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Rated “X” for XBox

Released last month, the sci-fi adventure “Mass Effect” (Microsoft for the XBox 360) hasn’t created as much of a stir as, say, the pornographic minigame Hot Coffee in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” but it still has authorities buzzing.

Inspector Gadget Column: “Bully” Kisses The Boys

Rockstar Games’ new title pushes the envelope in ways Grand Theft Auto wouldn’t even consider.

Original article published in XBiz Magazine and originally available online at http://www.xbiz.com/article_piece.php?cat=43&id=16703 (NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

Brian Shuster is an unassuming yet hyper man with longish hair and a goatee. He is nice, almost impeccably nice, but he seems to have a hard time settling down.

“I’m always focused on the next big thing,” he admits.

In 1998, Schuster decided that the next big thing was going to be the pop-up ad, so he invented them. Well, not exactly, but he created the Traffic Management Utility, a patented “exit interview” that was used for departing web customers — a method that, to paraphrase his words, was stolen and misused by other web companies.

“It was easier to do business in 1998, when the user wasn’t so on guard for trickery,” he says. “But we really poisoned the well, crapped where we slept. Users are very wary these days to do business.”

Shuster says his goal is to stop that misuse.

“If I were able to enforce that patent, I could clean up the web by not allowing people to use the pop-up in the form they are using it,” he says.

Shuster got involved in the Internet, innocuously enough, to promote his mainstream syndicated comic “Chaos” in 1994. He was able to get a few hundred readers to his comic-a-day page consistently, but it didn’t increase the number of newspaper syndicates picking up his work. However, he did notice something about advertising on the Internet — namely that there wasn’t any.

“So I put together a company to do what would become a double-click ad model,” Shuster says. “We took in little and medium sites — actually, that’s all there really were back then — and started 468×60-pixel images called banners. We wrote the first banner rotation software click-through and such, got several thousand affiliate websites and rapidly discovered that you could make money. We were trying to sell people on the notion that there was an Internet and that it was a good format. We couldn’t get interest in the mainstream, but we definitely got significant interest from the adult space.”

A recent college graduate still in debt, Brian borrowed $700 from a friend and started XPics.com. The free website gained popularity for its “XPic of the day” and made Shuster a lot of money. The proud creator claims that it was the second-most- frequented site on the web — easier to say in the mid-1990s but still notable.

Things started to become more complicated when Shuster decided to take things to the next level and planned to launch an XPics pay membership site.

“We were competing with companies that were very well funded,” he says. “We started a membership website, Sex Roulette, and were able to start to refine techniques to take traffic from the free website and turn it into dollars.”

Shuster cites a few good decisions he made at the time. First, his company applied the “all you can eat” method. Once you paid the fee, you got access to everything. No hidden charges. Next, he decided to ask customers why they were leaving.

This was both a good and bad decision.

“Traffic was coming to the site and we were giving them everything for $9.99 a month, but we were still losing people,” he says. “I wanted to survey people as they left the website, so we created the technology for an exit prompt — ‘Why didn’t you buy? How can we make it better?’” He says the feedback was invaluable. Banner prices jumped 9-12 cents per click.

“Of course, the technology got horribly misused by competition, with the endless loops and ….” Brian pauses for a second. “But we were able to make more money.”

When asked how many websites use his Traffic Management Utility technology today, Shuster estimates millions. And if asked how quickly his technology was copied, he says “within two weeks.”

In Oct. 1998, his holding company, Ideaflood Inc., requested a patent for the Traffic Management Utility. According to Ideaflood, the technology was given U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458 in May 2002, almost four years later. Shustersays this was too late.

“The purpose of a patent is if a small company has a good idea it can benefit from, but within two weeks it was wildly copied,” he says. “The problem is that patents still take up to seven years, then you can hold it for 20 — but seven years is forever on the Internet.”

It is hard to imagine an Internet browsing experience, whether it be Amazon.com or a fetish website, without some sort of pop-up window. It is even more difficult to see anyone getting respect in the early days of the Internet. Using the patent office must have been tantamount to contacting the sheriff of Dodge City for help.

“How could that possibly be invented by someone? How could that be a novel invention? Seven years later, it’s totally obvious,” Shuster says. “They weren’t very sympathetic to how much it cost or the research and development and the financial benefit to the industry. It’s an understandable reaction — a negative reaction — and I lay blame on the patent office for that.”

