Some of that was probably for the (at the time) novelty of it and some of it might have been an avid hunting crowd but I think a significant portion of it came from its ability to make hunting fun and approachable for people like me - someone who, admittedly, has never stood in the woods at 5AM covered in deer urine. Like Myst, Deer Hunter was a game that reached beyond the range of the typical gamer demographic and sold to people that really didn't play video games. Its considerable success shifted the company's development focus primarily to hunting games for the remainder of its existence.

They'd found something with this game, and others were quick to notice as a slew of other hunting games started to appear afterwards (and are still released endlessly to this day). they sold about a bajillion copies of it. It was a budget title released for $20 and is often cited as the first hunting simulator. Deer Hunter: Interactive Hunting Experience. This afforded them the ability to work on their own original games, one of the earliest being Deer Hunter a.k.a. Sunstorm Interactive were a small studio that started out making expansion content for Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Redneck Rampage, and Shadow Warrior. This is probably why I'm a Burnout guy instead of Gran Turismo. Subsequent games in the series added more features and more depth, but this is a case where I actually think less is more - the simplicity of the original is a big part of the appeal for me, the later games felt too much like work even if that's a more accurate representation of hunting, that doesn't necessarily make it more fun (for me). It manages to create a great atmosphere and does a lot with very little.

I'm not someone who's ordinarily into hunting games at all, but it's a pretty zen experience here, thanks largely to the simplistic gameplay and relaxing nature sound effects. I had a relative that used to refer to Deer Hunter as his 'coffee game'.

Rocky mountain trophy hunter game play