Video Challenger was produced by Takara in Japan in 1987 and used specially prepared VHS tapes together with a light gun called the Challenge Blaster. The console neither generated the scenery nor played the tape: the video came from a conventional VHS player, while the hardware detected shots fired at visually encoded targets in the recording and accumulated the score. This approach made it possible to use live-action footage and prerecorded animation, but meant that the course of each game was necessarily determined by the content of the tape.