Duck Hunt looked like a simple shooting gallery, but the 1984 Nintendo classic hid a second player secretly steering the duck, a kill screen at round 99 and a dog you were never allowed to shoot. This episode traces the game’s roots back to a 1976 Beam Gun toy designed by Gunpei Yokoi, explains his philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology, and looks at what Shigeru Miyamoto and composer Hirokazu Tanaka brought to a handful of pixels on a blurry CRT screen.

The heart of the episode is the NES Zapper: a one-pixel camera that reads black and white flashes drawn in sequence, synchronized to the sweep of a CRT electron beam, which is why the original hardware cannot work on a modern flat screen. It also covers the arcade version where you could shoot the dog, the family-friendly decision that made him invincible and infamous, the bundling strategy behind 28.3 million copies sold, and the game’s afterlife in Super Smash Bros., Pixels, the VR horror game Duck Season and a fan-made Game Boy demake.

• How the 1976 Beam Gun Duck Hunt toy inverted into a digital light gun game
• The frame-by-frame trick that lets the Zapper tell two ducks apart in Game B
• Why round 99 breaks the game and what the kill screen looks like
• How removing the ability to shoot the dog created one of gaming’s most hated characters
• Why bundling with Super Mario Bros. and an intuitive point-and-shoot interface expanded who felt comfortable with the NES