Fire and remember: 23 great unorthodox weapons in video games

There’s nothing new in noting that a disproportionate number of video games are focused on violence. Killing in games is, after all, very easy (and not just in a squishy moral sense). It’s a simple, easy-to-implement formula: Apply Bullet or Blade A to Enemy B, drop loot, repeat as needed until game is complete.

Weapons fascinate in games, though, because of how they let us interact with the world (usually in a very “now there’s slightly less of it” sort of way, admittedly). They let us change things, alter things, affect things. If we’re talking about guns and swords, these changes happen in simple and binary ways: stab, shoot, bludgeon, etc. But what about the other weapons? What about the more unorthodox entries in the gaming arsenal?

That’s what we’re contemplating here today: Some of the most interesting weapons in all of video game history that aren’t a simple series of well-statted axes or spears or Uzis or other straightforward implements of death. What lurks in the weeds, beyond your Super Shotguns or your Master Swords?

Many of the entries in this list (presented in roughly chronological order of their first appearance) are practical tools as much as killing ones; quite a few concern themselves with movement, that other major way we interact with virtual worlds. But together, they share one key element: They transform the basic assumptions about violence in games, taking the rote and making it, for lack of a better word, joyful. If games can never shake their link with killing, at least they can display a jot of the unique interactive creativity that only the medium can posses.

Superball — Super Mario Land (1989)

Mario’s first Game Boy-based adventure saw the plucky plumber bust out a whole host of new hardware, taking to the seas and skies with a plane and submarine to battle the forces of oddball alien Tatanga. But it was the humble Superball, which, once fired, bounced all over the screen in the ways a boring old fireball never could, that was the real game changer in 1989's Super Mario Land. Adding elements of aiming, and even some snazzy trick shots, to Mario’s repertoire, the Superball was apparently so good that it got itself shelved for 30 years—making its triumphant reappearance as one of the most enjoyable tools in Super Mario Maker 2's arsenal in 2019. [William Hughes]