It may be April 1st, but this ain’t no joke! Our good friends at The Gaming Warehouse made us aware that the elusive and extremely rare Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator (MACS) Basic Rifle (M16 Rifle) was for sale on Amazon at a cool price of $3,000!
Many would be asking themselves, what the hell is this? In a nutshell, it is an M16 Rifle designed (for the U.S. Army Infantry School) to simulate Basic Rifle Marksmanship (BRM) by using inexpensive off-the-shelf products, in this case, a lightgun, software and a Super Nintendo.
The Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator (MACS) was developed to overcome the training problems that resulted from insufficient facilities and too few instructors. While interest was primarily focused on its use as a rifle marksmanship trainer, MACS was designed so that the basic hardware could be used to provide training on a variety of weapons systems.
The MACS product was patented in 1986 by the US Army Research Institute Fort Benning Field Unit, which conducted research on training and training technology with particular emphasis on individual and small team skills in the Infantry arena.
Now, enough of this talk, we want to keep drooling over this M16 lightgun – who can spare us $3K? 😉
Connect me to that SNES!
Looks like this M16 lightgun has seen some action
RTFM’ing like a boss!
Aha, all MACS bits required!
Whack in the cart, and away we go!
sources: Amazon, DTIC and Video Game Museum