[kipchak]

>Over the next decade, designers at Nerf, a division of Hasbro, came up with fanciful models shaped like bats, piranhas, and spiders. What they didn’t look like were weapons of war.

While they're definitely more abstractly modeled, I think pre 9/11 nerf look more like Sci-Fi weapons of war than spiders. The Pulsator for example is a pretty close to the Quake nailgun visually and in function, and the arrowstorm similar to the super nailgun. Like the article mentions previously most toy guns were as realistic as possible, like the Entertech water guns from the 80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa-9Birw74o