Early Gaming Animation - Duck Hunt

It is interesting to see how far animation has come from the early stages of "Flipbook" style animation to modern computer software that can animate and render entire new worlds in a few hours.  I have looked at early animation earlier in this blog like "Steamboat Willie", and then I looked at modern gaming animation with "Wolfenstein".  But this post I chose to look back at early gaming with "Duck Hunt".  This game was part of the first era of realistic gaming, because the controller was a gun that you could use to point at the ducks flying in the game.  You were able to actually shoot at the screen and kill the ducks - all virtually.  It was an interesting development in technology, as well as animation, because the game creators had to animate their game to mimic real life (such as feathers flying off of the duck when it is hit, and the duck falling out of the sky).  The animators had to create several options of animations for every action that could possibly happen in the game.  I think the result was a fun, realistic game that was ground-breaking for the time.