MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Wild Gunman ’74: The Forgotten First FMV Game

It wasn't hard to find, since an unexpected side-effect of dubbing the game "Wild Gunman 74" means that Googling that term in quotes only brings up results of people discussing the video!

I don't know if any of you have seen The History Of Nintendo (Vol. 1) by Gorges. It's sadly out of print now, but it's a super in-depth look at everything Nintendo did before the Famicom. The story it tells of the Laser Clay System is a little different from in the TXT file.

In short, it was an immediate hit with the first bowling alleys to install it, but then the oil crisis happened and people were no longer spending as much on amusements. A ton of orders were cancelled, and it nearly sunk Nintendo before their video games ever happened!

So they salvaged it into a large cabinet called Mini Laser Clay, and then Shooting Trainer and Wild Gunman were even smaller sized cabinets.

I also dug for info in various coin-op trade magazines, which is where the SEGA revelation comes from. But SEGA only had the distribution rights for about a year, and then they were transferred to Bally and their Empire Dist. company. The transfer happened right around the time of Sky Hawk.

Bally then distributed Battle Shark and New Shooting Trainer in 1977, but it appears they declined Test Driver, which I don't think ever shipped here.

Ironically, Namco introduced their own take on Mini Laser Clay called Shoot Away, and it was a huge hit! I guess it was just a matter of timing. It appears that Nintendo responded with a new Shoot-Away-sized Mini Laser Clay, which they showed at the Japan trade show, but it must've not caught on...maybe because everyone already had Shoot Away? Even Bally, who was distributing Battle Shark and New Shooting Trainer in the US, were already distributing Namco's Shoot Away at the same time!