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‘I just wanted to play Duck Hunt with my kids’: the man on a mission to bring back the light gun
No one believed he could make a light gun that worked on modern TVs. But Andrew Sinden persevered with his dream to revive a dying game genre
Almost every console and computer, from the Sega Dreamcast to the humble Amstrad CPC, once had its very own light gun. Whether you were shooting ducks with the NES Zapper or downing baddies in Time Crisis on the PlayStation, they were ubiquitous – yet now they are all but extinct. Andrew Sinden aims to change that: he’s on a crusade to make light-gun games mainstream again. “I’d consider the project has failed if I don’t manage to do that,” he says.
It all began around four years ago, when Sinden’s parents were cleaning out their loft. They came across his old NES, and asked him whether he still wanted it. “Of course, the answer was yes,” recalls Sinden. “And what I really wanted to do was play Duck Hunt with my kids.” But after hooking up the console to his television, he was dismayed to find that nothing happened when he pulled the Zapper’s trigger. “I completely forgot that light guns didn’t work on modern TVs,” he admits. “It was a real disappointment, because I thought Duck Hunt on a 50-inch TV would be amazing. I used to play it on a 14-inch TV!”
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