Shuster says that the Traffic Management Utility was rarely used for its original purpose. It was modified by others and led to the invention of automatic pop-ups, forced entries and other now-commonplace technology.

Profit Margins Dive
“In the early part of this century, the value really went out of the industry,” he says. “The profit margins deflated. It was much more replete with fraud and squeezing out an extra tenth of a cent by spamming someone’s email.”

Other people were noticing an up-tick in unscrupulous behavior by porn sites as well and decided to take action against predatory webmasters.

Shuster was first on the hit list.

In 1914, the Federal Trade Commission was created to stop monopolistic practices among American big businesses. Congress eventually expanded the organization’s power so it could, in the FTC’s words, “police anti-competitive practices.”

Shuster’s website was one of the first to offer trial membership. Interested parties could get a free month with age verification. With Age Check, VeriSign and similar companies still in their infancy, Shuster says that the only reliable way to guarantee age was to get a major credit card.

“This was our lawyer’s advice — the industry standard,” he says.

The FTC smelled a scam.

“They saw the numbers we were billing and thought that the only way we could make that kind of money was if we were cheating customers,” he says.

Focusing on 1999, the FTC checked all Shuster’s company records, including 600,000 free memberships, and interviewed everyone in customer support. Everything checked out. Shuster says he understands why his business looked shady at the time but doesn’t mince words.

“I think the FTC knew what they were doing and how to throw a wrench in the works,” he says.

Shuster believes the FTC had a financial motivation to start such a case because any money gained from an investigation was reinvested in the government organization. At the same time, defending investigations is a major drain of company resources, particularly a small Internet company. Shuster beat the FTC rap after a yearlong battle, but his paysite went under shortly afterward.

“The problem with the FTC was going through their enforcement process, not the outcome,” he says. “They came up with a zero-dollar fine, but it shut down our business.”

To this day, Shuster still laments the process he went through in clearing his name.

“They basically shut us down, seized our assets and pulled our customers offline while they tried to figure out how we allegedly caused problems for customers,” he says.

The shutdown caused enormous chargebacks, and even though Shuster was cleared of the FTC charges, he says the company lost its banking and could no longer function.

“One of the lessons learned is that it’s the investigation that is the punishment, not the outcome of the investigating,” he says, looking back. “We have to be wary as an industry. At the end of the day, if you are vindicated and shown not to be in violation of obscenity, it is a hollow victory if you are out of business.”

RLC Launch
As usual, Shuster has moved on to the next big thing. His new company, Utherverse Inc., recently launched RedLightCenter.com. Inspired by the massively multi-player online games that are popular today, RedLightCenter is an arena that allows users to move their persona through an online sex district. It is patterned after Amsterdam’s famous red light district.

A local bordello is operated by a phone sex company. Online models can try on lingerie, which, if you like it, you can buy and have shipped to your home. Stars can meet and greet their fans online.

Launched this year, Shuster expects users to take to the 3D interface because it imitates real life, yet makes things easy.

“It is reminiscent of 1992 — simple — except with the buying power and secure features of 2006,” he says.

In addition to running his company Ideaflood, Shuster also released a novel this year, the technological thriller “The Minerva Virus,” which is currently one of the most downloaded books on the Internet. He refers to his present-day work as being similar to his pioneering in the early days of the web.

“The stuff I’m doing now is going to be recognized as being totally groundbreaking for the next version of the Internet,” he says.

While he learned from those early days, in many ways, the damage was irreversible.

“When it all comes down to it, the lesson is that it doesn’t matter if you’re doing anything wrong,” Shuster says of his run in with the FTC. “That is where the industry lacks support and cohesion. If people think they are immune, it doesn’t really matter, because if you get targeted, you can be put out of business and then with a smile, they say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been cleared of any wrongdoing’ — although by that time, that discussion takes place on skid row.”

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)

Like the Playboy under the mattress or scrambled pay cable channels, Artworx’s Strip Poker was the first pornographic exposure for many 20- and 30-somethings. Released in 1982 for the Atari 800, it became the standard by which all sexual party games would be measured. Here we are, 25 years later, and the company is still around.

Arthur Walsh established Artworx to sell his popular bridge game, simply called Bridge. He branched out after distributing an excellent, but poorly selling poker game by legendary Atari 800 programmer Jerry White. “We realized that there were more poker players than bridge players out there, so we thought ‘Why don’t we push poker [more]?’” he says. “Then one of my associates said, making a joke, ‘I bet if it was strip poker, it would sell.’ That was the birth of the idea.”

