Every Sega fanboy knows that outside of Japan the one country where the Sega Master System was loved the most was Brazil. This country kept their beloved 8-bit system alive until 1997 long after other countries had not only moved on from it but the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive too and were now on the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation. One of the accessories of the Sega Master System was the Light Phaser.
The Light Phaser was intended to compete with Nintendo’s Zapper and there was even a similar game to Duck Hunt, the most iconic Zapper game ever, for Sega’s rival. Known as Safari Hunt (well imitation is the highest form of flattery), the game had the player shooting at all kinds of animals such as ducks, monkeys and endangered species such as the Jaguar (perhaps someone had a premonition about Atari on that one). At the end of the game there is a message that would never appear in a game today (see image on the right).
Classic Japanese-English translation spelling mistakes aside; the game actually says that the player is ready to go hunting with a real gun now. Can you imagine the response this would get today? Anyway, moving back to Brazil a minute the message must have lost a little more in the translation into Brazilian and came out as “the light phaser is now a real gun” because in 2009 armed Police went rushing to a 60 year old woman’s house after she had been taken hostage by a man brandishing a “long barrelled gun”. The Police tactical response teams sealed off the house and began negotiations by which time they had realized that the “gun” was in fact a Sega Light Phaser with the cable cut off. At this point however he had ditched his Light Phaser and was now brandishing genuinely lethal knives he had taken from the woman’s house. Fortunately after a 10 hour stand off he gave himself up.
Thank God he was a Sega fanboy however. Imagine how the Brazilian Police would have responded if he was a Nintendo fan and used one of these…
Eurylade Reviews 