What would you say are the most historically significant adult games?

[tooldev]

TFgames was created four years before F95Zone but, as its name say, it focus on transformation games, that don't even need to have adult content. And, of course, it's also not a piracy site; if a game is listed on TFGames, it's because its author wanted it.
Therefore, it's the perfect illustration of what I was saying. Before F95Zone peoples had to follow a bunch of different sites (and to know that they exist) in order to get a, more or less complete, overview of the adult gaming scene.




So ahead that there's 2,222 games available on TFGames (and half of them are demos that were never continued because no one was interested by them), against near to 20,000 here. There's more new games on F95Zone each year, than there's games on TFGames.
Not that it's a bad site, it's just a purely dedicated one. If you like transformation games, it's a place where you should be, but if what you want is adult games, then it's not the place for you.




It doesn't matters, because it wouldn't change what I said.

Is a porn text RPG game distributed through BBS in the 80's a porn game or not? Who care? Nobody except twenty thousands peoples at max ever heard about it.
Is a Flash "select the fucking animation" games a porn game? Is it even a game? Who care? Nobody except two hundreds of thousands peoples at max ever heard about it. Same goes for the Meet'N'Fuck series by example.
And anyway, peoples can't even agree if Ren'Py CYOA games really are games or not, nor can they agree if platform games with fuck on loose really are games.
Yet there's one thing on which they all agree: As long as it's entertaining and kind of interactive, with some lewd content inside, let's say that it's kind of an adult game.

But in the end it don't permit to get a significant list of games because previous to F95Zone, only Leisure Suit Larry series were actually known from a majority. It's far to be the only game with adult content, and not even the only game made by what we would now call a AAA studio. But it's the only game that every kind of press dedicated to gaming talked about. All the other were more kept in their niche, either being a Japanese curiosity or something you should probably hear about but should you really play it?

Hagatagar talked about Sim Bro, personally it's Rack that stayed in my memory. And if you ask someone else that played those games, you'll get yet another answer because what games marked us depend on what site we used to be a regular user.
All of them had an impact on the adult gaming scene, but not a single one can pretend to be the game that had an impact on it.
Abandoned: A tale of forgotten lives is among the very first real time 3D adult games. Yet, can someone say that it, or one of the few that preceded, had an impact on the scene? No... It shown that it was something possible, but that's all.

And starting there, the question isn't "what is an adult game", but "what being historically significant mean".




It's funny because you clearly believe what you say, talking about porn games like there weren't open world games made with Unity or Unreal, platform games, and in fact all games that aren't VN or date sims.
What doesn't change the fact that, like 95% of "regular games", they invented nothing, but it still raise question...

There is a lot of purely personal perspective in there...

Just to remind you: It was a regular publisher called take-two-interactive that published the Luna series. They didnt just reach a few people, as you try to imply. I get your fawning over F95 as a dev being active here, but F95 was never THE place to be just because of mass. It was special in terms of users actually providing either cracks, help or infos to those games. The same games where available at other places but the additional information was the main attraction. By now it has become more of a marketplace than what it used to be, since mods and guides disappear in the mass of threads and postings, compared to having a place beside the game in the former structure.

 

[whowhawhy]

You cant pick things out of context, since it is important. For your quote especially as it refers to finished games in particular.

And no - history isnt dynamic, just knowledge might be limited. The event, person, place etc doesnt change anymore.

the past doesn't change. studying the past, history is that limited knowledge and historical significance is a subjective branch of it that's about looking at links between stuff in the knowledge we have and forming an opinion about it.
failures or unfinished stuff can also affect things so that quality alone isn't disqualifying, and the same goes for long-running projects/events that go up to the present, for which you can consider a period of time of their ongoingness if that period specifically led to something important.

to be clear, i'm only arguing with the point of view in that paragraph.

Not a single lewd game comes to mind that was really doing anything spectacular new.

if that's what you want, sex toy integration maybe? though it's in combination with requiring a dedicated physical input device, which may not be unique to the game (but i seem to recall some tabloid news about a japanese game sold with a dedicated toy).

