The 128-Bit Guns — the Dreamcast Gun America Never Got, and the GunCon 2

5.1 The Last CRT Guns

The Dreamcast Gun and the GunCon 2 are the last first-party console guns to read the picture of a cathode-ray tube. Both are mature designs: the Dreamcast Gun has a D-pad and a socket for Sega’s vibration pack, and the GunCon 2 has a D-pad, three face buttons, Select and Start, and connects by USB. Both were designed while CRTs were still what people owned, and both were stranded within a few years by the flat panel. Their successors in Vol 6 abandoned the raster entirely.

5.2 Sega Dreamcast Gun

Table 1 — Sega Dreamcast Gun

Maker	Sega
First release	25 March 1999, Japan, ¥4,500 (Sega’s own page);1 1999, Europe; 1999, Australia, A$49.952
System	Dreamcast
Model number	HKT-7801 (Sega’s own page)1
Connector	Dreamcast controller plug
Sensing	Photodiode; beam timing
Controls	Trigger, two digital buttons and a D-pad (“デジタル入力ボタン2個と十字キー”), so menus can be worked from the gun1
Expansion	One expansion socket with a window: takes a VMU, or the Puru Puru Pack vibration unit for “realistic vibration” matched to shots and damage1
Power	From the console
Recoil	No solenoid; vibration with a Puru Puru Pack (HKT-8600, released 4 March 1999, ¥1,800)1
Designer	Atsunori Himoto (per Dreamcast Magazine, as cited by Sega Retro)2
Regional variants	Japan and PAL only; no official North American release (below)
Works today	A Dreamcast, a CRT, and a game from a region whose software accepts it
Price	PriceCharting, 19 Oct 2026: Japanese Dreamcast Gun loose $60.00, complete $73.00, sales to September 2026; PAL House of the Dead 2 gun bundle loose $73.98, complete $116.11

Two corrections from Sega’s own page. Sega Retro, the most widely used fan reference, gives the Japanese price as ¥3,000; Sega’s own Dreamcast peripheral history gives ¥4,500. And the model number is HKT-7801; HKT-7800, which also circulates, is not the number on Sega’s page.^{1 2}

Games. Sega Retro lists The House of the Dead 2, Confidential Mission, Virtua Cop 2 (as part of Sega Smash Pack Volume 1), Death Crimson 2, Death Crimson OX and the “Big Car Hunter” mode of Demolition Racer: No Exit.² Sega Retro also lists a European patent, EP1002559B1, against the gun; it was not read for this dive.

5.3 Why North America Did Not Get It

Sega did not sell its gun in North America. A contemporaneous review of The House of the Dead 2, published on 1 November 1999, says simply that Sega “will not be releasing a gun peripheral in the US”, attributes it to “the lawsuit against Sega’s japanese gun”, and adds that Sega denied that was the reason.³ Later accounts, Sega Retro’s among them, connect the decision instead to fear of bad publicity after the Columbine High School shooting of April 1999.² No Sega of America statement giving the reason was found for this dive. Both explanations are recorded here as what their sources say, not as established fact.

What is settled is the practical consequence. The sources disagree on mechanism: Sega Retro says the official gun is electrically compatible with a North American Dreamcast but that most North American games refuse to work with it, the exceptions being Virtua Cop 2 in Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 and the “Big Car Hunter” mode of Demolition Racer;² a collector catalogue says the official gun does not function on North American units.⁴ Either way, a buyer in North America who wants to play North American discs needs a gun made for that market, which in practice means the licensed Mad Catz gun. A Japanese or PAL gun needs Japanese or PAL software, and therefore a console that will run it. Region modification of the console and patched discs are subjects for the planned Original Consoles dive.

5.4 Mad Catz Dream Blaster and the Third-Party Dreamcast Guns

Table 2 — Mad Catz Dream Blaster and the Third-Party Dreamcast Guns

Maker	Mad Catz, under licence from Sega
System	Dreamcast, North America
Connector	Dreamcast controller plug
Sensing	Photodiode; beam timing
Works today	A North American Dreamcast, a CRT and North American gun games
Price	PriceCharting, Dream Blaster Light Gun, 19 Oct 2026: loose $69.84, complete $98.08, sales to September 2026

Sega Retro reports that Mad Catz was licensed to make the North American Dreamcast gun, that it works with all North American light-gun games, and that it is the only third-party Dreamcast controller to carry Dreamcast branding.² A model number for it was not confirmed for this dive.

Other third-party Dreamcast guns were sold, among them the SRC Bio Gun, which its owner-photographer describes as having built-in vibration rather than relying on a Puru Puru Pack. No maker documentation was found for it.

