It seems so obvious: If we invent a machine, the first thing we are going to do – after making a profit – is use it to watch porn. When the projector was invented roughly a century ago, the first movies were not of damsels in distress tied to train tracks or Charlie Chaplin-style slapsticks; they were stilted porn shorts called stag films. VHS became the dominant standard for VCRs largely because Sony wouldn’t allow pornographers to use Betamax; the movie industry followed porn’s lead.  DVDs, the Internet, cell phones. You name it, pornography planted its big flag there first, or at least shortly thereafter.

Hot Coffeegate brought the link between digital games and sex to the forefront for politicians and parents, but gamers knew that the subject was as old as Leisure Suit Larry’s toupee. However, the story goes farther back than that, as people were getting off on computers back when their green monitors only showed a blinking cursor and some florescent text. Hot Coffee wasn’t the beginning of anything, but the natural apex of a 30-year saga.

FOREPLAY
Steve Russell’s SpaceWar may have been the first video game in 1964, but the games that would follow would be less action and more pen and paper. It was a time when folks didn’t have home computers and most games, played through high-end university mainframes, were extensions of the new Dungeons & Dragons craze. In fact, almost all of the early innovators, such as Willie Crowther (with Colossal Cave) and Richard Garriott (Ultima), were heavy D & D fans.

However, as 300-baud modems and crude computer kits began to infiltrate America, Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, made it possible to interact with other people in the comforts of home. Here, in the mid-to-late-‘70s, we see the nascent chat rooms and text adventures made especially for adult pleasure. Naughty games would be advertised in the black-and-white classifieds section of men’s magazines, right next to escort services and product-by-mail catalog pitches.

In 1981, as the Apple ][  made home computing more affordable, a homemaker and her husband agreed to distribute an adult game by programmer Chuck Benton. Released through their company On-Line Systems, Softporn Adventure would have the player trying to bag three different women through the course of one night. The back of the box read “WOMEN! EROTICA! DERELICTS! BOOZE! and MUCH MORE!!!” It was an instant success.

“Everyone had a copy of Softporn!” Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, said in an interview. “You’d think it was packaged with the Apple ][.” The traditionally conservative Time Magazine profiled the title in its first-ever game column. Time also showed the Softporn Adventure packaging, an amateur photo that featured three nude ladies sipping champagne in a Jacuzzi. The naked woman at the far right was Roberta Williams. Her and her husband Ken would later rename their company Sierra On-Line.

SEXERTAINMENT
Softporn Adventure not only helped launch perhaps the best adventure game company in history, but it also showed yuppies that the computer was more than just a word processor. The right software could turn a beige plastic box into a sexy machine, something that could add hours of entertainment to any wood-paneled den or bedroom. On-Line’s Softporn was unabashedly dirty, but other companies realized that they could reach more Reagan-era customers if the sex in their games was a little more… hidden. Game companies tried several themes, even commissioning the ever-popular Dr. Ruth to sponsor a sex trivia game. However, from Softporn’s heyday to, well, now, the best selling adult party games have been based around a classic bed-warmer: strip poker.

Artworx’s Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance was the first major adult party game of consequence. Released in 1982 for Apple, Commodore, IBM, and Atari computers, it set the standard for every strip poker game to come: The requisite semi-nude blonde covergirl, holding her cards close to her exposed chest; The nigh-impossible difficulty that truly tested the player’s libido. One trend Strip Poker did not set was unisex opponents: While the original game featured nude women and men, nearly every strip poker game to follow from any company would have only female competitors. This would be indicative of how sex in games would be portrayed in the decades to come.

Artworx did wonders with the black-and-white (or green) graphic displays, creating nude characters that were remarkably clear for the time period. Amazingly enough, Artworx is still in business today and has released dozens of strip poker games, as well as some, ahem, Solitaire titles.

During the mid-‘80s, as strip poker sales started to soften up, companies began bringing in celebs to prop up flaccid sales. Artworx added popular British “Page 3” girl Maria Whittaker to its products, while Martech got the topless model/pop singer Samantha Fox to star in Samantha Fox Strip Poker. It’s unclear whether a MIDI-version of “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)” played after a winning hand.

ADULT ADVENTURES
The late ‘80s brought a higher sophistication to the portrayal of sex in games, primarily because games in general were becoming more advanced. Complex titles from companies like Origin (Ultima), Interplay (The Bard’s Tale), and Sierra (King’s Quest) opened the door to exploration, while better graphics cards and new computers like the Amiga made some irresistible opportunities.

Inspired by the new freedom, Ken Williams of Sierra asked one of his programmers – whose specialty was making Disney games – to update Softporn Adventure for the “three-dimensional” era. That programmer was Al Lowe, and while he was a fan of the original, he was surprised by how stale it was when he replayed it. “There’s no way I could bring this game into the ‘80s unless I make fun of it,” he told Williams. “It’s so behind the times, it might as well be wearing a leisure suit!”

Williams thought it was a brilliant idea and asked programmer Al Lowe to make the new game a parody of the old one. Released in 1987, Leisure Suit Larry would follow the adventures of the sleazy but lovable loser Larry Laffer. The visuals were detailed, the plot ridiculously silly and the jokes appropriate on a truck stop bathroom wall. However, the roots of the game were clearly in classic text adventures, making Leisure Suit Larry a definitive bridge between the blinking cursor and the constant visual avatar. Released in 1987, it would sell more than one million copies.