 

[tooldev]

the past doesn't change. studying the past, history is that limited knowledge and historical significance is a subjective branch of it that's about looking at links between stuff in the knowledge we have and forming an opinion about it.
failures or unfinished stuff can also affect things so that quality alone isn't disqualifying, and the same goes for long-running projects/events that go up to the present, for which you can consider a period of time of their ongoingness if that period specifically led to something important.

to be clear, i'm only arguing with the point of view in that paragraph.

if that's what you want, sex toy integration maybe? though it's in combination with requiring a dedicated physical input device, which may not be unique to the game (but i seem to recall some tabloid news about a japanese game sold with a dedicated toy).

I would be perfectly fine with any of that, if there would be some clear expression of what is 'important'. The list in the OP can easily be reduced to less than 5 games probably, that actually did something of 'importance'. The rest is mostly a copy of what has been done already and people just remember differently or they simply disconnect the OP's heading of 'historical importance' and set it equal to 'personal importance'.

Which is exactly my point. Historical importance requires context as well and while interpretation can sometimes differ in real life history as well, especially for the soft parts like motivation of someone to act as they did historically, the base agreement of what an event or person of historical importance is, is relatively easy. Over half of what is on that list is just fanboy mentioning them, but I still fail to see, what the so-called importance in historical context would be for BADIK or Milfy. There is a pretty hefty lack of reasoning for most of them.

 

[APoc1]

[sorry for the double post]



What kept the industry as a niche was more the fact that real porn "games" were only available in sex shops. When the XXX studios were doing their "games" (that were mostly

You must be registered to see the links

interfaces, or similar, to select short movies through a porn movie level story) in the mid-late 90's, you had to go to a sex shop to buy them, or be lucky enough to live in a country more open minded and then you had few magazines dedicated to this.
In parallel there were Japanese games including porn content or fully dedicated to it. But for most of them you had to import them from Japan. And if you were lucky you had one that include an English translation.

It's there, and through those games, that porn really entered the video gaming industry. But as you said, it's nearly impossible to select a single game as moment when it started to rise. Even the most stupid and basic none kinetic novel made with Ren'Py is 10 times more advanced that the "games" made by XXX studios during this period. Then, probably due to piracy with Internet rise, suddenly both XXX studios and Japanese games studios stopped to do games; not totally for Japanese games studios, but they kind of disappeared from the radar for the biggest part of the world.

Yet, without two events I'm not sure that Flash porn games would have risen so quickly. They filled a void, and anyone around 30yo or more that knew about those games where more than happy to have those Flash replacement, whatever how more cheap they were at starts. Then, by extension, would nowadays adult gaming scene have been the same?
Like Hagatagar implied, there were a transition period between the Flash era and nowadays. A period where we had games like the original Sim Bro. Still basic because relying on Flash, but better than the average Flash content that we used to have. And like those games made money, it decided some creators to try their luck with other game engines like RPG Maker and later Ren'Py.

There's some games that marked us and stay in our memory, but can they really be described as significant for the adult gaming scene?
I mean, what was the said scene before f95Zone? A bunch of forum that you discover almost by chance and that only presented a small portion of what existed. There were Newsgrounds of course, but it was, and still mostly is, dedicated to Flash, and therefore only presented a selection of what existed. If you wanted to play Japanese adult games, you had to go somewhere else. If you wanted to play games like CoC, you had to go yet to another place, and so on. Then F95Zone appeared, and from a single place you had access to all this and more.

So, in the end, if there's something that really had a significant historical impact on adult games, I'm tempted to say that it's not a game, but a forum... this one.

I should have mentioned shockwave to be honest even though I know they are different I kind of lump the two together.

I pretty much agree with what you said , its really hard to make these kinds of determination with out hard metrics , eye's on game, money made...

I think you have a good point about forums , they with out a doubt made access to more games easier for the masses. As far as F95 roll of course it had a roll after all I am here and many others are as well , but in the early days how big was F95 certainly newgrounds had a big crowds inn the early days(talking early 2000's here I am not aware of which forum came first). Now comparing forums influence may be easier because you have some historical metrics.

