Katie Couric is a Sharpshooter at Mad Dog McCree

[Tom Goldman]

Katie Couric is a Sharpshooter at Mad Dog McCree


Katie Couric loved to kill FMV bad guys in the 1990s.

A poster over on YouTube has uncovered a piece The Today Show did on American Laser Games' Mad Dog McCree sometime in the early 1990s. In the segment, Katie Couric, current anchor of CBS Evening News, shows off her skill at the game, and does pretty well at that. Mad Dog McCree was one of the first live-action laserdisc games that had players use a lightgun to take out opponents in the Wild West.

This segment in hindsight is pretty funny, particularly when Katie's co-host calls refers to Pong as "Poing," but he's got such a happy energy that you can't hate him for his ignorance. They say that Mad Dog McCree was at one time "the hottest game in the arcades," and though possible, I'm not sure that was really true. I do personally remember trying Mad Dog McCree and thinking it was fun (at the time), but it was more expensive than other games and was also really hard.

If Couric didn't play a few games of Mad Dog before this piece was shot, she's got to be a natural because she tears through a couple parts of the game pretty well. Her co-host doesn't even get past one guy, but something about him really makes me want to be his friend.

What I like most about this piece is how it was designed to highlight the fun of Mad Dog McCree and not to vilify it in any way. Today, we would probably never see a game that involves guns on a morning show, except perhaps to point out how it was destroying society [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/96035-Fox-Friends-Shoots-at-Modern-Warfare-2]. Strangely enough, American Laser Games was eventually spun off into Her Interactive, which now makes Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys games.

(Via: GoNintendo [http://gonintendo.com/viewstory.php?id=103771])

Permalink

 

[Woem]

Well Mad Dog McCree actually was a very fun game at the time. I played the PC version with mouse controls. I do remember having more fun watching the cutscenes though, but hey I was just a kid and this is after all a cowboy game.

 

[accountdeletethis]

Now this is one from the archives - I first played Mcree 2, it was the first game I ever acquired on a cd after I bought my first 4-speed CD-ROM, which cost mucho dinero at the time.

 

[chronobreak]

Wow, you just like warped my brain with this. I used to play this all the time, along with another one called something like "bio:hazard", maybe someone can help me with the name. But yea, I remember the bottle practicing stage, and the annyoing "Good shootin' kid! Try anotha' one!" that accompanied it. Also, the part where you were in a creek was pretty hard.

Remember kids, don't try to shoot Mad Dog in the chest.

 

[73loup]

Had the SegaCD version of this and a light gun, and had many hours of fun with it.

 

[accountdeletethis]

Chrono, I think I know the game you're talking about - is it the one where you wake up to find out you've been turned into a half cyborg on another planet and have amnesia? The one where you take the severed hand of a guy from another cell and beat him over the head with it?

 

[hansari]

Katie Couric is a gamer? Stop hiding your true self!!!

 

[Drew Chapman]

Holy shit. I used to love this game. It was hard as hell to me when I was younger, and I don't recall being able to save it. But the cutscenes were pretty well done and it was pretty interesting.

I loved the part where the old prospector is tied to the dynamite and you had to shoot the fuse. If you failed, it cut to a crude ragdoll of the prospector exploding into oblivion.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Mad Dog McCree was one of the first non-shareware games I played growing up on my PC. I forget the reason now, but apparently at one point I was playing it on a laptop with no mouse, just the little green and highly inadequate analog nub - but since I memorized where every bandit would be I still got through the whole thing, heh. Good times.