JAPAN ON TOP
Japan, with its sexual openness, had tons of erotic computer software available by the time Leisure Suit Larry arrived. Gal’s Panic, a Qix-clone featuring naked women in schoolgirl outfits, was a minor arcade hit at the end of the decade. Bootleg games for the Nintendo Entertainment System remixed traditional video games with steamy visuals, or at least as steamy as you could get on an 8-bit system. According to Power-Up author Chris Kohler, the first major Japanese computer sex game may have been Koei’s Night Life, an instructional Kama Sutra released in 1983. Koei would later plow those profits into historic war/strategy games like Nobunga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Though Japan continued to produce a number of sex games for its own market and for the PC underground, it would take almost 10 years for them to become more mainstream. In 1992, Megatech released Cobra Mission, which featured a gumshoe named JR Knight on the hunt for missing women in a seedy part of Florida. [Our headline for our review was “Land of the Rising Nipple.” – ed] In this game featuring a top-down view and pudgy characters, your reward for saving each woman was an erotic minigame with a first-person view. The R-rated retail edition didn’t go beyond tight shirts and a little nudity, but an X-rated edition was very graphic, closer to typical Hentai pornographic games but without the tentacles.

PENETRATING THE MAINSTREAM
Two games made 1996 a banner year for sex in computer games: Tomb Raider and Catfight. Built like a bowtie donut with two infinite legs, Lara Croft showed the evolution of graphics. The fact that the PC version’s success paralleled the release of the graphics-heavy Sony Playstation only made it more obvious that video games were not a passive medium. They were made to stimulate.

Catfight was a Mortal Kombat clone with pixilated, black-eyed female cut-outs in leotards and army fatigues. A company named Atlantean Interactive unleashed this game on the public, and it was a front for porn producer Vivid Entertainment. The “Fodor’s Guide to the Apocalypse” backgrounds only reminded people that regardless of the processing power, it took skill to create a game, even a guilty pleasure. Reviewers from major news outlets called Catfight one of the worst computer games ever made. Of note, this was several years after the release of Magic Carpet’s Stroker, the Commodore 64 male masturbation simulator.

LIVE NUDE GIRLS
Lara Croft, like any model, was hounded by persistent rumors. The most notable one was that publisher Eidos had included a code that turned Tomb Raider into “Nude Raider.” The game would play the same, but the heroine would be running through dark caverns as naked as Lady Godiva. The rumor proved false – this was, for better or worse, not a forerunner to Hot Coffee – but it didn’t stop “innovative” gamers from creating suitable, if slightly odd, nude patches for their own. In 1999, Eidos and Core Design shut down www.nuderaider.com and sent cease-and-desist order to other sites featuring images of Ms. Croft in compromising positions.

Around the same time, the Electronic Software Ratings Board began to pressure Interplay over the game Giants: Citizen Kabuto, which featured somewhat bloody Clash-of-the-Titans-level battles. But the big problem was the nipples. More specifically, the game featured the Delphi, a female race named after the famous religious temple in Greece, and these lovely blue creatures were topless. The ESRB said that the nipples would have to be covered or removed, or the rating would be “upgraded” from Teen to Mature. Interplay relented, covering the nipples as well as turning the blood green. “We agree! Covering Delphi and changing the blood does suck!” Bob Stevenson, co-founder of Giants developer Planet Moon Studios, said at the time. “It was only recently that the pressure has been mounting for us to cover her up or face crippling our potential distribution.” Despite the change, the nipple-free version ended up with an M-rating.

This was not the first time cleavage caused a distribution stink. The cover of the 1987 action game Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior had a scantly-clad warrior princess and a very big sword. The Palace Software release had the British press up in arms, despite the fact that the cover model, Maria Whittaker, regularly appeared naked in their own publications. Proof again, it’s all about the package.

SOCIAL DISEASE
The next leap wouldn’t be motivated by processors or liberal attitudes, but by modem speed. Ultima Online in 1997 showed that vast, interconnected online visual communities were possible, while Quake nearly perfected the online first person shooter a few years earlier. As in the text-only MUDs of yesteryear, gamers could now reach out and touch someone else.

In 2002, game designers Melinda Klayman and Anne-Marie Schleiner released Anime Noir, a first-person game that turned the Quake engine into a love machine. Players would create an anime alter-ego and interact with each other by punching in a variety of commands: lick, suck, bite, pony ride and penetration. It was perhaps the first significant sex game created by women, though it was more social experiment than retail product.

However, the biggest inspiration for modern day designers was The Sims. Gamers immediately started created webpages, quite a few of them R-rated, documenting their digital lives. Expansions and unauthorized patches added more sexual expression – the most famous supported option allowed same-sex marriages – but the game series maintained a wholesome, if not sterile feel. Eidos’ Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, released in 2004, played like The Sims as interpreted by The Spice Network, but it failed to generate even a quarter of the heat (or sales) associated with breadwinner Lara Croft. Playboy: The Game, the officially-licensed title from Arush Entertainment, focused strictly on the business and social dealings of Hef. It too failed to sell, even with unlockable Playboy centerfolds and better-rendered digital nipples.

It is easy to assume that an incident like Hot Coffee will set off a seismic shift in the handling of sexual expression in videogames, almost as if San Andreas showed us the worse thing that could happen and anything less explicit than that would be more acceptable. But, as states fight to get Mature-rated video games classified in the same category as porn, one has to wonder where the future of sex in video games is going. As long as gamers are human, one thing is clear: it isn’t going away.

SIDEBAR: Making the Atari 800 Sexy (Computer Games Magazine)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Computer Games, Journalism, Sex, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.