famicom into the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it even meant a cautious approach to things like the name of the light gun that came packed in with the system.
The NES light gun would eventually be known as the Zapper, but early on, Nintendo of America was simply calling it what it was: a light gun. It might seem like the most obvious thing in the world to pack in a toy firearm when you're trying to sell a gaming console in the US, but at the time concerns about giving kids toys that look like guns were quite widespread.
"As for the Zapper, I mean, originally, it was gonna be called a light gun," Bruce Lowery, Nintendo of America's vice president of sales in the early '80s, tells Time Extension. "But something was eating at me a little bit because, at that time, the arcades were getting a very bad reputation."
Lowery describes an incident where police "had gone into an arcade and a kid pointed an arcade gun at them," and the officers thought it was a real weapon. "That made everybody change their guns to a bright orange, red, or yellow, [including us]." The Zapper originally launched in grey, and wouldn't be turned orange until a later federal law required it, but concerns about the gun remained.
"We weren't sure of the name either," Lowery continues. "So we decided that we were going to do a focus group, which we did in Paramus, New Jersey, where Ron and I set up with a great company. They brought in about 20 or 30 housewives who have children, and the person leading the focus group told them all about the Nintendo light gun, Duck Hunt, and all these other great things, and about a third of the women got up and walked out. And the others were all saying, 'No guns are coming in my house.'
"Immediately after, we had another group come in, and all we did was change the name to the Zapper, but this time the results were the exact opposite; they all thought it was great. So that one little focus group could have had a big impact on our success."
While there would be quite a few Zapper games over the years, Duck Hunt remains the one that looms largest in the NES library, and it's tough to imagine the console without it. Would the NES have been a success if the word "gun" had been printed across its packaging instead of "Zapper"? What if Nintendo needed to pull the gun and Duck Hunt altogether? These are the questions, dear readers, that keep me up at night.
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