I had Duck Hunt but didn't have the gun to play it with - nor the knowledge that I needed the gun. Every now and then I would try and fail to figure out how to play the game.
So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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This must have been a common thing, because you're the 2nd person in the comments to mention this!
It's funny now to think that if you couldn't figure out a game pre-internet, you just didn't get to play it. I know that happened to me plenty.
Back in the day we would often rent games for a weekend and sometimes we would get stuck at some point. There was one particular game that me and my friends really liked (Maui Mallard) on the genesis, but there was one specific point we didn't know what to do. Every now and then we would rent the game again for a weekend in hopes of figuring it out. The game had basically three buttons IIRC: attack, jump and special. You could also press attack and special at the same time for a different attack. So one day I was playing it and reached the point that we all got stuck, and kept trying to figure out how to jump out of the area I was in (there was a clear exit, but too high up). My brother saw me struggling and mockingly said: "come on, do a super jump" and that made me think: can I do special + jump too? I tried it and then learned that this combination allowed climbing through short gaps (and this was the very first such gap in the game - anywhere else the combination did nothing). I was the neighborhood hero for a while thanks to that.
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So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
No no, that part is still true.
Gen Z/late millenials trying to interpret retro games they play on emulators with no manuals is the modern "people making extremely detailed marble statues because they don't realize Romans painted theirs".
That's how you end up with Blue Prince and Dark Souls and stuff.
I refuse to believe that Romans painted theirs. I mean, the evidence is clear that they did but it would look so terrible!
Yeah, and old games were just well designed with no handholding and absolutely didn't include full bullet pointed tutorials for the first hour in the manual as a matter of course.
Younger me would have been blown away that reading would help me beat games in the future.
For the record, I have a small library now but when I first started playing NES-N64 games, I absolutely hated reading and never would have cracked open the manuals.
What did you do during the ten minutes it took to load tape games? Or the ten minutes it took to install them from floppy? Or...
Oh, wait, NES/N64, huh? You were into rich kid games.
So what did you do while you were getting driven back from the shop by your valet or whatever you guys had at the time?
All joking aside, I bet there was some divide between console and computer players on that front. I had binders of technical documentation from flight sims and entire novellas that came in RPG and adventure game boxes. The "here's how to play through the first chunk of the game" tutorials were just one format for that stuff, but perhaps the most platform-agnostic of them.
And, of course, there were walkthroughs and guides in gaming magazines. Getting stuck and waiting for the next monthly issue hoping they'd cover the game was a subtle form of monetization for games journalists even then. "Pivot to guides" has happened before.
Lmao no I grew up in the 90s, and we only got cheap secondhand n64 games. The apartments I grew up in were in the middle of trailer parks, but they all owned the land their trailers were on so I'll leave it up to the reader to determine who was more bougie.
My dad was the one who wanted the consoles and he isn't tech savvy, so until I got my own money, it was always "plug and play" things, none of those new-fangled computers until Windows ME.
And hilariously, I got an old macintosh in the mid 2000s and had fun figuring everything out by trial and error based off what I knew of computers at the time. Even had the x wing game on several floppies.
I would have loved having a computer when you had to actually know how it works to use it.
I remember waiting for next month's issue of different gaming magazines... I never bothered knowing which magazine it was, I just waited for my dad to return from the store with whichever one he wanted that day.
Honestly I miss in-depth game guides with the two pages of ASCII art at the top.
The GameFAQs era will become a bit of a lost age between the print magazine guides and the "IGN became a guide site so slowly we barely even noticed" period.
I wonder if there will ever be some specific nostalgia for it or it was just too short and grungy for anybody to care.
GameFAQs etc. need to be archived in a public database and incorporated into stuff like RetroArch.
Stop. Please! I can only get SO erect!
Somebody made a good point in another thread a while back (or maybe it was The 8-Bit Guy in a youtube video?) that a lot of times the manual got read as you were riding in the car back home from the store since you couldn't play the thing yet.
What did you do on the ride home from the mall?
Imagine not knowing about Vimm's manual project
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Me when I learned that Minesweeper actually had logic and you’re not supposed to just click randomly.
chip from sales guy vs web dude disliked this
Found this out completely by accident once after my sister and I played some Mario.
I had the 2nd controller still plugged in, and while shooting the ducks I stepped on the controller and the ducks moved differently.
From the on, every time someone wanted to play duck hunt I would grab a second controller and make it harder for them.
Bonus knowledge: the original game works by a light-sensitive sensor in the blaster tip, and when you pull the trigger, the screen goes black and a white square appears whee the ducks were, in a specific order. If the game controller detects the light square, it counts as a "hit" on whatever duck was in frame. You can cheat by pointing the blaster at a white light and pulling the trigger. It will just go through them one by one as you squeeze, thinking the light is the duck square.
I didn't have the gun, but I had duck hunt, so I could only control the duck. Needless to say I didn't play much duck hunt
If you press F in Skifree, you can outrun the snow monster.
Gamer sites on the early Internet were full of these "Easter eggs" that were really just non-obvious things with clear explanations in the manual.
One that I found particularly irrimusing (and seems to keep popping up forever) was that holding some combination of buttons on the Gameboy Advance when you turn it on "plays a secret, alternative start-up sound, then it just sits at the Gameboy logo until you press a button. That's all it does."
Except if you read the manual you'd know that holding that button combo overrides the normal start-up and forces the GBA into multi-play download mode, so you can play those games without having to take the cartridge out of the console. Pressing a button in that mode cancels it and resumes normal start-up, loading a game from cartridge if one is inserted.
I've seen some people insist that their manual didn't say anything about this, but I have trouble believing them given that it was written in the manual for the GBA which I bought on launch day.
my brother and i would always control it just to mess the other person up :3
I see you didn't have siblings.
Oh yeah, I remember that. The control over the duck was so erratic it wasn't really much fun.
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