It came out nearly 40 years ago. They didn’t put out “real” motion sensing games until 2006. Feels like I’m missing something.
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When you press the trigger, for a moment the screen goes black with a white rectangle where the target is. If the gun detects light, you’ve hit the target.
If there are two targets, there will be a white rectangle on the first target, then 1/60th of a second later – on the second target. Depending on the exact moment the gun detected light, it can tell which target you’ve hit.
To prevent cheating, there’s always a brief moment before the white rectangles appear where the entire screen is black. That way the gun can tell you’re not pointing at a lamp, because it first sees one frame of darkness, then one frame of light.
Fun fact. They only work on old crt TV. They relied on the fact that there was a constant frame rate. They don’t work on new tvs
Think not of the gun shooting at the screen, but the screen shooting at the gun.
The gun has a light sensor that can only see a small part of the screen, the game flashes a black screen with a white box where the duck is at the moment you hit the trigger, if the gun “sees” the white square, you were aiming in the right place and you get the hit.
Fun fact, and maybe an additional question, the game doesn’t work on projection or LCD screens, only old CRTs. If it’s just a light censor, why wouldn’t it work on all?
Source: sometimes I get nostalgic
When you pulled the trigger it flashed the screen. The target would flash white, everything else flashed black. That told the gun whether it was facing a target or not. Changing how the targets blink would tell the gun which type of thing it was pointing towards.
Light guns for later consoles were a bit more sophisticated. It would collect data from an entire frame, and see when the light from the tv scan for the frame would cross in front of its sensor. Once it detected that, it would tell the console where in the frame it was detecting, which the console would then used to determine where you were pointing. This allowed it to work without flashing the screen.
This doesn’t work with non-CRT displays, however, and so it’s obsolete, which is why it was replaced with motion-detection.
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The cool thing about it working this way was that you could play the game using a mirror. My friend had a mirror opposite his TV, we would next to the TV and shoot towards the mirror. Due to the light refraction, when you hit a duck in the mirror, down it went! Good times 😄
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