Retro: The Good Old Naughty Days

Putting the seedy into CD-Rom.

Throughout modern history a dedicated band of men have held a candle, or indeed anything cylindrical, for ladies who don't wear clothes. Or were dressed like a sexy cowgirl or something. I can only assume that it's a common complaint among young gentlemen even today, otherwise all the pretty Babestation ladies talking on phones would be displaying clear signs of mental illness.

Looking to capitalise on this societal obsession, for several decades game developers have been working tirelessly to perfect the art of interactive titillation. Inevitably, however, nearly all of these game developers seem to have been socially awkward talent voids. For years the sexiest thing most of them could come up with involved either strip poker or a version of Tetris with a poorly lit jpeg of a boob-lady as background, alongside the rudest falling blocks that could possibly be imagined.

Me? I'm a prude. If I were to meet a metaphorical pretty lady wearing nothing but her birthday suit I'd proffer a copy of the Guardian and ask her to cover up – the Berliner-sized main section for the top, and the G2 supplement for down below. Morbid interest however, AND NOTHING ELSE, has led me to a lifetime fascination with the new dawn of erotic gaming that began in the 1990s. I'm talking about FMV sex games: creations that are as sexy as placing a dead fish in your mouth and slowly pulling it in and out so the scales get stuck between your teeth.

With the added storage space provided by CD-Rom it must have seemed logical to fill games with flabby nineties bottoms and worrying boob-jobs, and the shallow end of the games industry certainly didn't disappoint. My personal journey with curly-haired ladies (who presumably didn't maintain their acting career much beyond wearing sexy pants in front of a ponytailed development team) began within the pages of PC Zone. As a young testosterone-tinged teen, you see, my mind was blown by an advert for a game called Space Sirens. A game in space with nudie women? Stop the world, where did I have to sign? It then became a personal quest to track it down – a mission that would one day end, years later, with a drunken student purchase on eBay.

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Jo Guest: as nineties as Global Hypercolor t-shirts.

Space Sirens wasn't, amazingly enough, very good. The game I had actually got a hold of was actually its sequel, Space Sirens 2: Megababes from Ajia, and it proved to be one of a litter of contemporary CD-Rom creations that honestly believed that merging a 3D artist's spaceship portfolio and QuickTime FMVs of space ladies taking their tops off was vaguely sexy. The 'game' here was to raise both your OrgasMeter and that of your chosen Ajian babe by prodding her unmentionable-bits in loving ways, but presumably the only real challenge was doing so one-handed.

You see, not everything was quite that blatant in the world of abysmal nineties FMV. During the entire run-time of Star Trek: Borg the entity known as Q never once approached the camera and asked you to stroke a nipple.

Voyeur and Voyeur II, for example, even had half-decent 'Rear Window' narrative approaches as you flicked between cameras and window views to follow the US soap opera plot and/or waited an interminable amount of time before someone showed off their bra or climbed out of a hot tub.

Tender Loving Care, meanwhile, was a decently well-acted affair about a sexy blonde psychologist who's been hired to constantly undo and do up her loose fitting porn-blouse while entwining herself in the lives of two bereaved parents. In amongst it all, meanwhile, John Hurt (yes, that John Hurt) occasionally pipes up with sex questions that will determine whether or not said psychologist takes her top off in the next scene. Really deep stuff like "Do you like watching people through windows?" and "How much would you say you think about sex?" The powerful eroticism that can be heard in Hurt's voice is simply astounding: after playing TLC for several months I could only reach a state of arousal when I could hear a DVD of The Elephant Man playing in the lounge. (I'm relieved to be able to say, however, that the fourth Indiana Jones movie cured me of this affliction.)

On top of these there are countless erotic FMV games that are even lower rent. Games that, if I were ever to hunt them down on eBay, would result in me having to admit that I've got a problem. Thank god for intrepid CD-Rom game curator fmvgamer2010 on YouTube, then, without whom we would not be able to sample countless FMV delights. There's Hollywood Body Double, for example, starring the world's most famous body double Shelley Michelle – and a flickering trek around a movie lot asking women whether or not you recognise them from a recent orgy and other ladies applying blusher to their cleavage. Or there's Ghostly Desires, which essentially seems to be Luigi's Mansion with prostitute ghosts and perms.

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John Hurt pulling a serious sex-face in Tender Loving Care.

