Hunting videogame big hit with city slickers

NEW YORK — Alexandra Broseus grabs a shotgun, lifts it to her slender shoulder, pumps, and readies her aim.

Seconds later she's firing furiously at animated deer darting across a video-game screen inside a popular Manhattan hipster bar called Horseshoe.

When the shooting ends and the adrenaline wanes, Broseus — wearing a zebra-striped dress — brings the plastic barrel to her lips, blows the imaginary smoke into the air and reaches for a can of beer. Thanks to youthful urbanites like Broseus, the coin-operated Big Buck Hunter Pro has evolved into the hottest-selling, biggest-moneymaking video game in bars and arcades across the country. And it's surprisingly popular in liberal bastions with strict gun laws such as New York City, where the idea of shooting real animals repulses many.

"It's very strange, and I've been doing games for about 24 years. There's some kind of hipness to it," said George Petro, president of Play Mechanix, the Chicago-area company that designed the game.

While older versions of the game have always done fairly well in the Midwest and other deer-hunting regions, the newest line — Big Buck Hunter Pro — has caught fire everywhere, mainly because of changes in the design.

Petro said the game has been upgraded to a PC platform, giving the game more lifelike graphics. A second shotgun was added so two players could fire away simultaneously, raising the competitive stakes.

When the Pro version was released, "I was hooked," said Sebastian Baumer, 25, of New York City, who has spent about $2,000 playing over the past year and says he's one of the most lethal shots on the East Side of Manhattan.

Players score points for accuracy, distance and the animal's weight. Players can stalk elk, antelope, bighorn sheep, moose and, of course, bucks.

Just like in real life, a head or neck shot instantly brings down the animal. Gut shots take two or three rounds. Slaying a ewe or doe is forbidden.

Part of the allure: no shivering outside in the cold for hours waiting for a trophy buck to arrive.

Will this start a trend? Will hipsters start taking to the woods en masse with Remingtons and Mossbergs? Hunting purists hope not.

"I thank God they are doing it in a bar," said Russell Thornberry, editor in chief of Buckmasters Whitetail Magazine in Montgomery, Ala. "I'm not sure I'd want them hunting anywhere near where I was hunting. They'd be a danger to me and the deer."