People are still having sex and nothing seems to stop them

December 3, 2014 8:45 AM

The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game -- Released in 1981, Softporn was controversial, cheesy, and earnest to a fault. It also presaged today's ongoing debates about who computers and games are for.
posted by Chrysostom (30 comments total)

and those sierra bastards ripped it off for the LSL franchise ..
posted by k5.user at 8:46 AM on December 3, 2014

and those sierra bastards ripped it off for the LSL franchise ..

I hope that was a joke.

Speaking of Ken Williams and Sierra, there's a really good chapter or two in Steven Levy's Hackers on the company's early years; it's kind of a revelation regarding the early dude-centricity of gaming companies and gamers. (The women in the hot tub photo were apparently all of Online's female employees.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:10 AM on December 3, 2014 [5 favorites]

Sierra is best known today for its multiple lines of seminal graphic adventure games

Ha! Good one, Wikipedia.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:20 AM on December 3, 2014 [10 favorites]

We had an Apple ][e, and my dad brought home some floppy disks that a coworker had copied for him. One of them was a text-based Start Wars game, which was awesome (except I think I always got stuck in the trash compactor). And one day I went to play something new, another text game. It was asking me human relations/anatomy questions that made no sense to me, so I just picked random answers, and then my dad walked in and was horrified and took the disk away.

I always wondered what kind of conversation with the coworker resulted.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:45 AM on December 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

LOL I remember seeing those ads in computer magazines, back in the day. But I never saw the actual product.

The article mentions Ken & Roberta Williams' early Apple II game Missile Defense. I played that game for hours. It is so old and rare that I can barely find any references to it online. But I might have a 5" floppy disk of it in storage.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:46 AM on December 3, 2014

Halloween Jack - not sure what you mean. It's the truth. I posted before RTFA, out of spite (big dislike for sierra games and getting into a massive argument in 7th grade about this great text adventure game I found in my dad's stack of disks, only to have my friend tell me it's LSL that I was playing.. )

In TFA, they do (thankfully) acknowledge that LSL was (more or less) a direct graphical port of the text adventure Softporn..
posted by k5.user at 9:53 AM on December 3, 2014

Whoa. THAT brings me back.
posted by Monkey0nCrack at 9:58 AM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

During the floppy-disk era, I always thought the running joke was that, if you had a disk labeled Space Patrol, it would really be a game of Strip Poker, because they both had the initials S. P. I wonder if anybody hid Softporn as Space Patrol on their floppy disks.
posted by jonp72 at 9:59 AM on December 3, 2014

In TFA, they do (thankfully) acknowledge that LSL was (more or less) a direct graphical port of the text adventure Softporn..

I think what Halloween Jack is getting at is that Sierra published Softporn Adventure.
posted by murphy slaw at 10:20 AM on December 3, 2014 [3 favorites]

(The women in the hot tub photo were apparently all of Online's female employees.)

Also, the woman on the right is none other than Roberta Williams, the genius designer behind the King's Quest series.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:22 AM on December 3, 2014 [3 favorites]

Wow. I recognized Roberta Williams right away then had to scan through the article to verify. And it was shot at the Williams home hot tub!

Interesting timing, too - I was just reading about the new King's Quest on Polygon yesterday.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 10:32 AM on December 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian blog has a bunch of great articles on the history of Sierra, including one about Softporn itself.
posted by murphy slaw at 10:32 AM on December 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

What a lovely article, I like that it gets into all the history and the people at Sierra On-Line and all. Roberta Williams was a hugely important game designer in the early days, I've always been sad that she quit making games.

This article makes me wonder what the actual first erotic game was. (Softporn being the first commercial erotic game). Every time I scratch the surface of pre-1980 computer games I find some new amazing treasure that's been nearly forgotten except by a couple of groovy aging hippies who spend their time in California hot tubs.
posted by Nelson at 10:35 AM on December 3, 2014

I was going to call foul and say Custer's Revenge on the Atari VCS was earlier, but dang if it wasn't a year later.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 10:44 AM on December 3, 2014

Funny story about LSL. My younger daughter, who was maybe 6 at the time, started asking me questions about things that happened when I was a teenager and young adult. Having a gigantic ego to compensate for my mental wimpiness, I was flattered at first, then grew suspicious. I finally discovered she was running LSLII, when she asked me how you get into the hooker's suite. D'oh!
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:46 AM on December 3, 2014 [3 favorites]

A random thing, but I was just reading this thread and then popped over to RPS and the first new post was about "a short game “where you spank the heck out of a dude and learn about how BDSM communities attempt to formalize consent/caring.”"
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:48 AM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Someone pointed out to me that the waiter in the Softporn pic looks like Tom Atkins, so, inevitably, this happened.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 10:50 AM on December 3, 2014

"Night Life" a game by Koei is often billed as the first commercial erotic game. It was released in 1982 so I suspect it was just the first graphical erotic game, but the history of early video games can be complicated.
posted by subject_verb_remainder at 10:58 AM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also, the woman on the right is none other than Roberta Williams, the genius designer behind the King's Quest series.

Considering the influence this woman had on my childhood, this is seriously weirding me out.
posted by Dr Dracator at 12:11 PM on December 3, 2014 [1 favorite]

Let me know if anyone finds an earlier example of a software developer depicted on the box art of a video game -- otherwise I think Roberta was first.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:15 PM on December 3, 2014

There is a brief aside in the article about computers with digital recipe organizers. I primarily remember that being a thing that kept coming up in Heathcliff comics, but like coin-operated talking scales and those one-person saunas with a neck hole, it's something I never saw in real life.
posted by RobotHero at 12:20 PM on December 3, 2014

Also, nice title.
posted by murphy slaw at 12:30 PM on December 3, 2014

There is a brief aside in the article about computers with digital recipe organizers. I primarily remember that being a thing that kept coming up in Heathcliff comics, but like coin-operated talking scales and those one-person saunas with a neck hole, it's something I never saw in real life.

Have you looked in your pocket lately?
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:01 PM on December 3, 2014

I assume you're implying some recipe-organizing app for the phone, but the fact remains I've never seen anyone use one in real life. And in the context of this article, they were talking about storing recipes on the P.C.

It would have been technically possible at the time but didn't conveniently fit into how most people cooked, and it made personal computers look like a useless gimmick in search of a problem it can solve.
posted by RobotHero at 2:20 PM on December 3, 2014

> People are still having sex and nothing seems to stop them

Just wait 'til they've died of dysentery.
posted by jfuller at 3:09 PM on December 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

On recipe computers, it's not quite "real life" because it apparently never shipped. But in 1969 Neiman Marcus had a fascinating ad for a Kitchen Computer, a repurposed Honeywell minicomputer. I suspect this ad was the origin of the whole implausible idea of buying a $1000+ device solely to be a recipe card file.
posted by Nelson at 3:53 PM on December 3, 2014

I must say, people in this thread are certainly being innovative in most meaningless "firsts" in video games ever.
posted by jscott at 7:42 PM on December 3, 2014

Softporn Adventure was hard coded to give you the "you seduced 3 women" ending if you got that far. But there was a way to get the item from gal number 2 without actually seducing her.

The problem was the game would crash just before the end if you did such.
posted by rough ashlar at 5:12 AM on December 4, 2014

That will be fixed in the next release.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:38 AM on December 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sierra is best known today for its multiple lines of seminal graphic adventure games

Ha! Good one, Wikipedia.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:20 AM on December 3

Eponysterical!
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:47 AM on December 4, 2014