That, then, is what Hollywood was up to in-between lines of coke and sessions on the casting couch. That's not to say, however, that Europe wasn't hot on their needlessly high heels. I mean, in Germany the nineties saw the birth of the Lula franchise and spat out the Days of Oblivion games – the basic ethos of which can best be understood through the most brief of vaguely NSFW YouTube nuggets. Days of Oblivion 2 is quite simply the most epic naked lady adventure I have ever played: peasants murder Venetian scientists, old ladies threaten you with shotguns then give you pudding and OAPs get ninja-starred next to skips. It's all in German though, so I could never explain the plot – but I can confirm that you can watch videos of a lady in the nip patting herself down and winking while you're in a space taxi.

But what about Blighty? The United Kingdom of the nineties: spiritual home of gentleman's periodicals thrown into hedgerows or hidden beneath moss-covered logs in woodland environments? The nation to whom highly-charged erotic behaviour was once Robin Asquith's spotty bottom thrusting up and down in a pool of industrial detergent in Confessions of a Window Cleaner? I'm proud (not very proud actually) to say that, as part of a 1994 package called Interactive Girls, we had a game in which you had to guess the right door and the right day on which you can deliver milk to Jo Guest. Then you had to tap the space bar like an excitable ape to make her, frame by frame, get in the altogether in praise of your milk delivery skills.

It was powerful stuff. Forget your idle flirting with Kelly in Mass Effect 2, this was truly the interactive medium's answer to Lady Chatterley's Lover. Go home D.H. Lawrence: as of the mid-nineties and the dawn of QuickTime your florid erotica became entirely unnecessary. Quite whether humanity as a whole could ever quite be forgiven for producing, or indeed playing, these games however – well that's a quite separate matter. For my part at least (standing, as I am, weeping in a cold shower) I am truly sorry.

Comments (36) Latest comment 11 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • justsomeone #1 11 months ago

    Will, if by "dedicated band of men" you're trying to encapsulate "men who like heterosexual porn" and "men who like heterosexual porn but don't admit it" and also "men that like the way women look naked" then i think you're going to find that that dedicated band of men accounts for pretty much every single hetero guy on the planet...

    let's not be disingenuous about the proportion of guys that like porn, especially not when writing on the internet...and on a gaming site...
  • Murton #2 11 months ago

    "let's not be disingenuous about the proportion of guys that like porn, especially not when writing on the internet...and on a gaming site..."

    Truer words were never spoken. +1
  • RandolphScott #3 11 months ago

    Ah. This is what we call 'irony'
  • marmaduke #4 11 months ago

    It is possible to write an article about soft-core interactive porn without having to state how you find such things beneath you in every fucking paragraph. Here's a good example: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/sex-ar...
  • O11Y #5 11 months ago

    I remember my dad once got given a game with Jo Guest that was a bit like a Tamogochi. It knocked around our study for a couple of years and even my baby sister (who was into Tamogochi's at the time) had a punt on it at one point.

    I can't remember if she ever took her clothes off or not. After 15 minutes of playing you were so bored that even as a horny teenager, the slim rewards were really not worth the agony.
  • StuDevo #6 11 months ago

    Best tag line I have ever seen on EG
  • StooMonster #7 11 months ago

    Will Porter: spiritual home of gentleman's periodicals thrown into hedgerows or hidden beneath moss-covered logs in woodland environments

    1990s, reminds me of growing up in the early 1980s too. The Internet is responsible for the sad loss of Jazz Mags stuffed around the countryside, you used to be able to cycle out and find treasure troves of bare naked ladies hidden around the place. Finding a pile of porn stashed in the woods was a right-of-passage.
  • shaymanjohn #8 11 months ago

    Tip of the hat to Mr Alan Partridge (..so just how seedy is this seedy Ron?).
  • fillip2k #9 11 months ago

    I love Will Porters writings... That is all.
  • captain_saturn #10 11 months ago

    Not to be mean, but this article kinda sounds like the writer didn't actually live through the nineties, but rather read about it on wikipedia or heard about it from a friend.
  • B0MBJ4CK #11 11 months ago

    "Finding a pile of porn stashed in the woods was a right-of-passage."

    And finding a stash of which wasn't half-burnt was like striking gold!

    ...well, thats what "my mate" told me anyway!

