The Long History of How "Hogan's Alley" (the Nintendo Zapper Game) Got Its Name
508Hogan's Alley was the best Zapper Game around! Take that Gumshoe! Hey, who was Hogan by the way...? (More below...)
Episode Information
GTV 130 "Up Your Alley" Season 7 Episode 8
Original Airdate: June 17, 2022
Produced June 3-7, 2022
Recorded at Butsudan Studios and edited on my all new 14” MacBook M1 Pro! Edited and produced with Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, which my job paid for!
By the way, the piano music heard in the video is a turn of the Century song titled “The Belle of Hogan’s Alley”
0:00 Lady Cares!
0:07 GTV ID: Always in seach of the Smoking Gun!
0:16 Introduction: The Light Gun
1:08 The Gold Standard
1:50 b/w Duck Hunt
2:34 Who was Hogan?
3:44 In 1895...
5:07 In the 1920s...
6:50 In the 1980s...
7:55 In the 1990s...
8:32 Mickey! No.......!!
Partial Transcript
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! 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.
Here are some other Nintendo videos from the GTV archives you’ll love!
What Was Yume Kojo? https://youtu.be/KL9o9zzCUsQ
Kid Icarus 30 https://youtu.be/ZGf6wIu9kEM
Double Identity https://youtu.be/sVx-e4obQc0
A Disney Afternoon (Let's Play Rescue Rangers in 1990) https://youtu.be/4dbvfJhTaMg
Justin Bailey https://youtu.be/x-e3BPF-qzw
The Perils of Pauline https://youtu.be/DKmJmAVXHgg
Evets Kainzow https://youtu.be/Q1BlbGdtGoY
Famicom Wars https://youtu.be/ba84r28pHRw
The Story of Punch Out !! Theme Song Look Sharp https://youtu.be/4iBeleAy5RE
Zelda 2 and the 1988 Chip Shortage https://youtu.be/H6zYKiueCEA
From B To A https://youtu.be/ZjZH9abJy0w
StarTropics: The American Game https://youtu.be/65F7xNqiZVA
Where is Chris Houlihan? https://youtu.be/Erytb_0MiQA
The History of Nantendo https://youtu.be/zBRtrrPk4zY
Sources (for nerds and sticklers)
https://group.irishecho.com/2011/02/108-years-ago-hogans-alley-debuts-2/
https://www.ticklethewire.com/2013/11/05/everything-you-want-to-know-about-the-fbis-hogans-alley/
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/hogans-alley-turns-30
B-roll furnished by: by RGTV, vini64, 9th key pattern, consumer time capsule
Gameplay assistance by: Mathieu Pronovost
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Other Statistics
Hogan's Alley Statistics For GTV Japan
Currently, GTV Japan has 5,787 views for Hogan's Alley across 1 video. His channel published less than an hour of Hogan's Alley content, making up less than 0.28% of the total overall content on GTV Japan's YouTube channel.