Duck Hunt looked like a simple shooting gallery, but the 1984 Nintendo classic hid a second player secretly steering the duck, a kill screen at round 99 and a dog you were never allowed to shoot. This episode traces the game's roots back to a 1976 Beam Gun toy designed by Gunpei Yokoi, explains his philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology, and looks at what Shigeru Miyamoto and composer Hirokazu Tanaka brought to a handful of pixels on a blurry CRT screen.

The heart of the episode is the NES Zapper: a one-pixel camera that reads black and white flashes drawn in sequence, synchronized to the sweep of a CRT electron beam, which is why the original hardware cannot work on a modern flat screen. It also covers the arcade version where you could shoot the dog, the family-friendly decision that made him invincible and infamous, the  ...