Gun Fight, known as Western Gun in Japan and Europe, is a 1975 arcadeshooter game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, and released by Taito in Japan and Europe and by Midway in North America. It was the first video game to depict human-to-human combat, while the Midway version was also the first video game to use a microprocessor. Following its November 1975 release in North America, it went on to sell over 8,000 arcade cabinets in the United States. It was ported to the Bally Astrocadevideo game console as a built-in game in 1977 as well as several home computer platforms. The theme of the game involves two Old West cowboys armed with revolvers and squaring off in a duel. Whoever shoots the other cowboy first wins the duel. Unlike in a real-life duel, however, both cowboys get numerous opportunities to duel in order to score points. The game was included in GameSpy's "Hall of Fame" in 2002.
Gameplay
Western Gun was a fixed screen shooter where two players could compete in an old west gun fight. It was the first video game to depict human-to-human combat. When shot, the characters in the game fell to the ground and the words "GOT ME!" appeared above the body. The game had two distinct joystick controls per player, with one eight-way joystick for moving the computerized cowboy around on the screen and the other for changing the shooting direction. Unlike other dual joystick games, Western Gun has the main joystick on the right instead of the left. Other features of the game included obstacles between the characters which block shots, such as a cactus, and stagecoaches. The guns have limited ammunition, with each player given six bullets; a round ends if both players run out of ammo. Gunshots can also ricochet off the top or bottom edges of the playfield, allowing for indirect hits to be used as a possible strategy.
Development and technology
Both Western Gun and Gun Fight had artwork of Wild West cowboys on the cabinet, with matching in-game graphics featuring cacti, rocks, and human characters. These cartoon-like humans were in contrast to earlier games which used miniature shapes to represent abstract blocks or spaceships. The original game, Western Gun, was created by Tomohiro Nishikado for Taito. Taito licensed Western Gun to Midway for release in North America, one of the first such licenses, after the 1974 scrollingracing gameSpeed Race, also designed by Nishikado, and the 1974 sports gameBasketball. The title Western Gun, while making perfect sense for Japanese audiences in that it conveyed the setting and theme as simply as possible, sounded odd to American audiences, so it was renamed Gun Fight for its American localization. Taito's version was based on discrete logic, like other arcade video games of the time. When Dave Nutting adapted the game for Midway, he decided to base it on the Intel 8080, which made Gun Fight the first video game to use a microprocessor. Nutting's company Dave Nutting Associates had already used microprocessor technology in prototypes of arcade pinball machines, and the first arcade pinball machine to include a microprocessor, The Spirit of '76 by Mirco Games, had used this technology under license. Midway's version, which had a black-and-white rastermonitor with a transparent yellow screen overlay, used bitmapped framebuffer technology to display the game text and graphics, including its animated human-like characters. To make the animation fast and smooth, the game included a special barrel shifter circuit built from multiple discrete chips. The microprocessor used this to shift each pattern of picture bits, byte-by-byte, to the proper horizontal bit offset, reading back each shifted byte and then writing it into the framebuffer. The 8080, like other microprocessors of its era, had shift instructions that could only shift by a single bit position. With the shifter circuit, the microprocessor could quickly shift a picture byte by several bit positions, giving it more time for other work. A similar shifter circuit was used in later Midway and Taito games whose hardware was based on Gun Fight, such as Sea Wolf and Space Invaders. Nishikado believed that his original version was more fun than Midway's, but he was impressed with the Midway machine's improved graphics and smoother animation. This led him to design microprocessors into his subsequent games, including the blockbuster 1978 shoot 'em up hit Space Invaders.
Ports
In 1978, the game was introduced to the home market with its port to the Bally Astrocade console, which included a color version of the game within the system's ROM. In 1983, Epyx ported Gun Fight and another Midway game, Sea Wolf II, to the Atari 8-bit family, and released them in an Arcade Classics compilation. In 1987, Interceptor Software ported Gun Fight to the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 computers.
Legacy
released a similar arcade game in 1976 titled Outlaw. In 1982, the clone Gunfight was released for the Atari 8-bit family by Hofacker / Elcomp Publishing. The Duel for the Commodore 64 is a clone released in 1985.
