In the latest episode of Nightdive Studios’ podcast series, legendary FPS developer John Romero came on to talk about the industry, past and present. He ended with a surreal anecdote about the inception of the Deer Hunter series, and thus hunting sims as we know them.
“Back in the ’90s, Wal-Mart had a ton of power in the industry, because tons of people went to Wal-Mart to buy their games—physical games, in boxes and everything,” said Romero. And to get to Wal-Mart, you had to go through GT Interactive.
GT was a legendary PC publisher that, through a string of acquisitions and corporate maneuvering, became the version of Atari active in the industry today—the one that now owns Nightdive, in fact. Luckily for Romero, GT had long worked with and favored id Software, leading to its inside track to get on store shelves, and Romero’s inside scoop on Deer Hunter.
Romero said that Wal-Mart’s primary buyer at the time was an executive based in Texas who effectively outsourced gaming decisions to GT Interactive, or in Romero’s words, he basically told the publisher, “‘We don’t know nothin’ about software, so that’s why we want GT to do this.'”
“After I don’t know how many years they had been meeting, the buyer goes, ‘You know, I don’t know how to play any of these space alien games, whatever stuff you’re putting on the shelf,'” said Romero. “‘I just want a deer hunting game. You make one of those, and I guarantee, you’ll sell out.’ And GT goes, ‘You got it!'”
Developer WizardWorks, which had been acquired by GT, was tasked with fulfilling this demand. It would make the sim Deer Hunter, which would become a long-running PC series. While Duck Hunt on the NES preceded Deer Hunter by 13 years, I’d argue it’s more arcadey, an evolutionary dead-end rather than an antecedent.
Big Buck Hunter, which you’ve probably seen in a restaurant or arcade, first released in 2000, three years after the first Deer Hunter game. So this sequence of events certainly makes sense with the timeline of the genre. “The hunting genre was because of Wal-Mart,” Romero concluded. In the same episode, Romero also expressed that he thinks indies are the future of the games industry.