Walsh and his two collaborators hired a professional photographer to do nude studies. The resulting slides, with models posing in a hotel bedroom, bathroom or the ever-popular Jacuzzi, would be projected onto an Atari 800-connected television. The artist would then fill in the 320 x 192 screen, pixel by pixel. Realizing he had a hit on his hands, Walsh translated it to the Apple ][, IBM PC, and other new computers as they came along.

Clones followed, but one distinctive element was the use of “data disks,” which were software add-ons that gave players new opponents, both male and female. Sometimes they were presented as a couple that people would play against at the same time. “The multi-opponent ones were very popular, but we’ve also seen it be used by a spouse. A husband will use it as an excuse to buy [the game] because he’s ‘buying it for his wife,’” says Walsh.

Walsh says that increasingly conservative storeowners took Strip Poker and its many sequels off the shelves in the ‘90s, but Artworx is alive and well online. Now headquartered in Naples, Florida, the semi-retired Walsh now has Strip Poker on PDAs and plans to hit cell phones later this year. He’s not too worried about the opposition.

“There are some other [comparable cell phone] games available, but it looks like ours will be the quality product,” he says. “We’ve always done the whole thing in extremely good taste… it’s like comparing Playboy to Hustler. We didn’t want to produce a Hustler.”

MAIN ARTICLE: PCs in Ecstasy: The Evolution of Sex in PC Games

WomenGamers.com Feature

GameSpot Lead Feature

WomenGamers.com Feature

It’s not often that a game inspires controversy before it even hits the shelves. The sci-fi adventure Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix has been under fire since its concept was first reported, and its original ad campaign, launched around Christmas, is not being used in most game magazines. Perhaps it’s all the lesbian sex.

Hana and Rain, Retro Helix’ two female leads, sleep together. “I wanted Hana to be an open character,” says Kronos president and director Stanley Liu, who then trots out an old joke: “She’s what I call a trysexual: She’s willing to try anything.”

Retro Helix follows the adventures of four mercenaries who cross paths while surching for the cure to a mutant virus. The gameplay, which is similar to Capcom’s popular Resident Evil series, blends exploring, puzzle-solving and action sequences. It uses well-integrated cut scenes to tell the story and never takes itself too seriously, especially in regard to the lesbian relationship.

Before anyone gets too het up, be warned that the intimacy between Hana and Rain isn’t developed all that much, with the love scenes never going much farther than a PG-13. Liu admits that Kronos had to work hard to have its publisher accept the mature content of the finished product.

“We heard some concerns from Eidos because Wal-Mart wouldn’t carry it if it was too explicit. I’d say by mid-production, though, we said ‘Screw it.’,” he says, laughing. “And it stayed: we have a little touching and such, but it fits in the story.”

What wasn’t accepted by many was the original print ad campaign, which featured both Rain and Hana in their undies with Rain on top. The tagline is, “No one’s surprised this story is capable of thirteen climaxes.” According to Liu, there was a problem with the word “climaxes”. And according to Eidos PR, the problem came from conservative game magazines.

“We didn’t actually choose to pull the ad. Certain gaming magazines decided not to run the ad,” says Eidos PR Coordinator Kjell Vistad. “That wasn’t an Eidos choice.”

So what did they go with? A fully clothed ad of Rain and Hana with the tag line, “These two ladies put the ass in assassin.” “And that one’s OK!” Liu says.

But don’t let the sex and violence fool you: The story is the title’s real strength. Liu originally planned on making Retro Helix a full-length anime as opposed to a game, which becomes obvious when playing sections heavily influenced by classics such as Ghost in the Shell and Akira. Coupled with some of the best Playstation graphics ever (in gameplay and cut scenes), Retro Helix will make any anime fan feel right at home.

Another strength of the game is its hilarious pop-culture references, which range from a mock infomercial for a killing machine to the lame pickup lines tossed around in a bar scene. All the humorous subplots are weaved almost perfectly into the gameplay, which makes the lack of development on Hana and Rain’s relationship that much more obvious.

Still, Retro Helix is more risqué than the average title and will keep you entertained with its many unnecessary cleavage shots and four-letter words. Hopefully Fear Effect 3, currently in development for the Playstation 2, will bring the series to adulthood.