BeelzeRog Adult Game Review 12: Vintage Adult Games
On February 26, 2023 by beelzerog
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Video Transcript
(Originally published April, 10th, 2021, edited December 3rd, 2021)
I’m blaming Civvie for this one.
For 2021’s April Fool’s video, Civvie11 used the name of a real company known for creating unlicensed Nintendo games for the original NES named Color Dreams, later known as Christian game studio, Wisdom Tree. While I was familiar with the history of unlicensed games for the Atari 2600, thanks to the lawsuit against Activision, I hadn’t heard anything about unlicensed games for Nintendo systems, since Nintendo is notorious about brand protection. So I looked things up and there were a lot more unlicensed games than I thought, including a few games we actually owned…. like Tetris, released by Atari subsidiary Tengen. And if there are unlicensed games, that means there should be porn games for these systems… and down the rabbit hole I went.
As I mentioned in my very first video, porn video games have been out about as long as video games have been. Much like computer porn has been around since back when people would send each other ASCII art printouts of Playboy centerfolds for teletype printers. If a medium exists, we will try to put boobs and penises on it.
Insert from the future: There was a limited edition adult game created by Nintendo to promote their full-motion-video light gun, “Wild Gunman” in 1974. It was called “Fascination” and featured footage of a Swedish model dancing around and occasionally exposing fasteners for the player to shoot, causing her to lose clothing. Enough shots will leave her completely naked. It was only set up at trade shows and promotional events in Shinjuku, never released and not cabinets or footage remains, only mentions in a few interviews and one small image from a magazine article. The first actual adult arcade game was “Streaking” by Shoei Co. Ltd., which seemed to come out around 1980, sometime after Pac-Man, given it’s maze set-up. I talk about this in my first Potpourri video.
The first known adult video game was “Softporn Adventure”, released in 1981, which we covered in the “Leisure Suit Larry” video. It was a text-only adventure, but still managed to sell over 50,000 copies, despite heavy piracy and the fact there were only around 200 thousand Apple II computers on the market. A Japanese version called “Las Vegas” was released in 1986 with some graphical images to go with the text.
But these would not be the only text-based sex games available for the new PC market. 1981 also saw the release of “Interlude”, which was a sex scenario game for couples. Following shortly after was “Street Life”, a prostitution business simulator. Meantime, Softcore Software would release a series of sex comedy games labeled “Misadventure” exclusively for the Radio Shack TS-80. 1986 saw the release of “Interlude II”, which included an upgraded version of the first game, was well as the release of Infocom’s “Leather Goddesses of Phobos”, which was more innuendo than sex, but still falls into this category.
Also mentioned previously in my first video was the work of the company named Mystique, which put out “Beat-Em & Eat-Em”, “Bachelor Party”, and the rapey “Custer’s Revenge” in 1982 for the Atari 2600 system. Despite controversy-driven sales, the company folded in the video game crash of 1983 and its assets were bought by the company GameSource and released under the name Playaround, which then flipped the games both figuratively and literally. First was to create gender-flipped versions of each game, many with women being the player character, with names like “Philly Flasher” & “Bachelorette Party”. Secondly they created double-ended cartridges, which contained one of the opposite gender games on the other side.
This included an attempt to redeem “Custer’s Revenge” by renaming it “Westward Ho!” and giving the Native American woman a ‘come hither’ motion, as though she wants the male’s attention. The reverse version, named “General Retreat”, has the woman running though a hail of cannon balls to reach the General. Despite these reworkings, the reputation was still poisonous enough that these versions were only released in Europe.
Playaround also released 3 new games, or 6 if you count the gender swapping as a new game, such as “Burning Desire/Jungle Fever”, “Knight on the Town/Lady in Waiting”, and “Cathouse Blues/Gigolo”. Given the crudity of the graphics and the gameplay, they didn’t last for much longer. Playaround was shut down shortly after releasing these games. If you want to see the crazy shenanigans surrounding Mystique and Gamesource, I highly recommend Kate Willaert’s article “Porno Hustlers of the Atari Age”.
Oh, and speaking of doing gender flipped versions, an article about “Softporn Adventure” in Time magazine mentioned On-Line Systems wanting to make a version for straight women, but they couldn’t find a woman willing to work on the writing and the game was never finished.
Moving over to Japan, which would become notorious for adult games, a simple strip ‘rock, paper, scissors’ game named ‘YaKyuKen’ was released by Hudson Soft in 1981. It was rare enough that some people considered it an urban legend, but some digging found actual screenshots and the computer cassette it came on. It was also definitely not the last Strip “Jan Ken Pon” game to make it to market. Otherwise, most places say Koei’s “Night Life” in 1982, marketed as a couple’s aid, was the first Japanese adult computer game. And, again, definitely not that last.
And since we mentioned popular strip games, Artworx Software’s “Strip Poker: A Sizzling Game of Chance” was released in America for various computers like the Apple II, the Commodore 16 & 64, and the Atari ST. It even had updates you could buy which would give you other girls to play against.
There was one other adult game for the Atari 2600, 1983’s X-Man by Universal Gamex, which had nothing to do with Marvel’s X-Men, but was a labyrinth game where you controlled a naked man trying to avoid various objects trying to neuter him while pursuing a naked woman. If you win, you get a bonus ‘sex scene’.
