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The Laser Clay Shooting System was a Nintendo venue that preceded the company's entry into the video game market. It inspired many of Nintendo's future video games including Duck Hunt and other light gun home and arcade titles. A home version of the game was actually released.

Development[]

Sometime in the early seventies Gunpei Yokoi suggested the use of light guns to Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. He had become interested in light guns after purchasing a rifle and bringing it to a skeet shooting range 1. Yamauchi, trusting Yokoi's good judgement, purchased several unused bowling alleys that had closed after the initial hype surrounding the sport dwindled (Americans had introduced bowling to the Japanese after World War II and it subsequently became a popular sport. This success didn't last for long, and when attendance dropped the owners of the alleys had to shut down).

After opening, Nintendo encountered several problems that were fixed by Genyo Takeda, who had just joined the company. Something terribly wrong occurred and without Takeda's help the opening day could have been a disaster. The programming of the system had a glitch that resulted in it not registering the player's actions. In order to fix the problem, Takeda went behind the screen and personally controlled the clay pigeons and delete them when customers shot at them. He also had to raise the score when a user successfully shot at a pigeon. After the day was over they managed to get everything under control

1: A competitive type of sport in which people shoot at a variety of targets, and in Gunpei's case clay pigeons. During this time, skeet shooting was becoming very popular in Japan.

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