10/20/2005: Real-life Duck Hunt model

[Undertoad]

Half of you will look at this with confusion; the other half will look at it with a warm feeling of happiness...

The confused might not realize that the duck seen there is the Duck Hunt duck, as it was rendered on the original Nintendo game system. The Nintendo was the most popular game console in the mid-80s - in fact, its popularity revived the whole industry - and Duck Hunt came with it. So millions upon millions of kids grew up killing that duck over and over. For those who enjoyed the original Duck Hunt game, the above model is a happy cultural icon, a note of fun of days gone by. (It appears here in a Shockwave version.)

The Duck Hunt game had the feature of a real plastic gun (the guy is holding one) which you could "shoot" at the TV. Nintendo's system was able to recognize the shot and its location, which made the game very interesting at the time. Cool new technology! But this was the mid-1980s, and graphics were all low-resolution... so the duck is as accurate as a duck can be, when you are at 320x200 resolution, or whatever that original Nintendo system had.

The guy above explains, and shows off, his project to recreate the Duck Hunt duck on his Livejournal page. It's a nice project and shows what a "real life pixellation" might produce.