Hunter Deer

HunterDeer is a freeware point-and-click novelty shooter by Brian Kelley of CompleatMac Software, first released in 1995, that flips the deer-hunting genre on its head. The player is the deer, and the woods are full of beer-swilling hunters picking off friends and family. Time for some payback.

Premise and tone

Billed openly as a parody of mid-1990s deer-hunting sims, the game asks for nothing more than a sense of humour. Whenever a hunter appears, the deer-protagonist fires the deerRifle, a weapon specially adapted to accommodate the deer's lack of opposable thumbs. Hits land a harmless tranquilizer rather than a kill.

Gameplay loop

Each successful shot incapacitates a hunter, after which the player ties the unconscious target to the hood of his own pickup truck. The cycle of spot, dart, and humiliate forms the entire arcade-style loop, played out across short scenes from a fixed first-person hunter-hunting perspective.

Versions

Two builds survive in the Info-Mac archive: HunterDeer 1.0, the original 1995 release with the full novelty intro text, and HunterDeer 1.1, a maintenance update whose graphics were redrawn at lower size to shrink the download. Both are freeware.

System requirements

Runs on PowerPC Macs under Mac OS 7.0 through 9.2.2 with about 5 MB of application RAM. Distributed as a BinHex'd disk image (HunterDeer.img.sit) of around 1 MB. Hosted by CompleatMac Software at home.nycap.rr.com/compleatmac/.