When you think of guns in video games, you think of assault rifles, plasma rifles, rocket launchers or machine guns. Why is it you never think of, say, a musket?

I know what you're thinking. It's Friday. Gun Week must be over, right? Or do we have one more post in the barrel, another celebration of video gaming's obsession with firearms?

If a video game contains guns, does it also contain bullets? Not necessarily. Well, not necessarily — get this — depending on your philosophical take on what it means for a bullet to exist.

Meet the Heavy and ignore, for a minute his massive weight loss instead listening to his monologue about his gun, his wonderful, wonderful to-scale gun.

If I learned anything from Unreal Tournament, it's that two automatic pistols are better than one, and holding them sideways makes them fire faster. It's two popular handgun fallacies in one!

In many genres, the gun is the point where the gamer meets the game, making it the single most important element in a given title. That makes the guys who make the guns important, too.

Sometimes, the obsession with guns in video games gets ridiculous. So we're celebrating acts of "gunfusion." Here we have the ultimate, unofficial Doom weapon, which we first highlighted in 2008.

So many games, so many guns. Most are good, but some have to be the best, and it's only the best that we've decided to hang on our Kotaku Gun Rack. Keep the crows off our porch.

The man who invented home video games may have known more about real guns than any other game creator in history. But, he tells Kotaku, that's not why the first game console had a gun.

In Dallas, last month, I spotted a big inflatable igloo. It had been erected by a company called Microvision on the exhibition floor at QuakeCon. Inside of it, I discovered, was a man holding this gun.

Whether you're seriously low on ammo or just want to make someone's life completely miserable, there's nothing quite like bringing a hammer, crowbar, or chainsaw to a gun fight. Here are some of our favorite gun alternatives.

Somewhere between a light gun and a 3D mouse things went sideways over at peripheral maker Novint's laboratories. The end result: This monstrosity.

What was the first video game gun? There are three ways to try to answer that question.

What's it look like to get shot in a video game? The portrait of pain has been changing over the years. We took a bullet in 18 years' worth of games to bring you this montage.

Sometimes, the obsession with guns in video games gets ridiculous. So we're celebrating acts of "gunfusion." The entertaining Metal Gear Solid series is gun-crazy. (It is!) Here's the ultimate more-detail-than-necessary discussion of a gun, from MGS3, at the four-minute mark.

Armed with M-4 automatic rifles, swathed in body armor and combat fatigues, the five man U.S. Special Forces Airborne entry team stacks up outside the entrance to the house.

As mentioned in our recent History of Headshots article, the 2000 video game Soldier of Fortune was a pioneer — a bloody pioneer — in the technological art of connecting a gamer's virtual gun with various enemy body parts.

Long before there were video games about people shooting one another in war, there were wars with people shooting one another.

A lot of people loved killing zombies in the original Dead Rising. But almost just as many hated using guns to do so. Why? The controls.

In game after game, there they are: guns. Weapons are a common trope. They are a catalyst for action and an instrument for destruction. In-game guns and, well, guns are different. What do game developers know about the real deal?