- Sep 6, 2016
- 54
- 74
Recently I started the development of my game (Link in the signature, shameless plug over), and that put me in a thoughtful mood, in my real non-porn game related life I am interested in old computers and old software, my first computer was an AMD K6-2 Win98 computer, and I spent most of my time on it playing Doom and Quake.
But at some point I played Leisure Suit Larry, and I can still see the influence from that game in this community to this day, even if subconsciously, but apart from small comments about some old game that the new games remind the old cats of, I never saw something like a comprehensive history of adult games, Wikipedia has a very interesting article called "
I arrogantly fancy myself a bit of a historian so l wanted to do some research and see exactly how far back some of the concepts we take for granted in this amazingly weird community go, and this thread is all about that (Also I think this is extremely interesting).
Now, we are talking about 50 years of software history, going from Fantasia Arcade machines and Custer's Revenge, to Summertime Saga and Rance IX (Just from the differences in those 4 games you can tell that this bitch is COMPLEX, but believe me, it's all related.),
So this post will only be about a small fraction of that 50+ years of software and gaming history, and only focus on 80s era PC Adult Games, if you guys enjoy I'll make other posts EVENTUALLY (tm).
So, lets begin,
The 80s were the era of Personal Computers, this idea of having a computer in your house began at that time, with the Apple II, and later with the IBM-PC 5150 ( With a GLORIOUS 4.77Mhz 8086 CPU ( remember that x86 thing that sometimes appear when you download 32-bit versions of software? This is where that comes from, your computer, right now, can trace it's history DIRECTLY to the 8086).
With computers invading peoples homes, its no wonder that games soon followed, and horny people exist in all eras so with those games, came a few raunchier titles, now we get to the biggest difference between now and then, remember we are talking about the 80s, you are not going to get Bestiality/Incest simulators in the 80s alright, they were all incredibly high on cocaine but not that much, what you had in the 80s was this.
Softporn Adventure (Sierra On-Line, 1981)
This is one of the earliest games where you can see some influence in games today, the longest running series of adult games that is unbroken until today is the Rance Series, started by Alice-Soft in 88, this is 7 years earlier than that. (2)
Softporn Adventure was a comedic, slightly sexy (and I DO mean slightly) text adventure for the Apple II.
I cannot stress enough how important text adventure games were for the adult game scene, (if I ever do a post about the 2000s you'll hear all about the days of GoblinBoy and AIF), and I believe it is because of how easy they were to create, the 80s computer game development scene wasn't all that different from today, the concept of "Bedroom Programmer's" began in the 80s, Softporn Adventure was PUBLISHED by Sierra, but it was developed in Apple Basic by Charles Benton, as an exercise to learn Basic (Remind you of any programmers making games here? Teaching themselves Python via RenPy?), He had no intentions to publishing it, and in an era before the Internet and F95zone, that was very difficult to do, one day he met Ken Williams (Which later, with his wife, created the King's Quest series) and Williams accepted to publish his game under the recently founded On-Line Systems (Later renamed to Sierra On-Line) (1)
At the same time that bedroom programmers were learning Basic by writing smut, we also had resonable (for the time) sized companies like Infocom, that were also going on with their stuff, Infocom had basically created text adventures in the 70s inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure while they were students at MIT, which gave us Zork (Trap-Quest today runs on the Inform platform, Inform can make games for the Z-machine Virtual Machine, the Z is for Zork.), if you have ANY interest in text adventures you should play Zork immediately, but I wont include it as a major point here because it's not porn. (5)
I will include this tho:
Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Infocom, 1986)
This was another text adventure (Hey graphics were complicated on personal computer of the 80s alright, but we'll soon get to those.), but this time made by Infocom, this is what happens when an actual serious game developer house like Infocom snorts way to much cocaine, the MAD-LADS had THE BALLS of putting a scratch and sniff
card with the game box, so you could smell certain smells during the game, unfortunately the smells are rather boring, (and I wouldn't try smelling a scratch and sniff card from the 80s).
But this isn't very different from Softporn Adventure, basically it's the same idea, a Lewd-ish Comedic Game, and you can now see somewhat of a pattern, which follows western adult game development until basically the 2000s, they were all Lewd-ish Comedic games, I dont think many people cranked one out to Softporn Adventure, and if you did, well congrats.
Leisure Suit Larry (Sierra On-Line, 1987)
Leisure Suit Larry is amazing, it's crap, but it's great, it's basically a graphical version of Softporn Adventure, but a lot funnier, there's literally a puzzle about having sex with a prostitute, if you dont use a condom, you get gonorrhea and your dick falls off, there's not much to say, since all that was important was said on the Softporn Adventure section but fuck it I love this game, it deserves a paragraph.