 

[anne O'nymous]

[...] but in the early days how big was F95 certainly newgrounds had a big crowds inn the early days(talking early 2000's here I am not aware of which forum came first). Now comparing forums influence may be easier because you have some historical metrics.

Newsgrounds was here way before F95Zone, that date only from late July 2016.

When I joined on June 2017, there were a bit more than 63,000 members. And when you joined in April 2018, it was already over 560,000. The forum have now a bit more than 8 years of existence, and 8 millions members.
Of course, not all are active members, but with ~30,000 members logged in at anytime of the day, it have a daily traffic that most competitors would like to have monthly.

But more than the crowd, what was noticeable back in the starts of F95Zone, and still is nowadays, was the number of games. Personally I joined because everywhere I was going (and god I was going on a lot of place), there were always an, "oh, well, if you want that game, you should goes to the f95 place, I'm sure they have it". It looked like the place to be, and actually happened to be it.
Nowadays you don't even need this. It suffice to hear about a game and search it on google. F95Zone will come on the first page, sometimes even before the Patreon/whatever page for the game.

 

[anne O'nymous]

[Sorry for the double post]

Just to remind you: It was a regular publisher called take-two-interactive that published the Luna series.

So, Leisure Suit Larry series was "far to be the only game with adult content, and not even the only game made by what we would now call a AAA studio" ?

I wonder where I read those words, but apparently it wasn't in my post, else you would have read them too, understood them, and not wrote this...

 

[APoc1]

Newsgrounds was here way before F95Zone, that date only from late July 2016.

When I joined on June 2017, there were a bit more than 63,000 members. And when you joined in April 2018, it was already over 560,000. The forum have now a bit more than 8 years of existence, and 8 millions members.
Of course, not all are active members, but with ~30,000 members logged in at anytime of the day, it have a daily traffic that most competitors would like to have monthly.

But more than the crowd, what was noticeable back in the starts of F95Zone, and still is nowadays, was the number of games. Personally I joined because everywhere I was going (and god I was going on a lot of place), there were always an, "oh, well, if you want that game, you should goes to the f95 place, I'm sure they have it". It looked like the place to be, and actually happened to be it.
Nowadays you don't even need this. It suffice to hear about a game and search it on google. F95Zone will come on the first page, sometimes even before the Patreon/whatever page for the game.

Kind of off the OPs topic but gets a little to your point about the forums.

I recall why I ended up here , I was in search of Elana champion of lust was good in the beginning but it tanks after chapter 3 imo... The interesting thing I noticed was for the previous five years when searching on google for any porn games it was very hit and miss whether you would find results anywhere near the first 10 pages and the dcma's man I recall seeing dcma ommitted result messages all the time for all the Jap games. Google must have had a change of policy at some point because after that suddenly SV F95 and a few others I don't recall the names of started showing up in the google searches when I looked at the real choice SV or F95 it was pretty clear which was better...

I wonder how many people played the JSK games I cut my teeth so to speak on those for me they were pretty influential but I have never gathered any info on how many people played them so back to lack of reliable metrics

 

[Loorenio]

i saw someone in my hometown wearing a summertime saga shirt. i believe they got it secondhand but i would not bet on it. it made my day

 

[anne O'nymous]

i saw someone in my hometown wearing a summertime saga shirt. i believe they got it secondhand but i would not bet on it. it made my day

It can perfectly be him who bought it. After all, what are the chance for him to encounter someone who know the game?
And if by hazard it happen, since it happened, what will be the outcome? I doubt that someone will goes to him and say something like "hey, nice shirt you wear, me too I like to fap on that game". Nor will the other person starts to call him pervert and talk about this. It need a pervert to know what this shirt is...

