Image from VGChartz.com

Image from VGChartz.com

Image from VGChartz.com

When Nintendo announced the Zapper, people were skeptical of what is essentially a plastic shell (I agree, actually, that the Zapper isn't even the best one- stay tuned for a review for a great new shell that I think is better than Nintendo's product). At the time, I argued that light gun style gaming had a nice potential upside: after all, it's one of the "last men standing" in the arcades. Yet the ever present barrier of entry problem always existed: you had to buy extra equipment.

So the Wii always had great potential here, since the Wii Remote can essentially function as a light gun by itself. However, developers needed a little push to get going. Nintendo's release of Link's Crossbow Training, and the Zapper ensured a large portion of the Wii audience had at least some sort of gun shell. This, in turn, led to a release of a wide variety of light gun games.

How would these games do? Do gamers care about ported old arcade shooters?

In a word: yes.

Link's Crossbow training itself was a huge success, selling almost 2 million copies so far. That was expected, at least by most. It was cheap and it was Zelda.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is a million seller on Wii, a third party success story. It is also the second highest selling light gun game on Wii, and is the only original game other than Nintendo's title. The rest are budget priced arcade ports.

However! Those have done well too. Ghost Squad by Sega has pushed out 370,000 copies. House of the Dead 2 and 3 return, also by Sega, has sold 280,000. Remarkably, House of the Dead maintains a rock solid 20,000 copies sold per week, every week, according to VGChartz.com.

The newly released Target terror, though fast on the way to becoming a cult hit due to its campy production values, may be the first Wii light gun game to not sell well, but we'll see. No numbers are available for it just yet.

House of the Dead 2 and 3 on VGChartz.
Link's Crossbow Training on VGChartz
Ghost Squad on VGChartz
Umbrella Chronicles on VGChartz