The pattern of West-Based Comedic Adult games continues, Spellcasting Series (Made by Steve Meretzky, same dude from Leather Goddesses of Phobos, when he left Infocom to join Legend Entertainment), all the Leisure Suit Larry sequels, that went well into the 2000s with the CRAP that is Box Office Bust.
I believe that the pattern appeared from the unwillingness of Publishers to publish REALLY adult games, and when they actually did it was all for shock value (See Custer's Revenge on the Atari), self publishing did exist, but unless you got really popular like Ultima, you didn't really get remembered.
Maybe there's something to do with conservatives being in power in the 80s, maybe American society was more prude (3), I dont know, but that's what I have, most of the adult games of the West in the 80s were like this.
But of course there were a few exceptions:
Emanuelle (Coktel Vision, 1989)
Emmanuelle was a bit different, it had graphics like Leisure Suit Larry, but the main point is that it wasn't all that comedic, sure there's a lot of funny stuff going around, you can't really take this game all that serious nowadays, but being funny wasn't the goal here, it was loosely based on the world famous Emmanuelle series of novels, you might chuckle from calling these games adult games, you might be fooled by the sexy cover art, but there's only a single raunchy scene in this game I believe (Never finished it, forgive me research gods) where you can peep on Emmanuelle getting dressed. (4)
But this is where it all began.
If you are a porn game developer or player, you are part of the legacy of Charles Benton, Steve Meretzky and Al Lowe, to this day we see influences of Softporn Adventure and Zork in what we do, Twine wouldn't exist without Inform, which wouldn't exist without Z-Machine Interpreters, which were created in the 70s by a bunch of MIT students that wanted to make a text adventure about a very big cave.
Now, this is all West based stuff, the East was already going ape-shit with porn games, but I think thats a story for another time.
Thank you for your time, this post was an experiment for me, and I'd love to get some feedback, I struggled a bit with finding the correct amount of info to dump here, there's a lot of cut stuff, and this kind of stuff is new so give me a bit of a break <3
Play these games, they are mostly worth having a look,
and always, Be Excellent to Each other!
My sources are below:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
But at some point I played Leisure Suit Larry, and I can still see the influence from that game in this community to this day, even if subconsciously, but apart from small comments about some old game that the new games remind the old cats of, I never saw something like a comprehensive history of adult games, Wikipedia has a very interesting article called "
You must be registered to see the links
" which I believe is very good but falls short at some points (especially 00s flash games and AIF, which only got a tiny 2 line paragraph)I arrogantly fancy myself a bit of a historian so l wanted to do some research and see exactly how far back some of the concepts we take for granted in this amazingly weird community go, and this thread is all about that (Also I think this is extremely interesting).
Now, we are talking about 50 years of software history, going from Fantasia Arcade machines and Custer's Revenge, to Summertime Saga and Rance IX (Just from the differences in those 4 games you can tell that this bitch is COMPLEX, but believe me, it's all related.),
So this post will only be about a small fraction of that 50+ years of software and gaming history, and only focus on 80s era PC Adult Games, if you guys enjoy I'll make other posts EVENTUALLY (tm).
So, lets begin,
The 80s were the era of Personal Computers, this idea of having a computer in your house began at that time, with the Apple II, and later with the IBM-PC 5150 ( With a GLORIOUS 4.77Mhz 8086 CPU ( remember that x86 thing that sometimes appear when you download 32-bit versions of software? This is where that comes from, your computer, right now, can trace it's history DIRECTLY to the 8086).
With computers invading peoples homes, its no wonder that games soon followed, and horny people exist in all eras so with those games, came a few raunchier titles, now we get to the biggest difference between now and then, remember we are talking about the 80s, you are not going to get Bestiality/Incest simulators in the 80s alright, they were all incredibly high on cocaine but not that much, what you had in the 80s was this.
Softporn Adventure (Sierra On-Line, 1981)
You must be registered to see the links
This is one of the earliest games where you can see some influence in games today, the longest running series of adult games that is unbroken until today is the Rance Series, started by Alice-Soft in 88, this is 7 years earlier than that. (2)
Softporn Adventure was a comedic, slightly sexy (and I DO mean slightly) text adventure for the Apple II.
