Can you play Shooting Arcade online?
Only partly. The game expects a light gun plugged into the left controller port and aimed at the TV screen. The emulator on this site does not emulate a light gun, so you cannot aim and shoot the way the game intends. You can load it and look at the screens, but treat it as a piece of history rather than a playable game. F12 (the console’s Reset switch) restarts it and F11 is the Select switch.
What the game contains
Shooting Arcade is a set of six short shooting scenes. A status bar shows your remaining shots, the skill level and the targets left, and a timer at the bottom counts down. There are five skill levels, and the higher ones give you less ammunition and unlock more scenes.
- Colored Squares: hit the squares before time runs out
- Shooting Gallery: fairground targets such as ducks, pipes and jugs, with coloured squares that give you more ammunition
- The Birds: birds flying set paths against a changing background
- Target Practice: fast birds that appear one at a time
- The Demon: a demon that teleports around the screen
- The Unicycle: shoot the thin, quick wheel under a clown
Why it was never released
Nobody knows for sure. The prototype’s aiming is badly off, so hitting a target by pointing straight at it is almost impossible, and the same shot can give different results. By the late 1980s a plain target-shooting game on the 2600 was also unlikely to sell well, and Atari chose to release the more action-packed light gun game Sentinel instead.
