Smoking Guns: Shooting Gallery!

Smoking Guns: Shooting Gallery! is a first-person virtual shooting gallery game set across diverse themes including western towns and forts, alien invasions on Mars, and horror levels with ghosts and monsters. Players use weapons like colts, shotguns, and machine guns to clear levels by shooting targets while avoiding civilians, managing time, and triggering bonus events such as Armageddon or Sniper Time, with customization options for target images and online high score tracking.

Smoking Guns: Shooting Gallery!: A Relic of the Arcade Gallery, Reviewed

Introduction: A Shot in the Dark

In the expansive museum of video game history, certain titles occupy dimly lit corners, their glass cases slightly dusty. Smoking Guns: Shooting Gallery! (also known as Rauchende Colts or Smoking Colts) is one such artifact. Released in November 2003 by Spellbound Studios, this Windows exclusive represents a fascinating divergence for a developer better known for tactical stealth (Desperados) and real-time strategy (Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood). It is not a narrative-driven epic, nor a complex simulation. Instead, it is a pure, unadulterated exercise in digital marksmanship—a first-person shooting gallery in an era dominated by 3D shooters. This review posits that while Smoking Guns failed to ignite critical or commercial fervor, its existence is a telling data point. It reveals a moment when studios, between major projects, would dip into the simplest, most timeless of game genres: the point-and-shoot test of reflexes. Its legacy is not one of influence, but of documentation—a clear snapshot of the low-budget, high-concept “shovelware” that quietly populated retail shelves at the turn of the millennium, built on pillars of customization, variation, and pure, unreconstructed arcade action.

Development History & Context: Pizzas, Kebabs, and Pixels

The story of Smoking Guns is intrinsically linked to the financial and logistical realities of a mid-sized European studio in the early 2000s. Spellbound Entertainment AG, based in Germany, was actively developing Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge at the time. Smoking Guns (under its original title Rauchende Colts) was conceived and executed as a “low-budget game,” a pragmatic side project. The official website’s famously whimsical “production costs” breakdown—2,321 Hawaiian pizzas, 1,126 doner kebabs, 420 crates of brown ale, and 198 three-course meetings—paints a vivid picture of a small team working with scale and humor, not blockbuster resources. It was also one of Spellbound’s first forays into self-publishing, a strategic move to control a low-risk product.

The technological context was one of accessible 3D graphics (the game uses a basic first-person perspective) but before the widespread adoption of online-centric distribution. The “shooting gallery” genre itself was a legacy arcade format, translated to home computers with varying