What has been affected the most is the home games industry. After developing the memorable and popular arcade and NES titles Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman, Nintendo buckled under political pressure and backed away from light gun titles in the SNES era, releasing a ridiculous and unpopular bazooka-shaped light gun (the Super Scope 6) before ceasing to develop any gun-enabled software. (A light gun attachment for the Nintendo 64 was briefly discussed but never released or even shown in prototype form; a single third-party game, Knife Edge, was originally conceived as a potential light gun title but was changed before release.) Sega has had its own problems, releasing a similarly ridiculous crossbow-shaped light rifle (the Menacer) for the Genesis, then reverting to a futuristic hand-held light gun for their Saturn system, and then deciding amidst real-life school shootings not to release any light gun for the Dreamcast in America. Today, most likely for legal reasons, both Sega and Sony depend on third-party developers to release light gun peripherals for their respective consoles, though both companies have published gun-compatible software.

As a result of the wide exposure their games receive in arcades, gun games have continued to be popular for Sega. Casting up to two players in the roles of modestly futuristic police officers, the Virtua Cop series started in arcades, then helped flagging sales of the Saturn console, and then garnered praise on PCs. An enhanced version of Virtua Cop 2 will be released shortly to satisfy gun-hungry Dreamcast fans. Far more successful, however, is Sega's zombie-blasting House of the Dead series, which unexpectedly dominated arcades shortly after the popularization of Capcom's similar PlayStation title Resident Evil. House of the Dead 2 for the Dreamcast is considered to be among the most impressive light gun games ever made for arcade or home consumption, and has even spawned the release of a tangentially related beat-em-up called Zombie Revenge. Other Sega gun titles, such as the sci-fi themed L.A. Machineguns and a dinosaur shooter based on Jurassic Park, have done reasonable business in arcades but have not been released into the home market.

Whereas Sega has for the most part limited its in-game violence to the shooting of zombies, monsters, dinosaurs and robots - recently taking emphasis away from Virtua Cop, which lets you shoot at popping-up criminals as you would in a police training simulator - its primary arcade competitor Namco has successfully fixated on two sorts of gun games: hard-core shooting at human criminals, and shooting at cartoony targets. Namco's Time Crisis series is paced and populated like James Bond movies, full of terrorist organizations, seemingly European locales, and fast-paced action. The pistol-based action proved so popular in arcades that Namco developed and released its own light-gun peripheral for the PlayStation to bring the action home. Though the company has released purely cartoony target-shooting arcade and PlayStation games (under the Point Blank label) to some success, its recent release of the arcade title Crisis Zone has been generating far more talk. Crisis Zone combines the hard-core shooting action of the Time Crisis series with a rapid-fire machinegun, a combination that has been thrilling players around the world. Unlike Sega, which releases software only for the Dreamcast console, Namco develops titles both for the Dreamcast and Sony's PlayStation machines. Though a purely original home game called Time Crisis 3 is in development for the older PlayStation, the industry is really buzzing over whether the arcade titles Time Crisis 2 or Crisis Zone will appear on Sega or Sony home platforms, especially as no light gun peripheral has been formally announced for the new PlayStation 2.

The biggest surprise has been the recent international popularity of Konami's Silent Scope, a sniper rifle game set seemingly in present-day cities. Featuring a mounted rifle equipped with an actual LCD monitor sighting scope, Silent Scope has been especially well-received by audiences in supposedly less violent locales such as Japan and Europe. British reception of the game was so warm that the developers chose to use well-known London and European settings in the sequel, which was recently debuted to much fanfare at a U.K. arcade trade show.

What is the secret to the success of these titles? It's seemingly not the level of violence or the presence of blood, but rather the level of skill required of the player. None of the games described above shows vicious injury to human characters - Time Crisis, Crisis Zone, Virtua Cop and Silent Scope, the only games with human enemies, have no blood whatsoever and make their characters disappear upon 'death.' But all of the most popular games have high-intensity action and solid graphics in common, requiring fast reflexes and precise shooting; slower-paced or less graphically impressive titles tend to be less popular.

The presence or lack of a light gun has never been dispositive in the accusations of parents' groups that video games are dangerous; though guns have recently been the sole focus of anti-video game forces, pulling off characters' heads or pulling out characters' hearts was once said to be dangerous content in Mortal Kombat. Of course, except when pointed at police officers or used in the commission of real crimes, toy guns themselves have not proved dangerous for children, and the guns used in childhood games of cowboys and Indians or G.I. Joe elicited no fear of under-aged terrorist activities or other violent crimes.

Just as hitherto unseen content in games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom inflamed the passions of concerned parents, so too they brought record audiences to play video, arcade and computer games. Responsibility dictates that the video game industry commit to getting past particularly violent portrayals in games that may be played by young children; freedom of speech, by contrast, necessitates that adults be able to obtain and self-judge the content of even the most controversial software, so long as they desire to do so.