To be on the periphery of something means to be on the outskirts of it, to be on the edge of it, but not of it.

The inland empire, a metropolitan region just outside of Los Angeles proper, is peripheral

to Los Angeles. It's right there outside that main thing, and in a broader definition

of Los Angeles, you might also include the inland empire of that main thing, and in a broader definition of Los Angeles, you might also include

the inland empire of that broader thing, but it's technically separate. In the world of video games,

a peripheral is a device that adds some new functionality to a gaming system, but which is still

itself separate from that system. One of the most popular

and successful gaming peripherals of all time was the NES Zapper, otherwise known as the

gun that game packaged with the original Nintendo Entertainment System console. The Zapper only

worked with 16 official licensed games on the NES, and the majority of

people who had one only ever used it with the game that it came packaged with, Duck Hunt,

which was a game in which you would shoot at pixelated ducks as they emerged from a grassland

at varying speeds. And you're also pixelated ducks as they emerged from a grassland at varying speeds. And your also pixelated

hunting dog, who was ostensibly on your side, would laugh at you if your performance was subpar.

This was what video games were like in the 80s. To play the NES, you had to plug it into your TV

so that you'd have a display.

And TVs were relatively dumb machines back in the mid-80s when this device first hit

shelves, no internet, no interactivity, just a few cables that plugged into the back,

sending audio and video from the console to the screen. So to make this peripheral work, the developers at Nintendo

had to get clever. The gun barrel was a very simple machine. It could detect black and white

illumination on old school CRT screens. When you pulled the trigger on the gun, the TV screen would flash pure black for a

fraction of a second, and then for another fraction of a second, everything that was a target,

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