What it was
Three cardboard cut-outs slide into place against a wall and spin to face you. Some are gangsters, some are ordinary people. You have a moment to shoot the gangsters and only the gangsters. Shoot an innocent or miss a gangster and it counts against you.
Game B moves the shooting to a city block, five cut-outs at a time, some already turned as they come into view. Trick Shot is a different game: tin cans fly in from one side, and you keep shooting them to bounce them across onto ledges for points. A miss counter climbs with every mistake, and at ten the game ends.
Where it sits in history
Nintendo made it for the Zapper light gun. It came out on the Famicom in 1984 and in 1985 on the Nintendo VS. arcade system and the NES, one of the 17 games ready for the NES launch in the United States. In arcades it was a hit: it topped the RePlay charts in America by November 1985 and was popular in Europe by 1986. With Duck Hunt it made light-gun games popular.
The name comes from a real place. Hogan's Alley is a shooting range for training police, first built at Camp Perry in Ohio in the 1920s and rebuilt at the FBI Academy in Quantico in 1954; a third version, laid out like a small town, opened there a few years after the game. Computer Gaming World named it the best NES target game of 1988. Artist Cory Arcangel later hacked it into I Shot Andy Warhol, swapping the targets for the artist. Its one re-release, on Wii U in 2016, swapped the Zapper for the Wii Remote.
How it plays today
Good, in short sharp doses, if you have the gear. It needs the Zapper, which brings the same hardware catch as Duck Hunt. Once set up, it asks for something Duck Hunt never does: a split-second decision, not just a quick hand. The hesitation before you fire on a cut-out you aren't sure about is the whole game.
Trick Shot is the better mode for a crowd: easy to understand, hard to master, and funny when the can drops.
Compared with
- Duck Hunt: The other Zapper launch game, and the one everyone remembers; Hogan's Alley is the sharper test.
- Wild Gunman: Quick-draw duels against outlaws, Zapper again; its outlaws and these gangsters share a shootout in Super Smash Bros.
- Gumshoe: Nintendo's 1986 Zapper oddity: you make the detective jump by shooting him, while picking off the mob in his way.
Why it matters
Howard Becker argued that 'deviant behavior is behavior that people so label': the rules, and the people who apply them, decide who counts as the wrongdoer. Hogan's Alley makes the label the whole game. Every cut-out is cardboard; the gangster is a gangster because of how he is drawn, and you fire on that.
It was named after a real police training range, and it trains the same reflex: read the costume, decide in under a second, live with the call. As a game, it is good fun. As a picture of how quickly people sort strangers into safe and dangerous, it is worth thinking about after the cartridge comes out.
Read: The magic circle: the world that rules make →
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.
What you're levelling up
You have been training these without noticing. Here is how to do it on purpose, and where it pays off away from the couch. All the skills games teach →
Reading people
In the game. Three cardboard cut-outs spin to face you, some gangsters, some ordinary people. Shoot an innocent and it counts against you, so you're reading faces in a split second.
Do it on purpose. Play Game B and say 'safe' or 'gangster' out loud for each cut-out before you fire. Count the calls you'd have got wrong.
Off the couch. Snap judgements about people are often wrong, and this game shows how fast you make them. Give the quiet one at the party a second look and you might meet the most interesting person there.
Hand-eye coordination
In the game. Trick Shot flings tin cans in from one side, and you keep shooting them to bounce them across onto ledges for points.
Do it on purpose. Pick one ledge and try to land every can on it. Notice how your aim shifts as the can falls.
Off the couch. Darts, pool, a sport you've just taken up. Aim that adjusts on the fly is the bit that wins the frame.
Keeping your cool
In the game. The hesitation before you fire on a cut-out you aren't sure about is the whole game. Ten mistakes and it's over.
Do it on purpose. When you feel the urge to shoot early, let the cut-out finish turning. Track whether your miss counter climbs slower.
Off the couch. At work and with mates, the quick call under pressure is where most stuff-ups happen. Half a second to actually look saves heaps of apologising.
Verdict · 6/10
A light-gun game about holding fire. Short, tense and smarter than Duck Hunt, if you can still plug a Zapper in.