    /gulp
  • tossrStu #12 11 months ago

    I guess the feature title's a nod to the porn-in-the-1920s documentary of the same name?

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/mar/...
    Edited by tossrStu at 03/07/11 @ 12:34
  • Lucodeath #13 11 months ago

    Any one remember party games on the commadore amiga? First pixel porn I saw.
  • Half-assed #14 11 months ago

    I remember Samantha Fox Strip Poker and Sex Games for C64. Perhaps EG could do a retrospective?
  • spliffhead #15 11 months ago

    The Philips CDI bought HD gaming/wanking into the living room too.
  • spongebob #16 11 months ago

  • OrgasmicMutton #17 11 months ago

    I'm not sure what this says about the esteemed Mr Porter, but as soon as I saw this on the front page I guessed the article would be by him. Though that might just have been because of the horrendously brilliant "seedy" pun!
  • Genji #18 11 months ago

    "For years the sexiest thing most of them could come up with involved either strip poker or a version of Tetris with a poorly lit jpeg of a boob-lady as background, alongside the rudest falling blocks that could possibly be imagined."

    Awww, I loved X-Tetris. :(
  • coomber #19 11 months ago

    I remember being given a copy of a game for my Amiga which had red and black images of hardcore porn that moved as you waggled your joystick (oo-er) Daley Thompson Decathlon-style. A lot of my mates came round to play that one.
  • EMarkM #20 11 months ago

    "her loose fitting porn-blouse"

    I...I have nothing to add...
  • TonyCB #21 11 months ago

    My 70 year old mom still fondly recounts the story of how she wandered into my room to anyone I introduce her to.... And thought the worst when confronted with a rear view of me playing Daley Thompsons decathlon on my c64.....
  • Lemming81 #22 11 months ago

    I remember John Hurt AND Clive Owen in Privateer 2. Pretty decent game that.
  • BBIAJ #23 11 months ago

    Nah, Daryl Morgan, Kandi, Lilly Roma, and Tiffany would all get some.
  • Miths #24 11 months ago

    My fondest memories of early computer porn aren't really about the laughably terrible adult games I played on Commodore 64 and Amiga (of which the only titles I can remember off the top of my head are "Sex Games" and "Samantha Fox Strip Poker";), but rather waiting in eager anticipation for ten minutes while my 2400 baud painstakingly downloaded a gif image chosen from a text description on some BBS.
    Of course you would regularly be struck by utter disappointment when that "hot, busty redhead" turned out to be neither particularly hot nor all that busty :).
  • Farzlepot #25 11 months ago

    I seem to have missed an entire medium of self-bonking, to paraphrase a 90s term.

    90s Matt is angry.
  • Shinetop #26 11 months ago

    "Best tag line I have ever seen on EG "

    It's good, but it still can't top Gibson's "Heather Mills Nearly In Bionic Commando - But it would have cost an arm and a leg" tagline.
  • byakuya83 #27 11 months ago

    Post deleted at 10:03:41 30-03-2012
  • Bluetooth #28 11 months ago

    Hahaha Seedy Rom! I love it!
  • Tyronne #29 11 months ago

    Porn mags in the wild, gone the same way as white dog poo...
  • Lucodeath #30 11 months ago

    @coomber
    That was party games
  • Danj #31 11 months ago

    An article on sex in FMV games with no mention of the 7-disc epic, Phantasmagoria? For shame.
  • petran79 #32 11 months ago

    You mean Phantasmagoria 2.

    There were also some porn magazines that had interactive cdroms with pixellated porn clips, made with macromedia director. Better than playing a more expensive fmv game.

    I also played Lula (there is also a mediocre sequel) and it was very funny. Probably the most decent game of its kind.
    i also remember those amiga games.

    Now 3d boobs and japanese porn cartoons are our only option in porn games.
    Plus the countless indie games, mostly Flash made
  • Zpardi #33 11 months ago

    Will: Self deprecating humor - Learn it.
  • andromeda #34 11 months ago

    @marmaduke

    He's a Guardian reader thou, he is always right.

  • fuzzyfelt #35 11 months ago

    I would never have made the link between Daley Thomson's Decathlon had it not been for this clip someone showed the other day http://youtu.be/SPorNpzXrp0
  • mukki #36 11 months ago

    All I have to say Custer's revenge on the Atari 2600