This is GTV: Always in search of The Smoking Gun!
Time to go back to the well, and dig up a well worn, though always beloved, piece of
Nintendo History™, The Zapper Light Gun! I’m not going to get too into the woods
with the backstory. But it turns out, Light gun technology is actually pretty old, going
back to the early 20th Century. Light Gun games were common in arcades, evolving from
shooting gallery games that used real firearms. They came home in the 1970s and hung in there
for a while, still maintaining their popularity well into the Playstation Era. Motion controlled
games often imitate older Light Guns, so the concept really never went away.
For many the Gold Standard was the Nintendo Zapper, included with most editions of the
Nintendo Entertainment System, back in the late 1980s.
Of course Sega had the Light Phaser, sharing the same design from the most awesome gun
to ever exist, The Zillion. Atari had one too! And it even worked with one 2600 game!!
But, since the Status Quo of Video Games, seems to revolve around the influence of the
NES, either real or imagined, The Zapper is the de facto standard when it comes to the
Light Gun. Of course if you had the original grey gun sold until 1988, you had a lot more
Gamer Cred™ than if you had the orange one that came later.
And, oh how fun it was! Hey remember Duck Hunt? I love blasting away at those ducks.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one! (Stossel) It was a great stress reliever, especially
if you suffered some frustrating losses in world 6, 7 or 8 in Super Mario Bros. So, it’s
a good thing that Duck Hunt was the B-Side to that particular Nintendo Tape™.
Wild Gunman? Fun for sure, but I somehow don’t recall seeing the arcade version at my local
7-11.
Of course what else could you really do with in a Light Gun game besides shoot moving targets?
Not much… Nintendo tried something novel with Gumshoe, where each shot made the character
jump. It was a strange experiment that didn’t work.
Personally, I felt that Hogan’s Alley was the best game of the original Light Gun Series,
my personal favorite and the closest you could get to a realistic simulation of using an
actual gun. (So here we go into story time)…
But I always wondered, who was Hogan? The supposed owner of this alley.
Was it a tribute to Hogan’s Heroes? Hulk Hogan? The Hogan Family?
Well, we do live in The Future™ so it is quite easy to search on the internet and find
that there is a real life Hogan’s Alley, used by the FBI for training purposes. Obviously
this must be where Shigeru Miyamoto got the idea from. This facility was opened in 1987?!
Well then, that is an anachronism! Because, Hogan’s Alley, the game, was first released
in 1984!
So did the FBI just happened to be playing some NES one day and said, “Hey you know
what? We should do what this game is doing! It would be good training for us!”
No, that obviously didn’t happen. To find the source you need to go back 90 years before
the game existed!
In 1895, not 19-85! But 18-95, A comic titled “Hogan’s Alley” appeared in the New
York World newspaper, which was in print form 1860 until 1931. Created by Richard F. Outcoult,
the comic portrayed a stereotypical view of Irish immigrant life in a New York City slum,
named Hogan’s Alley. Hogan was never shown, though being an Irish name was more than enough
to imply a certain imagery.
Hogan’s Alley featured a cast of characters that were poor, uneducated, diseased and criminal
street urchins. The breakout star of Hogan’s Alley was Mickey Dugan, a young boy with a
shaved head wearing only a yellow nightshirt. The character would soon earn the nickname,
“The Yellow Kid.” Mickey was so popular he began to appear in the rival, cross-town
paper, The New York Journal while still appearing in the World.
Hogan’s Alley ended 1898, but the character of Mickey Dugan lived on into the 20th Century.
The Yellow Kid was featured in various advertisements across America, as well as on the cover of
sheet music for Tin Pan Alley songs, that helped convey the origins of said music.
In the 1920s, The United States Army’s National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice
in coordination with the National Rifle Association, established a training facility at Camp Perry,
in Erie Township, Ohio. The grounds featured tactical training courses to increase marksmanship
skills and public safety. At Camp Perry, a mock town square was built, where hostage
standoffs, and other situations were re-enacted. For the sake of safety, Paper cut-outs of
human targets were installed in windows and were mechanized, to move in and out of sight.
This “fake” town adopted the moniker “Hogan’s Alley,” referring to the crime-filled slum
where the Yellow Kid hails from.
When United States entered World War II, Hogan’s Alley closed down, as the U.S Military. re-organized
itself for the war effort. Though the program was no longer active, the term “Hogan’s
Alley was still used, informally to refer to these training exercises.
Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, The United States occupied and rehabilitated,
the nation of Japan.
The Japanese military was abolished by its new constitution, and after the US Occupation
ended, The Japanese Self Defense Forces was established, in 1954. The United States Military
kept a presence in Japan, and often engaged in training missions together. The American
leadership and influence, as well as the firearms training exercises themselves, led to the
term, “Hogan’s Alley” entering the Japanese language, and over time being understood throughout
Japan.
When Nintendo developed the Zapper Light Gun in the 1980s, 3 target practice games were
developed. With Wild Gunman, adopting an Old West theme, Duck Hunt employing a modern sport
theme, and Hogan’s Alley utilizing a police training theme.
The 3 games were released in Japan first, in 1984, and then came to the west, the next
year.
While the Hogan’s Alley video game, was a well-known title in the early days of the
NES, the term came back into mainstream American consciousness in 1987, when the Federal Bureau
of Investigation revived the Hogan’s Alley training program and facility, in Quantico,
Virginia. A fully built mock town, that resembles both the Hogan’s Alley of the 1920s and
30s as well as the video game! Was the FBI aware of Hogan’s Alley the video game? Well,
anything is possible! But the continued informal use of the term points to the game having
no influence over the program.
And to bring things full circle, Hogan’s Alley the comic had a semi-revival beginning
in 1994. Hogan’s Alley, the magazine, dedicates itself to promoting print comics and preserving
the classic turn of the century art style that its namesake made so popular!
So, the next time you sit down for a quick game of Hogan’s Alley, you’ll know the
origins of its unusual name! Feel free to share the story with a friend too, if you
like. But I won’t hold a gun to your head over it…