 

[Lunarius]

From the beginnings of adult games all the way up to the present. Off the top of my head the following come to mind, but I can update the list with your suggestions:

* Softporn Adventure (1981): A significant early adult game and possibly the first known Western one, made by Roberta Williams herself and the rest of the team that would become Sierra On-Line.
* Custer's Revenge (1982): One of the earliest video games is also probably one of the most controversial and negatively received ones.
* Lolita Yakyūken (1982): The first Japanese eroge, it's a strip rock-paper-scissors game. I don't know if it was controversially received in Japan.
* Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987): Probably the first mainstream adult game in the West. The series itself would become the mainstream face of softcore adult games in the West for the following decade or so.
* Rance: The Quest for Hikari (1989): One of the earliest RPG eroges, it established the Rance series which is both very popular and also foundational to Japanese adult games and adult RPGs in general.
* Dōkyūsei (1992): An erotic dating sim visual novel. It created the dating sim genre and it's also one of the first overall video games with a focus on romance. It also probably was a big influence in establishing the high-school setting in adult games.
* Lula: The Sexy Empire (1997): A German business sim game that revolves around building a multimillion-dollar pornography and erotica industry. It's one of the first notable adult business sim games and probably a big influence on the many (usually brothel-themed) that would come later.
* Kanon (1999): A VN low on the erotic content and high on the prose count and sentimentality, it was massively popular and contributed to story-focused (rather than sex-focused) VNs becoming the norm. It's also possibly one of the biggest historical influences in the spreading of the cutesy, big-eyed, almost chibi-like artstyle both in adult games but especially outside of them in anime and anime-style media.
* Utawarerumono (2002): One of the earliest significant adult VNs with tactical combat, a genre that would become more and more established. It was quite popular in Japan and it spawned a number of sequels with no sexual content and anime adaptations to this day.
* Saya no Uta ~ The Song of Saya (2003): The most played adult VN of all time, according to VNDB stats. It's a horror eroge inspired by Lovecraft and by the creator of the Madoka Magica anime series. Also a big influence on many subsequent adult horror games.
* Fate/stay night (2004): One of the most popular visual novels in history also includes sexual content. It's late in the game, it's low compared to most eroge VNs (though higher than the similar example of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, which only featured non-explicit nudity but was also a VN that achieved a -smaller- level of worldwide popularity a couple years earlier) but still the impact of Fate in VNs, adult games and anime is sizeable.
* RapeLay (2006): The double whammy of being one of the significant early 3D adult games and one of the most controversial ones that made international news and got banned in several countries.
* Muv-Luv Alternative (2006): The highest critically rated adult VN and also one of the most played ones, according to VNDB stats. The most well known representative of the long-running Muv-Luv series.
* Slave Maker (2008): Browser game that started the trainer genre and also spawned its own series (though I'm not sure if by the same devs). The Slave Maker games were based on the non-eroge Princess Maker games from Japan.
* Kamidori Alchemy Meister (2011): An eroge with tactical gameplay, praised for its polish in both aspects. Though Japan had been making adult games where the non-adult gameplay part was also highly polished for years, this is the first globally sucessful example as far as I know.
* Katawa Shoujo (2012): The first mainstream Western adult VN, its unique setting (a disable protagonist in a school for disabled teens) and the novelty of its origin (4chan) combined with its unexpectedly heartfelt (and according to some, high quality) writing probably helped it to gain the amount of notoriety and players it did.
* Princess Trainer (2014): Akabur games like this one and Witch Trainer have been since they came out a common mainstream introduction to the trainer genre. Princess Trainer also happened to release around the time Patreon-funded adult games development really kicked off and was one of the biggest examples for Western devs that it was possible to profit off making adult indie games.
* The Last Sovereign (2014): A modern darling among Western adult RPG fans, I'd say this is one of those that have managed to break into semi-mainstream discourse due to the amount of times I've seen it recommended in social media like Reddit and Twitter both when the topic of discussion is adult games or indie RPGs.
* HuniePop (2015): Possibly the biggest representative of the adult puzzle games but one that managed to get positive mainstream reception due to its level of polish and content.
* Honey Select (2016): Made by Illusion, the same Japanese company that made RapeLay, basically a sex simulator created for VR (though playable without) that had a big influence in the adult game market. A successor also by Illusion called Koikatsu Party serves a similar purpose and has also had a similar impact.
* Corruption of Champions (2016): A text-based RPG with turn-based combat (winnable by either depleting HP or raising lust) and a large focus on customization and body modification. A standout at the time and even to this day due to its level of interactivity and narrative
* Big Brother (2017): A Russian sandbox game with pre-rendered 3D art that is possibly one of the most widely played incest games ever. Its development was also abandoned, like a significant number of games of the current era that follow an early access model or similar.
* Summertime Saga (2019): Probably the mainstream adult game, one of the most known and played ones, maybe even the face of the industry at least in the West. And that's coming from someone that's not a fan (not into milfs or scrawny protags). One of the more successful games in Patreon which gives it big production values and a more wholesome story than the average darker adult game.
* Being a DIK (2019): The other big mainstream one I can think of in the West, choice-driven multiple route story set in the world of college and fraternities that has been praised for its writing.