That same year saw the arrival of an adult arcade game called “Swinging Singles”, by the generically named Entertainment Enterprises. This cabinet was meant for bars & adult stores and started out with a Pacman-like maze for you to attempt to get to a brothel, followed by collecting keys and avoiding venereal diseases to unlock a player-controlled sex scene. You orgasm, you win, kinda like real life!
Moving up a few years to 1986, where Martech released it’s own Strip Poker game for computers into an increasingly full market, but this time featuring some celebrity magic with the inclusion of pictures of British model and singer Samantha Fox as your opponent.
Meanwhile, in Japan, the first unlicensed game appeared on Nintendo’s Famicon system called “Super Maruo”. This adult game featured a sprite that looked like a clean-shaven Mario, but only consisted of gameplay of trying to get to a girl while avoiding her dog. Catching the girl results in increasing sexual images.
The next year was the release of Sierra On-Line’s graphical reworking of “Softporn Adventure “into “Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards” which we, again, covered a lot of in the “Leisure Suit Larry” episode. Needless to say, this helped usher in a whole new level of adult video games with graphics, including the Brad Stallion series of games such as “Sex Vixens from Space”, “Planet of Lust”, “Bride of the Robot”, and finally “Sex Olympics”.
Now for many years in America, the Nintendo Entertainment System managed to keep itself clean of adult games, but that changed in 1990 when Panesian managed to release imported adult games to the NES, available only through mail-order to get around Nintendo’s retail bans. “Peek-A-Boo Poker”, which was your standard Strip Poker game with three different opponents, was release in 1990, followed in 1991 by “Hot Slots”, a slot machine game where the more you win, the more naked the accompanying hostess appears. And finally “Bubble Bath Babes”, which is a variation of Tetris, where winning levels gets the girl more and more naked.
Now all of those games came from a Japanese company called “Hacker International”, which handled several adult games for various systems, many of which only made it to American shores after being cleaned up. The saga of one particular game ties into Color Dreams, the maker of unlicensed Nintendo games mentioned at the beginning of this episode. They made a game called “Mr. Assy” but never released it. The game is a side-scroller beat-em up, with cutscenes involving female prisoners who’s clothing is slowly dissolving. Hacker International licensed the game, changed some of the artwork and renamed it “Miss Peach World 1: Super LA Cop”. Meantime Color Dreams reworked the game into a less controversial version called “Menace Beach” and the hostage girlfriends clothes never completely dissolve. One would think that’s the end of it, but no. When Color Dreams decided to focus on the Christian video game market as Wisdom Tree, they reworked several of their titles, including “Menace Beach”. So an adult beat-em up became “Sunday Funday” where a good Christian boy, complete with Bible in hand, attempts to get to Sunday School on time, with more pedestrian-liking people attempting to stop him, interspersed with cutscenes of a Sunday School teacher giving him encouragement and advice.
Never said any of this made sense.
And I do want to throw out another adult game, this one I had personal experience with. In the mid-nineties, there was an arcade I used to frequent that had a reputation of carrying import cabinets, which made it a popular hang-out for otaku like me. Two of the cabinets in the back were 2 versions of a popular Japanese game “Gals Panic”, which first premiered in 1990. The gameplay is similar to the game “Qix”, which involved attempting to draw blocks on a screen while avoiding various hazards. In “Gals Panic”, the added incentive was the area you claimed could also show a pin-up image of a girl. As you progressed through the levels, the girls were more undressed. As this was the Japanese version, it was uncensored, so the final level for each girl was topless. Unfortunately, the fourth version of Gals Panic and the S series removed the nudity. But, a new game, with nudity, has been released called “RE:Gals Panic” and is currently on Steam now! (No, I’m not being paid for mentioning games)
While by no means complete, there’s some interesting bits of early adult games. As computer systems became more and more powerful, more and more complex and graphically better adult games came out, which made such games easier to enjoy. It also made unlicensed games for consoles harder to do, so the number of these games drop off severely. And now thanks to the internet, adult games can be sold without relying on the fickleness of retail stores and distributors. And if you look through Steam, you’ll see a lot available for sale.
As we start to wrap this up, If you want to listen to reviews of a lot of these Steam adult games, you might want to check out the YouTube channel “Sex Positive Gaming”, which is run by a fellow enthusiast named Annie, who is definitely more pleasant to listen to than me, but at the same time, she has to deal with Youtube’s rules, so… yeah. Anyway, give her a listen because, while I will review some games, like I’m playing “Lust from Beyond” for the second time to get footage for my review, but I’m probably going to mostly continue to do mods instead. And that’s for the simple reason that a lot of the more complex adult games amount to variations of the dating sim games that Japan cranked out decades ago that I could never get into. As I said in my first video, I feel they are more trouble than they are worth and if I’m going to indulge in sexual fantasies, ‘dating’ is not among them. So glad I haven’t had to do that in more than 20 year, and my wife feels the same way… yeah, I’m married. Surprised?
Update from the future: After I originally wrote that last part, I have been finding more and more adult games sparking my interest, so you will probably see a larger number of adult games in my video mix. My wife is also joining me in some of my videos to give her two-cents about the topics, so look forward to that. Later!
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[…] my vintage video games episode, I mentioned the earliest commercial adult game was “Softporn Adventure”, but it’s not quite […]