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.

Power Pellet — Pac-Man (1980)

The power pellet in Namco’s 1980 arcade game Pac-Man and the 1982 sequel Ms. Pac-Man isn’t so much a weapon as something that turns your hungry protagonist into a weapon, a fierce predator capable of devouring the colorful ghosts chasing them around the map. They need to be used strategically to clear a level, with the ideal maneuver being to reach one right as Blinky and Pinky are about to box you in so you can turn around and eat them, ideally while screaming “the hunter becomes the hunted.” The euphoria is short lived, so try to gobble up the ghosts and their points as quickly as possible and any other pellets you can while you have the breathing room and then get yourself to the next power pellet to start the process again. [Samantha Nelson]