Full-motion video games occupy a curious niche in video game history. If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to games that use actual real-world filmed footage in their gameplay. The genre flourished briefly in the mid-90’s, when the advent of CD-ROMs provided developers with enough storage space to make use of pre-recorded footage—first in point-and-click games like The 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria, and then in cinematic titles like Wing Commander III, which memorably featured Mark Hamill.
While the idea of games using real footage with real movie stars was exciting at the time, in practice, it proved kinda clunky, and when the arrival of 3D acceleration hardware enabled CG to leap forward in quality and speed, FMV was suddenly yesterday’s news. Today it’s more the province of arsty indie developers—Sam Barlow, for example, used it to great effect in Her Story and Immortality—and, sigh, “adult games.”
But there’s another, earlier chapter in the history of FMV: in the earliest days of gaming, arcade machines would occasionally make use of filmed footage. By far the most famous example of this kind of game is Dragon’s Lair, which used pre-recorded rotoscoped animations to create a sort of (somewhat) interactive Disney movie. Even today, it looks impressive, so you can imagine how comprehensively it blew people’s minds in the era of Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.
Because of the renown of Dragon’s Lair, people (including me) tend to assume that it was the first game to use this technique. But it wasn’t. Almost a full decade before Dragon’s Lair, a game called Wild Gunman used FMV to create an interactive Wild West gunslinging game. (Confusingly, an identically named sequel, which didn’t use FMV, was released in 1985 and is featured in Back to the Future Part II.)
The original game—which was the first coin-op release from a small and down-on-its-luck Japanese game company by the name of “Nintendo”—basically comprised an arcade cabinet containing a light gun and sensor, two 16mm film projectors, a screen, and some logic circuitry. Once you plugged in two quarters and the game had played its various intros, you’d be greeted with footage of a Clint Eastwood type creeping menacingly toward the camera.
You’re supposed to wait until you see the shooter’s eyes flash, at which point you whip the light pistol out of its holster and fire at the screen. If you’re quick enough on the draw, your reward is a film of your victim tumbling to the dusty ground and the right to take on another villain. Otherwise, you see the gunman firing at you, at which point it’s game over, and you’re on the hook for another 50 cents.
If you’re wondering how the game switches between the “you won” and “you died” films, well, this is why there are two projectors. One is loaded with a so-called main reel, which contains the footage of various gunmen approaching and firing; the other is loaded with a sub-reel, which contains the footage of the gunmen being hit and falling down. The game’s simple logic circuitry simply blocks the output of one or the other, depending on the success state returned by the light gun. The game shipped with four main reels and four sub-reels, providing 15 or so gunmen to shoot. So yes, the more analog nature of the game is probably why it doesn’t often get its proper due in the history of FMV games, but it should, dammit.
So with all that history out of the way, why are we writing about Wild Gunman now? Well, the original game has been something of a holy grail for arcade fans, because it’s pretty much impossible to find a working copy these days. However, copies of the original film reels surfaced recently on eBay, and they were snapped up by YouTuber and game collector Callan Brown, who has just posted a video about his efforts to restore the game.
Brown didn’t get all the game’s footage—the reels he purchased included multiple copies of Reels/Sub-Reels B and D, but only one (somewhat degraded) copy of Reel/Sub-Reel A, and no copies of Reel/Sub-Reel C. But they were enough for him to go ahead with an impressively ambitious project: Working from the original patent, Brown has built a recreation of the original 1974 arcade cabinet. It’s not a straight like-for-like replica: the hardware has been updated, with all the lights etc now handled by an Arduino, and the projectors replaced by a single digital projector, which projects 4k scans of the original footage. The actual gameplay is now handled in Unity.
The result is clearly a labor of love, and Brown says confidently that it’s the only playable Wild Gunman experience in North America—“and, possibly, the world.” While the game is conceptually pretty simple, when you’re watching Brown play it, it’s still kinda wild to think that it was released over half a century ago.
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