I also noticed I don't have any Western adult games between 1987 and 2008. It's a gap in my knowledge. Were games like X-Tetris, BoneTown or Playboy: The Mansion significant enough? Also I don't have Japanese games after 2016.

Which other games I'm forgetting? I'm sure a lot of them. Let me know!

Shouldn't Artificial Academy (2011) be in that list as well? Artificial Academy and Artificial Academy 2 (2014) made a big splash, and you can tell that the Artificial Academy series was the stepping stone to the fully customizable 3D poser functionality that we saw in Honey Select and Koikatsu a few years later.

I'd also say that Tsukihime deserves to be on that list. This is where the Nasuverse got started, it was Type-Moon's breakout success, and Fate/stay night would not have existed without it. It did get somewhat overshadowed by Fate/stay night in the West. But even so, Tsukihime got an English translation really early on, and it was still one of the first translated visual novels available to us English-speaking online nerds back in the mid-oughties.

(...shit man, that's already twenty years ago...)

A Drug that Makes You Dream/Yume Miru Kusuri (2005/2007) might also deserve a place in this list. It's not a particularly remarkable title on its own (despite being a solid story), but IIRC it was one of the first Japanese visual novels that was officially translated and commercially marketed in the West. Which was a big change compared to fan translations, piracy, and importing hardcopies directly from Japan.

And a title that definitely should be on that list is School Days (2005), for multiple reasons.

Obviously its infamy is a major reason - a few of its endings are gruesome, and the anime adaptation infamously went with a bad end where one of the heroines murders both her rival and the MC. IIRC it even inspired a murder IRL.

But School Days is also how the fan translation circle Sekai Project got started. And Sekai Project went on to become a professional translator group that partnered with several of the big name H-game publishers.

 

[Doorknob22]

I don't claim to know which adult game had the biggest global impact on the industry, but for me, the first time I have ever realized that pornographic software can be professionally made, possess high artistic quality and have reasonable writing came after 30 minutes or so into Summertime Saga. Defiantly the closest to "mind blown" by an AVN for me.

 

[Dryme]

Far to be all the time, and when I name it it's just because, will being only the third-fourth FPS, it's the first one to use real 3D, to have multi height maps and to not feature a basic labyrinth for the said maps. Said otherwise, it's just the father to all 3D games that are now the norm in video games.

A little late answer, but have you ever played Crysis? To any part? Damn, it was fun to kill Koreans in this cool costume and then aliens while listening to the epic soundtrack of Hanz Zimmerman
And you don't have to say anything about the graphics, they're great even now.

 

[DrMorningwood]

I'm surprised there's no mention of Breeding Season here, it was the most backed game ever (at least at the time) on Patreon iirc

 

[tooldev]

I'm surprised there's no mention of Breeding Season here, it was the most backed game ever (at least at the time) on Patreon iirc

Probably because it mostly became famous for all the drama and backstabbing among the devs. Yet I still have version 7.7.1. on my drive as well but cant see how it has been influential at all. There was nothing really ground breaking with it...

