Softporn Adventure: “Women! Erotica! Derelicts!”
The eBay seller who posted this auction may indeed, as @textfiles tweeted, be suffering from enjoying a very strong dose of “hope and wishes” if you go by his $3k asking price. But 5¼” floppy-disk porn from 1981, for the Atari 400/800? That’s relevant to our interests here at ErosBlog:
The seller captions the hot-tubbing cover art thusly:
This is the text adventure that inspired the Leisure Suit Larry series released by Sierra.
That’s Roberta Williams on the right, In the center is the wife of Bob Davis (creator of Ulysses), and on the left was On-Line’s bookkeeper.
Let’s look at the back of the box. I remember that funky font (what font is that?) very well, because Sierra Online was still using it when I entered the market for computer games just a couple of years after this was published:
SOFTPORN ADVENTURE
This delightful game has more features than most adventures.
The computer program creates a fantasy world, complete with objects, different areas, and everything else one would expect plus descriptions are full paragraphs (stored on disk) and several new twists and surprises are included. You, the player, have a “puppet” who’s identity you adopt for the game. Your objective? Find and seduce 3 girls!
As in real life, meeting this challenge is not an easy task. It requires money (which you must win at the casino); you must be creative in approaching your women; and there are many dangers to avoid and puzzles to be soled. The subject matter is ssuch that adult males should find this game quite interesting. Others may too — but be forewarned!
— over 48k of actual program memory plus another 48k of text (stored on disk)
— a CASINO, complete with a slot machine, and a blackjack table!
— the ability to SAVE a GAME in progress
— WOMEN! EROTICA! DERELICTS! BOOZE! and MUCH MORE!!!
Last but not least, what’s inside the box?
I’m posting this here because the auction link will be dead (and the pictures gone) in two or three months, but this artifact is worth preserving. As an added bonus, if you’re got a standard “in my day we had to walk through the snow to school, up hill both ways” lecture, now you can profitably add this to it. When your children whine to you about the poor quality of online pornography these days, you can link them to this post and say “Daughter, you think it’s bad now, this is what computer porn looked like when I was your age!”
Update: Of course I wrote this blog post without Googling one damned thing. Which was, as it always is, a mistake. It turns out (see the comments, thanks Jason!) that Jason Scott (the @textfiles guy whose tweet set me off) actually interviewed Chuck Benton about this title for his (Jason’s) epic documentary about text adventures called Get Lamp. A summary of the interview is here and if you scroll all the way down, you’ll be rewarded with a bunch of file links including executable files for the game for several different platforms.
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I interviewed the creator of Softporn Adventure/Super Stud (the original title) and put the raw interview up here:
Chuck Benton Interview in support of GET LAMP.
And here’s the entry from the GET LAMP site with additional information: Chuck Benton Interview.
Awesome! I haven’t seen your GET LAMP movie yet but I’m delighted you made it and very pleased you posted these links about Softporn Adventure. Folks, that second link of Jason’s includes a whole bunch of files including a zip of an .exe that’s an MS-DOS port of the game…
Oh what fun!
…’cuz when I’M lookin’ fer “softporn adventure” and “entertainment value”, I’m ALWAYS thinkin’, “Gee, I hope there’s gonna be lots of booze and derelicts involved!”
I was thinking, surely I must not know the correct definition of the word “derelict”, so I double checked it: “An abandoned or forsaken person, without a home, job, or property; a vagrant, a bum, a person who is negligent in their hygiene.” …not generally a good mix with “booze” either…
This is the title described in Steven Levy’s “Hacker’s” which excited my 16-year-old brain when I read it – and so lodged it there for the subsequent 27 years despite my never having seen it! As soon as I saw it here I knew what it was:
“One day not long afterward, Ken walked into the office and said, ‘Who wants to come over my house and take pictures in the hot tub naked?’
The idea was to get three women to pose topless in Ken’s hot tub for the Softporn advertisement. Somewhere in the picture would be an Apple computer, and in the tub with the three naked women would be a male waiter serving them drinks. They borrowed a waiter from The Broken Bit, a Coarsegold steak house which was about the only decent place to eat in town. The three women, all On-Liners, who took their blouses off were the company book- keeper, the wife of Ken’s assistant, and Roberta Williams.
The full-color ad, with the women holding wineglasses (the water in the hot tub tactfully covering their nipples), the fully clothed male waiter holding a tray of more wineglasses, and an Apple computer standing rather forlornly in the background, caused a sensation. On-Line got its share of hate mail, some of it full of Bible scripture and prophecy of the damnation ahead. The story of the game and the ad caught the imagination of the news services, and the picture ran in Time and over the UPI wire.”
Fascinating! I spend a bit of time with the PS3, mostly playing car-driving games and I’m always thinking “What this game needs is naked women!”
I love the promo line: the ability to SAVE a GAME in progress!