Duck Hunt was invented in 1936. At the time, it was called the “Seeburg Ray-O-Lite.” Light-sensing vacuum tubes attached to moving, wooden fowl moved across the painted plain of an oak cabinet. Player’s used light-emitting (flashlight) rifles to ping the tubes.
On November 16, 2006, Nintendo released the Wii, sporting a console menu dependent on light gun controls (actually an optical sensor, but who’s counting?).
It’s a genre with a history as long as it is niche. The promise of light gun games still excites FPS fans looking to recent examples - Killzone 3 - for liberation from twin sticks, for arcade revitalization. If the top ten light gun games from recent history are indicators (as in the first installment of Keepin’ It Rail), the future of this often dismissed “peripheral” and its accompanying titles will be weird; thrilling, direct, on-rails, and wonderfully weird.