 

[DrMorningwood]

Probably because it mostly became famous for all the drama and backstabbing among the devs. Yet I still have version 7.7.1. on my drive as well but cant see how it has been influential at all. There was nothing really ground breaking with it...

The sheer amount of money it made was pretty staggering, and it still gets clones to this day, 9 years later

 

[megaplayboy10k]

I would tie the explosion of the industry to, first, Patreon allowing adult games to be supported; second, the availability of relatively easy to program platforms like Ren'py, RPGM and Unity; and third, the emergence of DAZ studio and mods, really starting with the G3 figures, and secondarily the use of Honey Select to create characters and scenes.
It feels like everything converged around 2016 or so.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Lust Epidemic...

 

[EstadoYSociedadGriegos]

Hey guys, been very busy these last few days but just wanted to say that for the purposes of this list I've decided that "historically significant" will be taken in a broad sense. So yeah, instead of fighting over which games shouldn't be here based on arbitrary definitions or perceptions that we're never gonna agree on, it's probably more productive to just suggest games you think are historically significant and include the reasons why they are significant.

For example some ways in which games might be significant:

• "Firsts": first of a given genre or subgenre, first to reach a landmark of some kind, first in a significant series (like Rance or Leisure Suite Larry), etc.
• Trendsetters: they weren't firsts but they significantly shaped a genre or subgenre or otherwise a group of games, usually due to some quality of theirs but sometimes due to massive controversy or some other circumstance.
• Influential: they directly inspired many other games, or a few very significant games.
• Best sellers/very widely played, critically acclaimed, popularly acclaimed: it's harder to get these kinds of numbers/scores for adult games, so I guess this one is a category where we should actually go by generally agreed picks.
• Even something like "massively hyped but was a huge flop" or "pretty recent games that have quickly become iconic even if we don't know if they'll stand the test or time", or any other way you think a game might be historically significant. Just expand on the reason and I'll see if I can add it to the list

I'll add the new suggestions between my last post and this post as soon as I can

 

[mrbigchungus]

Surprised folks didn't mention Shark's Lagoon (first adult game forum I participated in) which was around a few years before F95, and Lesson of Passion / Playforceone, which had (still have) flash + unity web based games that used Poser & early daz, about ten years or so ago...to me, those were pretty influential as that was the first brand I learned about and then eventually after playing games for a year or two decided to start making my own.

 

[chainedpanda]

Spoiler: TLDR;

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First of all, adult games wouldn't exist at all if not for the weebs. Chances are that the first western vn ever attempted was done so by a translator. Therefore, we should acknowledge some of the early Japanese games such as Rance. However, I think what was more impactful were some of the VNs with optional patches, but I never played any of them.

Secondly, we can't ignore the furries and transformation fetishists either. They played a massive role in the early popularity of adult games. Corruption of Champions and TF games certainly played pivotal roles. You can thank TF games for the popularization of Twine as well.

However, those two were already mentioned so I'll toss in Free Cities. It played a massive role in popularizing brothel sims which used to dominate adult games. The fact that it still has a dedicated community to this day whilst none of the others do speaks volumes.

There were also flash games, especially on Newgrounds which played a major role as well. Most of them were garbage, but there were some gems that unfortunately haven't been archived well AFAIK. A major standout was Super Deepthroat, but there were others like Simgirls as well.

There was also Elena: Champion of Lust which was either the first, or among the first games ported to Android. I found the game randomly whilst using a third party app store before I even knew adult games existed. I don't know how significant it was for bringing in new players, but the fact that it was among the first android ports should definitely be noted.

For more modern games, we can look at Milfy City, A Wife and Mother and the Deluca Family which elevated the overall quality of adult games as a whole.

Lastly, we can't ignore the influence that My New Family had. Not only did it practically take over the site for a while (seriously, you couldn't look at a thread page without seeing at least 3 banners), but I believe it played a major role in popularizing both the romance and harem genre's. Although both always existed, MNF too their fanbases to a whole new level and showed just how successful the genre could be. Harem Hotel, WVM and Midlife Crisis all played roles as well, but none had the impact that MNF had.