Adult Video Games
From LoveToKnow VideoGames
It's A Dirty Business
Not long after people started making and selling computer games, people started making and selling adult video games. It was simply human nature. Sex sells, and video gamers have largely been male, young, and unattached. And although there are many in the video game industry who would dearly love for adult video games to disappear quietly under the carpet, they are a historical fact that cannot be ignored.
A Scantily-Clad History
Probably the most common and most replicated adult video game is the old standby, strip poker. Simple to make and simple to play, the game pits the player against a seductive woman - really, just a photograph - and rewards him or her for successful play by causing the woman to strip off her clothes, item by item.
Many mainstream games have a ham-handed prurient element to them - for example, the pixelated pole dancers in Duke Nuk'em - but very few mainstream games cross the border into adult territory. Let’s take a look at both a successful and an unsuccessful example of games with adult content.
Pulpy Success
One of the most successful racy games was Infocom’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos. How much adult content did it have? Well, it was a text adventure game. That’s right; no graphics. However, it did feature some spicy language in LEWD mode.
Most importantly, it appealed to an adult audience who was familiar with the campy Flash Gordon-esque serials that it both imitated and lampooned. The combination of sexual content and the pulpy storyline made for an adult game that was more stylish than sordid.
Bad Biking
On the other hand, Acclaim was clearly shooting for the lowest common denominator with their BMXXX extreme sports title. In 2002, they announced that their new Dave Mirra title would feature swearing, FMV strippers, and topless riders. In fact, the player could edit his or her rider with a create-a-rider mode that included a “breast size slider.”
Fortunately, gamers recognized the difference between titillating and tawdry, and BMXXX was an absolute bomb. Mirra even sued the company for associating his name with the game.
Adult Video Games and Video Game Ratings
The ESRB, or Entertainment Software Rating Board, was founded in 1994 to monitor the content of video games and rate them appropriately so consumers can have some idea of the content they're purchasing. It has unsurprisingly taken a dim view toward the creations of video gaming's randier developers.
However, the ESRB was notoriously caught napping by Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the public scalding that resulted from the Hot Coffee scandal in 2005. As you may know, Hot Coffee was a secret section of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas code that included a crude sex game in which the player manipulated the controller to cause his or her character to… ahem… have sexual congress with a non-player character. Reportedly, the sex minigame was more unnerving (thanks in great part to the vacant stares of the two participants) than erotic. The true intent of the code is unclear, but given the amount of work necessary to unlock it, it was probably a misguided inside joke that accidentally made its way into the final product.
Parents and pundits reacted to the hidden content with ferocity, and the ESRB failed to react quickly to protect the very consumers it was founded to guard. In the end, both the ESRB and Rockstar North, the publisher, looked patentedly foolish as Rockstar lost thousands and thousands of dollars in a massive product recall. The affair took the shine off a game that would otherwise have been a crown jewel.
On The Fringes
Hot Coffee remains a cautionary tale about the power of sex in video games, both good and bad. For now, video games remain largely targeted at the young, and perhaps it's because of this that adult video games continue to search fruitlessly for shelf space and legitimate developer efforts.
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