A 25-year-old male suspect has been arrested in South Carolina after allegedly using anNESZapper to rob a convenience store.
According toWBTV, David Joseph Dalesandro is accused of entering a Kwik Stop in Sharon, South Carolina while wearing a wig, a mask, and a hoodie. He then brandished the Zapper, a toy made for the Nintendo Entertain System in the mid-1980s, and demanded money. The clerk handed over roughly $300 before Dalesandro allegedly left the scene.
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To be fair to the convenience store clerk, the NES Zapper was painted black, and as one of the original 1985 models, the handle was still grey. Though it did have an orange trigger, we could easily imagine that little detail is missed in the commotion of an armed robbery.
Dalesandro didn’t get far.York County Sheriff’s Officedeputies caught up with him down the street and arrested him at the Dollar General. The Zapper was found stuffed in his pants.
First released in 1984 in Japan, the original NES Zapper actually looked like a Colt Single-Action Army Revolver, which would have been far more menacing for an attempted robbery. The Zapper was packaged with the game Wild Gunman, which essentially simulated Wild West shootouts. When the Zapper arrived in North America in 1985, it had been redesigned to be more futuristic and was packaged with the game Duck Hunt.
The Zapper didn’t actually project anything. Instead, it was more like a primitive light sensor. It determined where it was pointed by having games display single black frames with white targets on them. If the Zapper was pointed at the white target when the trigger was pulled, it registered a hit, and then the game would go back to displaying normal graphics. The whole process happened in a flash so as to be imperceptible to human vision, and it also simulated an actual firearm’s muzzle flash.
After the 1988 Federal Toy Gun Law was passed, Nintendo colored the Zapper orange in order to avoid confusion with an actual firearm, but the original grey versions can still be found in pawn shops and classic game stores.
Nintendo didn’t entirely give up on the Zapper concept after the NES days. The Wii had a Zapper-style holster for the Wii Remote, and Nintendo also makes sure to reference the Zapper in current video games, most notably the Splatoon franchise. In fact, Splatoon’s N-ZAP weapon caused abrief surge in Zapper salesin Japan back in 2020 thanks to the game’s popularity.
This also isn’t the first time a Zapper has been used for a robbery. Back in 2019,a man in Mexico committed several robberiesusing a Zapper wrapped in black tape.
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