I know very little about Nintendo's history prior to the Donkey Kong era of games in the arcade. I knew about the company's start-up making trading cards, but nothing really about its efforts in the 70s. After learning about Wild Gunman a couple of weeks (i.e. "years") ago, I've now had the chance to look into 1976's top arcade earner: EVR Race.
In short: it was a betting machine that played different versions of either a horse or a car race (the horse race seems to be the one most reported on, so maybe it was more popular or prevalent), and "players" would simply pick a winner and hope for the best. There wasn't any control over the horses or cars, so it really was just a gambling game.
A site called thedoteaters.com features a short clip of the video used: https://youtu.be/YaUmcG3iors
What's more meaningful to me from that year was an early Nintendo handheld game: this prototype version of Duck Hunt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=YaUmcG3iors. After this, it won't be long before I'm spending an awful lot of time with the NES Zapper, shooting ducks and being laughed at by a video game dog.
And by the way: I lost a lot of games on the hard level of Pong. Tried keyboard, tried mouse ... I think I'm ready for the end of Pong's three-year dominance of home video gaming.
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