I cannot stress enough how important text adventure games were for the adult game scene, (if I ever do a post about the 2000s you'll hear all about the days of GoblinBoy and AIF), and I believe it is because of how easy they were to create, the 80s computer game development scene wasn't all that different from today, the concept of "Bedroom Programmer's" began in the 80s, Softporn Adventure was PUBLISHED by Sierra, but it was developed in Apple Basic by Charles Benton, as an exercise to learn Basic (Remind you of any programmers making games here? Teaching themselves Python via RenPy?), He had no intentions to publishing it, and in an era before the Internet and F95zone, that was very difficult to do, one day he met Ken Williams (Which later, with his wife, created the King's Quest series) and Williams accepted to publish his game under the recently founded On-Line Systems (Later renamed to Sierra On-Line) (1)
At the same time that bedroom programmers were learning Basic by writing smut, we also had resonable (for the time) sized companies like Infocom, that were also going on with their stuff, Infocom had basically created text adventures in the 70s inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure while they were students at MIT, which gave us Zork (Trap-Quest today runs on the Inform platform, Inform can make games for the Z-machine Virtual Machine, the Z is for Zork.), if you have ANY interest in text adventures you should play Zork immediately, but I wont include it as a major point here because it's not porn. (5)
I will include this tho:
Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Infocom, 1986)
You must be registered to see the links
This was another text adventure (Hey graphics were complicated on personal computer of the 80s alright, but we'll soon get to those.), but this time made by Infocom, this is what happens when an actual serious game developer house like Infocom snorts way to much cocaine, the MAD-LADS had THE BALLS of putting a scratch and sniff
card with the game box, so you could smell certain smells during the game, unfortunately the smells are rather boring, (and I wouldn't try smelling a scratch and sniff card from the 80s).
But this isn't very different from Softporn Adventure, basically it's the same idea, a Lewd-ish Comedic Game, and you can now see somewhat of a pattern, which follows western adult game development until basically the 2000s, they were all Lewd-ish Comedic games, I dont think many people cranked one out to Softporn Adventure, and if you did, well congrats.
Leisure Suit Larry (Sierra On-Line, 1987)
You must be registered to see the links
Leisure Suit Larry is amazing, it's crap, but it's great, it's basically a graphical version of Softporn Adventure, but a lot funnier, there's literally a puzzle about having sex with a prostitute, if you dont use a condom, you get gonorrhea and your dick falls off, there's not much to say, since all that was important was said on the Softporn Adventure section but fuck it I love this game, it deserves a paragraph.
The pattern of West-Based Comedic Adult games continues, Spellcasting Series (Made by Steve Meretzky, same dude from Leather Goddesses of Phobos, when he left Infocom to join Legend Entertainment), all the Leisure Suit Larry sequels, that went well into the 2000s with the CRAP that is Box Office Bust.
I believe that the pattern appeared from the unwillingness of Publishers to publish REALLY adult games, and when they actually did it was all for shock value (See Custer's Revenge on the Atari), self publishing did exist, but unless you got really popular like Ultima, you didn't really get remembered.
Maybe there's something to do with conservatives being in power in the 80s, maybe American society was more prude (3), I dont know, but that's what I have, most of the adult games of the West in the 80s were like this.
But of course there were a few exceptions:
Emanuelle (Coktel Vision, 1989)
You must be registered to see the links
Emmanuelle was a bit different, it had graphics like Leisure Suit Larry, but the main point is that it wasn't all that comedic, sure there's a lot of funny stuff going around, you can't really take this game all that serious nowadays, but being funny wasn't the goal here, it was loosely based on the world famous Emmanuelle series of novels, you might chuckle from calling these games adult games, you might be fooled by the sexy cover art, but there's only a single raunchy scene in this game I believe (Never finished it, forgive me research gods) where you can peep on Emmanuelle getting dressed. (4)
But this is where it all began.
If you are a porn game developer or player, you are part of the legacy of Charles Benton, Steve Meretzky and Al Lowe, to this day we see influences of Softporn Adventure and Zork in what we do, Twine wouldn't exist without Inform, which wouldn't exist without Z-Machine Interpreters, which were created in the 70s by a bunch of MIT students that wanted to make a text adventure about a very big cave.
Now, this is all West based stuff, the East was already going ape-shit with porn games, but I think thats a story for another time.
Thank you for your time, this post was an experiment for me, and I'd love to get some feedback, I struggled a bit with finding the correct amount of info to dump here, there's a lot of cut stuff, and this kind of stuff is new so give me a bit of a break <3
Play these games, they are mostly worth having a look,
and always, Be Excellent to Each other!
My sources are below:
You must be registered to see the links
(1)
You must be registered to see the links
(2)
You must be registered to see the links
(3)
You must be registered to see the links
(4)
You must be registered to see the links
(5)
You must be registered to see the links
,
You must be registered to see the links
