It is no secret that gamers are some of the horniest creatures on the planet. For every easily moddable game, there are 100 mods to make the characters in the game fully nude. It doesn’t matter how low polygon an NPC is, someone, somewhere, wants to fuck them – even if it is metaphysically impossible. For instance, you really don’t want to know what people are doing to Cortana on DeviantArt. I’m going to show you anyway.
Pictured: The internet. (Credit: DeviantArt / Ilikapie.)
In the free market, when people see demand they create supply, and when game developers saw horny gamers, they decided to make horny games. In the interests of completely ruining my Google search history and credibility (“Hey why are you googling ‘sexy cortana’?” “It’s for a story!!!“), we thought we’d take a look at some of the highlights of the history of horny gaming.
Our story begins in the distant past, in a time equally as close to the end of World War II as it is to now: 1981. It also begins with a plucky young man named Charles Benton. Benton had an idea. An extremely horny idea.
Imagine a text-based video game for the Apple II where you used a series of commands to try and find items to help you bone down with three women. You are imagining ‘Softporn Adventures‘, which has maybe the most incredible box art I have ever seen:
Pictured: Sensuality, a computer, and a waiter in a jacuzzi for some reason.
While this image is evocative of some vintage 70s ‘Playboy‘ sensuality, what it actually was was this:
Pictured: Sex. Apparently.
Fun fact: as one contemporaneous critic pointed out, the game’s parser didn’t recognise “woman” at all, you had to refer to them as “girls“. Hooray for 80s sexism! Amazingly, the game was published by On-Line Systems, who eventually became Sierra, the gaming giant behind ‘Crash Bandicoot‘ and ‘Spyro the Dragon‘.
Somehow even worse than that is the horrific blight on the history of gaming, 1982’s ‘Custer’s Revenge‘. In this steaming pile of actual turds, you played as a nude General Custer with a visible erection, overcoming arrow attacks in the pursuit of trying to rape a Native American woman. Yes, you read that correctly. A baffling series of adults OK’d this game to the point that it was very much available in stores.
Pictured: What happens when everyone involved in a project has a hole in their brain.
Inspired by ‘Softporn Adventures‘ was the much more famous ‘Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards‘, published in 1987 (also by On-Line Systems, which had by this stage become Sierra). Unlike ‘Softporn Adventures‘, ‘Leisure Suit Larry‘ was a considered, measured, deeply sensual exploration of human sexuality. Just kidding.
Pictured: Hot R-rated action.
The Leisure Suit Larry series (oh yes, there were a bunch, the latest was released in 2009) saw you play as Larry Laffer, a 40-something-year-old virgin who would be a lothario if he ever managed to have sex. The games were definitely meant to be more funny than they were sexy, but you bet your ass a lot of people were playing them just praying to see a brief glimpse of a hot babe rendered in sweet, sweet CGA graphics.
Other than the continuing adventures of the inexhaustibly horny Larry Laffer, the 90s was a terrible time for bad sex in video games, which I think is a double negative that amounts to “a good time for video games“. Notably, though, the 90s saw the rise of the Japanese dating sim, which eventually led to such incredible works of art as ‘Dream Daddy‘.
Horniness came back in the 2000s though, and in a big way. 2002 saw the release of ‘Playboy: The Mansion‘, a game that combined the tedium of a very poorly thought out simulation game with all the hot erotic content you can fit in an M-rated PC game designed for teens (read: not much).
In saying that, sometimes things got pretty wild:
Pictured: ‘The Sims’, but with more nipples and less to do.
This is what people did when finding porn on the internet was still a pain in the ass. Shameful.
Speaking of sexy games that are just a worse version of other games, also released in 2002 was ‘BMX XXX‘, a shitty BMX game that let you play as topless women and slowly unlocked snippets of footage of actual strippers stripping (topless only) as you progressed through game. Keen to give it a bash? Instead, play ‘Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX‘ and just google “titties“.
2004 was also a wonderful year for the horny gamer, seeing the release of both ‘The Sims 2‘ and ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas‘.
‘The Sims 2‘ was the first game in the franchise to introduce the ‘WooHoo‘ action, via which two of your sims (gender irrespective, nice work on being ahead of the curve, Maxis) would engage in the much censored, disturbingly cartoonish sim-approximation of getting they fuck on. This might seem like the opposite of sexy, but I am willing to bet actual currency that people out their were turned on by the ecstatic Simlish whooping their euphoric sims let loose.
While ‘San Andreas‘ didn’t have sex in it out of the box, one horny, intrepid nerd from the Netherlands correctly guessed that the references to sex in the game actually alluded to a sex mini-game that was included in the game but not available to the player. Patrick Wildenborg released an infamous patch known as the ‘Hot Coffee‘ mod that let sexually frustrated teens control CJ as he engaged in the worst animated sex you have ever seen.
Pictured: Pour one out for the teens who learnt about sex this way.
Thanks to the fact that you can get porn on your phone just by shouting “PORN!” at Siri, the age of video game horniness has come largely to a decline, but at least we know that right now, as I type this, a bunch of extreme weirdos are concocting up the weirdest virtual sex shit you can possibly imagine in ‘Second Life‘.
Photo: Sierra.