Telling the guns apart. The official Sega gun is grey-white with an orange trigger and the Dreamcast swirl on the barrel. The Dream Blaster is silver with orange and blue and also carries the Dreamcast logo, because it is licensed; its shape is quite different. Unlicensed guns carry no Dreamcast logo. The region of a gun matters more on the Dreamcast than on any other console in this catalogue.

5.5 Namco GunCon 2 and G-Con 2

Table 3 — Namco GunCon 2 and G-Con 2

Maker	Namco
First release	2001, Japan, with Time Crisis II (secondary sources give 4 October 2001); also bundled with Time Crisis 3
System	PlayStation 2
Model number	NPC-106 (secondary sources and listings; label not seen)
Names	GunCon 2 (Japan, North America); G-Con 2 (Europe)
Connector	USB plug — top USB port for player 1, bottom for player 2 — and an RCA pinjack that joins the composite video through the “External Cable” supplied with the gun5
Sensing	Photodiode; timed in the gun against the video it is fed
Controls	Trigger, A, B and C buttons, SELECT, START, and the “Thumbcon” D-pad on the rear of the slide5
Power	From the USB port
Recoil	No
Mixing with the original GunCon	Possible in Time Crisis II: a GunCon 2 on the top USB port overrides a GunCon in controller port 1 (and the bottom port overrides port 2), so the two guns must be assigned to different players5
Regional variants	Black (Japan); an orange example packaged with Time Crisis 3 is photographed below. Which colours each market received was not confirmed from Namco
Works today	A PlayStation 2, composite video into a CRT, the External Cable, and a GunCon 2 game
Price	PriceCharting, 19 Oct 2026: US GunCon 2 loose $40.58, complete $67.55, sales to September 2026; Japanese black GunCon 2 loose $42.97, complete $58.05, last sales 2023 (stale)

The wiring, from Namco’s manual. The Time Crisis II manual gives three diagrams: GunCon alone, GunCon 2 alone, and both together. For the GunCon 2, the console’s A/V cable goes into the male/female leg of the External Cable, that leg goes to the television, and the gun’s RCA pinjack goes into the remaining leg; a second GunCon 2 goes into the free side of the same cable. The USB plug goes into the top USB connector on the front of the console.⁵ The diagram in Vol 4 redraws it.

The part that goes missing. The External Cable is a small Y-splitter and the first thing lost from a loose GunCon 2. Without it the gun has no video and will not register. Any composite splitter with the right genders will do the same job; that is an inference from the manual’s diagram, not a Namco statement.

The GunCon 2 as a modding platform. Its shell is the most common donor for modern infrared conversions, and the sibling Open-Source Firmware and Solenoid Recoil dives list the commercial GunCon 2 conversion kits and sets. A buyer who wants a shell for that purpose does not need the External Cable and can pay a loose price.

5.6 The Other Consoles of the Generation

Neither Nintendo nor Microsoft sold a light gun for the GameCube or the original Xbox. Third-party guns were sold for the Xbox and the PlayStation 2; none was researched to the standard of this catalogue, and they are left for a later pass rather than listed from search summaries.

5.7 Buying a 128-Bit Gun

On the Dreamcast, match the gun to the software’s region. The Sega gun is for Japanese and PAL software; the Mad Catz Dream Blaster is for North American software.

Count the GunCon 2’s parts. Gun with USB plug and RCA lead, plus the External Cable.

Give both a composite path to a CRT. Neither gun works through RGB, component or VGA alone, and neither works on a flat panel. The Dreamcast’s VGA box output is no help to a light gun.

Check the Dreamcast Gun’s socket. It should accept a VMU or Puru Puru Pack firmly; a cracked socket is a common fault on any Dreamcast controller.

Footnotes

1. SEGA, “関連・周辺機器 | ドリームキャスト” (Dreamcast related and peripheral devices), entries for ドリームキャスト・ガン and ぷるぷるぱっく. https://www.sega.jp/history/hard/dreamcast/devices.html (read 2026-10-19). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Sega Retro, “Dreamcast Gun” (citing a 1999-02-03 Sega press release, sega.jp, Hyper September 1999 p. 31 and Dreamcast Magazine 2000-41 p. 96). https://segaretro.org/Dreamcast_Gun (read 2026-10-19). A fan wiki. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. GameRevolution, The House of the Dead 2 review, 1 November 1999. https://www.gamerevolution.com/?p=32214 (read 2026-10-19). ↩

4. chromagi.com, Dreamcast HKT-7800 entry (search summary, 2026-10-19). A collector catalogue; it also uses the HKT-7800 number that Sega’s own page does not. ↩

5. Namco, Time Crisis II (PlayStation 2, US) instruction manual, controls and connection pages. Scan: https://archive.org/details/ps2_Time_Crisis_II_USA (read 2026-10-19). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