Man, Duck Hunt was the best. The original NES title was my first introduction to the light gun genre of shooters and it still remains one of the best. The genre has mostly faded away over the past few decades, but one developer is bringing it back… kind of.

Masasuke Yasumoto, a student at the Tokyo University of Technology, has created a light gun game that’s controlled by a traditional Japanese longbow. The bow is real, but he worked in a number of sensors that track where the bow is being pointed and the strength of the shot. He said that he used a real bow to let players know what firing a Japanese bow feels like.

The project is already impressive enough as is, but Yasumoto isn’t finished with it just yet. For the next iteration, he wants to integrate a smartphone into the bow’s handle to allow for mobile projection. That way, players could play the game without having to aim at a specific area of the wall. Instead, the game would use 3D imaging to make the entire room a virtual shooting gallery.

Light gun games are a dying breed that only saw a brief resurrection on the Wii. Yasumoto’s game isn’t going to bring the light gun genre back into prominence, but at least it shows that the passion and love for light gun games is still alive.

[Image: Diginfonews/YouTube]