Simply a great example of using engineering and inventiveness to solve the problem they had. I remember noticing the screen having a flash, but because it coincided with the 'bang!' noise it felt natural.

It's a bit absurd to have an article about this and not include any screenshots of the actual white blocks used by the lightgun to detect targets. This is a better explanation with visuals; it actually used two screens to do the detection:

https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-did-the-nintendo-g...

So true. Here's one that also shows the other light gun games for NES[0].

[0] https://solidpawnadvance.wordpress.com/2016/12/31/light-gun-...

so could it easily be tricked by putting a finger over it and quickly removing it in front of a light? or it's too small of a window to trick? a strobe light could fool it?

Have to detect a frame of black before detecting a flash of white. And the white has to be detected on the right raster lines. It's not trivial to fake.

There's a timing element to it too. Because CRTs display pixels from top to bottom the timing gives information about the exact location of the hit too, not just a boolean hit/miss.

It's also well explained (waaay more technical and in depth) by the "Retro Game Mechanics Explained" channel on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2Dw7NFm1ZfY?t=975