KS01: Spending the Big Bucks

A hunting arcade challenges boundaries with bullets

Originally published in Spring 2010 issue of Killscreen #1.

-by Jason Fagone / Photography by Fred Benenson

“In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting; I do not believe that any one could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe, and my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands. This taste long continued, and I became a very good shot.”

– Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

Big Buck Hunter Pro is an arcade game with no characters, no mythology, no lush video, very little mission, and no story. What there is is a gun. On the screen, photorealistic animals—bucks, elk, white-tail deer, prong-horned antelope, big-horn sheep, moose, blackbirds, bluebirds, skunks, foxes, rabbits, wolves, squirrels, possums and raccoons—scurry back and forth and wait for you to shoot them with the gun. 

That’s pretty much it. Big Buck Hunter Pro is exactly what it appears to be: a hunting simulator, a more varied and lushly rendered version of the NES classic Duck Hunt. And yet, over the last four years alone, gamers have fed more than $50 million into Big Buck Hunter Pro machines, a few crumpled dollar bills at a time. It may well be the most lucrative arcade shooter the world has ever seen. When you factor in the other versions of the game—in addition to Big Buck Hunter Pro, there’s the original Big Buck Hunter, plus Big Buck Hunter II, Big Buck Hunter 2006: Call of the Wild, and Big Buck Hunter Safari, together comprising about 40,000 deployed consoles across the 50 states—you’re talking “a quarter of a billion dollars, probably, in coin drop,” says George Petro, the game’s creator. “That’s conservative.”

It’s worth asking why Americans are so crazy about such a simple videogame, and an arcade game at that. And maybe the best place to start is with the Buck Hunter gun, because the gun is the first thing you notice when you walk up to the nearly seven-foot-tall Buck Hunter cabinet—probably in a bar, probably having just set down your Brooklyn Lager on the rim of the pool table. (The game’s design is simple because it has to be; now that there are virtually no more arcades, the main players of arcade games are people in bars, who are apt to be playing while drunk.)

So: the gun.