The History of Light Guns

From the 1936 Ray-O-Lite to Sinden and OpenFIRE: ninety years of shooting at screens.

Firearms

The History of Light Guns · Deep Dive

The History of Light Guns

Every light gun died with the CRT, and then came back.

From the 1936 Ray-O-Lite to Sinden and OpenFIRE: ninety years of shooting at screens.

Photo: Namco GunCon, GunCon 2 and GunCon 3 by Chinpokomon5 · CC BY-SA 3.0

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 Before Video — Bulbs, Photocells and the Rifle Ranges of 1934 to 1974 Charles Griffith's two Tulsa patents, the Rayolite company and its Seeburg licence, the coin-machine boom they started, and Nintendo's solar-cell guns: forty years of shooting light at a target before anyone shot at a television
    2. Vol 2 Shooting the Television — Ralph Baer's Light Guns, the Odyssey Rifle and the First Arcade Duck, 1967 to 1979 The moment the target stopped carrying the sensor: a photoresistor in a Sears toy rifle, the 1968 patents, Magnavox's $25 Shooting Gallery that a desk lamp could beat, Atari's Qwak!, and the pong chips that put a rifle input on a single IC
    3. Vol 3 The 8-Bit Boom — Zapper, Light Phaser, XG-1 and the Home-Computer Guns, 1984 to 1990 Two ways of reading a CRT that every later console gun copied: Nintendo's black frame and white box, decided in software, and Sega's and Atari's latched beam position, decided in silicon
    4. Vol 4 The 16-Bit Guns — Super Scope, Menacer and Justifier, 1992 to 1994 Nintendo's own development manual explains the Super Scope: a pin photodiode, a 4-bit CPU, raster pulses relayed by infrared to the console's counter latch, 180 ns a pixel, and a calibration screen that every game had to carry
    5. Vol 5 The GunCon Era and Arcade Recoil, 1992 to 2006 Polygon arcades, the action pedal and the blowback slide; the offscreen reload that turned a sensor's blind spot into a button; and Namco's GunCon, which stopped trusting the console and timed the video signal itself
    6. Vol 6 The Flat-Panel Crisis — Why Every CRT Light Gun Died With the CRT Scan-line timing at engineer depth: what the photodiode actually measured, the three things a flat panel takes away, why no firmware patch could bring them back, and what the industry did instead
    7. Vol 7 Infrared and Motion — The Wii Remote, GunCon 3, PlayStation Move and Top Shot Elite, 2006 to 2012 How the industry answered the flat panel: put infrared markers by the screen and a blob-tracking camera in the controller, or turn it round and watch the controller from the screen; and why the gun became a plastic shell
    8. Vol 8 The Do-It-Yourself Revival — AimTrak, Sinden, GUN4IR, SAMCO, OpenFIRE, RetroShooter and Blamcon After the console makers walked away, small makers and hobbyists rebuilt the light gun for flat panels: a camera in a GunCon shell, a white border round the picture, an open firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico, and the recoil the home guns never had