The cactus will break down a bit depending on where it’s shot, and the same is true of the trees found in later battlefields. Right as the game starts the two cowboys are lined up so if they fire right away a cactus is going to absorb the shot instead of the opposing player’s body. The areas you fight in themselves aren’t too detailed but the presence of things like cacti and trees do heavily impact how you play. A round is won by a player managing to peg the opponent with a bullet, after which the game will start a new round with new obstacles until you’ve gone through the set of available battlefields. ![]() This central area not only keeps players at a distance from each other but can be filled with different obstacles that can block your shot. Player 1 and Player 2 both have a section of the screen to themselves, neither of them able to enter a center space that is wider than just a simple line. Both players start a round with a pistol full of six shots, and while the game tells you to draw when the contest starts, both cowboys enter the two-dimensional battlefield with pistols drawn and ready to fire. This two-player arcade game is styled after the classic gun duels you might see in a cowboy film, the goal as simple as trying to shoot the opponent before they can shoot you. We might just not have the solid records to fully attribute such lofty titles to Gun Fight or TV Basketball, but since it does seem to more solidly be the first game where man was pitted against man in a fight to the death, it at least seems to have a fairly interesting part in history to cling to. However, that transition overseas also might be the first time a Japanese game was licensed for use in America, but TV Basketball from the year prior is also declared to be the first and in both cases the companies involved were Taito and Midway. It does seem that this claim is fairly solid, as is the claim that it might be the first game to use a microprocessor when it was brought to America and edited by Midway. Released first in Japan as Western Gun, Taito’s arcade game may be the first to show two human characters engaged in lethal combat, but as I’ve discussed in earlier parts of the 50 Years of Video Games review series, it’s hard to state anything too definitively as a first in video games. ![]() In 1975’s Gun Fight though we’d see two video game characters that were distinctly human raising their guns with the intent of killing each other. Computer Space was about blasting UFOs while trying to avoid being blown up yourself, but there was at least some fantasy to it and you had no context for what was in the rocket or UFO as they engage in their little battle in space. Even in its earliest days video games were at least a little violent.
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