In a nutshell: We’ve seen some pretty clever NES-related mods over the years but this latest one involving the Zapper light gun accessory may take the cake. Remarkably – and for reasons we haven’t yet determined – one modder thinking way outside the box has managed to turn the iconic Nintendo controller into a functional wireless “telephone.”

Most will remember the Zapper as the bundled accessory that came with the NES Action Set, and the controller of necessity for playing Duck Hunt and a handful of other gallery-based shooting games. Outside of a handful of titles, however, the gun wasn’t all that useful. And because it only works with CRT TVs, they’re practically useless nowadays which is why Nick Bild decided to see what else could be done with it.

After working on a project to recreate Alexander Graham Bell’s photophone, Bild got the wild idea to see if he could build something similar using the Zapper. The first step involved bypassing Nintendo’s built-in anti-cheat mechanisms by connecting the hit indicator signal directly to the photodiode. Doing so produces an analog signal that represents the intensity of the light striking it, allowing Bild to encode audio into light by modulating its intensity.

That signal then gets fed into an amplifier to reproduce the sound. Add a transmitter and speaker to the mix and voila, you’ve got a Zapper “phone.” Neat, right?

Bild is the first to admit that while the sound quality is pretty good, the Zapper itself is quite bad as a phone. That’s largely due to the fact that you have to have line of sight with the laser transmitter and it must be lined up nearly perfectly. And I’m not even sure phone is the right word for it – perhaps wireless speaker would be a better description.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Zapper and its inner workings, I’d highly recommend checking out Bild’s earlier teardown video. It goes into great detail on what was certainly an innovative and impressive technology for the era, and explains why the Zapper isn’t compatible with modern televisions.

Image credit: Sic!