Better Lightguns

If you've ever played a shooter game in an arcade, and you've ever fired a pistol, you're probably pretty frustrated by the dinky little plastic pistols in most lightgun games. Nowadays, some of them have a recoil simulator, but they're still light little pieces of plastic, with an absurdly light trigger pull, and the gun remains exactly the same as you fire it. The slide is the same chunk of plastic as the frame. There's a fat cable coming out of the bottom of the gun. For god's sake, you reload the gun by pointing at the floor and pulling the trigger! We need not suffer this way. Airsoft pistols are in widespread production and are much, much more realistic. They're heavier, the trigger feels mostly right and so on. You could put the electronics of a lightgun in an airsoft pistol and have a much better looking toy. Now, I'll admit that if the cable on the pistol was removed*, some jerk would steal it in most arcades. *(This is very easily do-able with bluetooth or an IR system these days.) But that's okay. The cable can be very useful to us. We stick a small compressor inside the game cabinet, and pump high pressure air through the cable to the gun. The air cycles the slide, which will look and sound cool, and it can even be directed out of the gun's muzzle. Rather than simulating recoil, we will create it!