Trivia / Duck Hunt

• Dueling Games: With Sega's Safari Hunt on the Master System.
• Early-Bird Release: The Vs. Duck Hunt cabinet was released in the United States in April 1984, more a year before the American launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System. In fact, the game's popularity in arcades is what convinced Nintendo to make it a pack-in game for the NES.
• Executive Meddling: The game exists in part to give the Zapper a reason to exist, to convince US toy chains still smarting from The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 that the NES was something different that they had to have.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Aside from emulation, the game was never available outside its original cartridge form for nearly 30 years. However, in November of 2014, it was re-released on the Wii U's Virtual Console; but the Wii U eShop shut down in March 2023, making the game legally-unavailable once more.
• Killer App: It sold 28 million copies when it was released on the NES. This greatly secured the popularity of the Zapper, and made the game stand toe-to-toe with the Super Mario Bros. trilogy (it outsold Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3, thus being only outsold by the first game).
• Referenced by...:
  • The dog appears in Pixels as one of the trophies awarded to the Earthlings. After doing his signature laugh at the apartment window of the old woman who distracted the Centipede, he immediately befriends her.
  • There are a few references to Duck Hunt in The Super Mario Bros. Movie - a picture of one of the ducks appears in Punch-Out Pizza, a stylized painting of the Duck Hunt dog appears in the Mario Bros.' clients' house, and a restaurant called Chasse au Canard ("Duck Hunt" in French) can be seen in Brooklyn.
  • The ducks make a cameo in Super Smash Bros. Melee as a trophy. The promotional Special Movie plays with the trophy by panning the screen to make it look like they're flying past the centering reticle.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Being able to shoot the dog.
  • This is actually possible in the bonus stage of the arcade version, Vs. Duck Hunt, where the dog leaps about as a distraction while flushing out the ducks.
  • Naturally, it is also possible in Fan Remakes and parodies, like I-Mockery's version.
  • The dog can also be shot in the game Barker Bill's Trick Shooting, but doing so accrues a penalty. Some would consider the penalty Worth It.
  • And if you can't get to any of that stuff, give this song a listen.

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