Shooting Gallery

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The Shooting Gallery light gun
The Shooting Gallery light gun

The Shooting Gallery was a light gun and is regarded as the first commercial light gun ever created for any arcade or video game console . It was originally created by Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, in 1968 as part of a prototype gaming unit. The prototype light gun was used as an interface for playing multiple choice games.

Ralph Baer's prototype light gun.
Ralph Baer's prototype light gun.

This prototype design was later developed into the Shooting Gallery for the Magnavox Odyssey. The console had a special port built into it for this peripheral. The Shooting Gallery allowed playing four additional games. This simple shotgun-inspired light gun would only detect light, and not necessarily what particular target, which thus allowed the player to cheat by shooting any light source, e.g. a light bulb. Since no scores were displayed on the TV screen for any Oddysey 1 game, cheating was somewhat irrelevant. A rumor circulated that the Shooting Gallery rifle would only work with a Magnavox TV set. Although wrong, this hurt sales and only 20,000 or so were sold.

There were four games made that supported the Shooting Gallery, not a small number of titles relative to the extremely limited total number of games available for the console. The four games were available on two cards (#9 and #10). Note that these games are colorized only by translucent plastic screen overlays.

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