More Porn Videogame History

Way back in 2014 I linked to and quoted from a computer game magazine’s feature on the infamous line of cheesy adult video games marketed for the Atari game console in the early 1980s under the Mystique Presents Swedish Erotica brand. Of these the most notorious was the Custer’s Revenge title. It was widely panned at the time for its racism and implied rape, although this seems mostly to have been a reaction to the marketing materials. The actual in-game pixels were so incoherent and blocky they barely manage to seem risque to modern eyes:

Even so, you may well wonder “How in the hell did that even happen? What the actual fuck was going on in the computer gaming industry to make any of it possible?” Well, if that’s your curiosity, we got you covered. In Porno Hustlers Of The Atari Age, author Kate Willaert has dug as deep as it is possible to dig into the history of that iconic porn-in-videogames episode. It is one hell of a trip!

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Yesterday’s Porn Games Of The Future

Remember video games, as they were back in 1982? They were kinda blocky and beepy. With a couple of notable exceptions, they also weren’t the least bit erotic. But people understood that wouldn’t last forever!

And that’s how Porn Stars magazine came to devote two full pages of their September/October 1982 issue to porn games of the future, as imagined by eight of the biggest names in porn. Their headline was Future Vid-Sex Games: Porn Stars Predict Tomorrow’s Turn-Ons. Ron Jeremy had an idea for a damp and smelly Missile Command clone called Penile Command:

Keepin’ it classy, Ron! I’m surprised nobody ever made that one… sure I am.

Atari Porn Games

If you’re old enough to remember the early days of PC gaming, you won’t have missed the ubiquitous magazine advertising for “sexy” games like the notorious Custer’s Revenge, even if you never played them (as most did not). Recently PC Magazine ran a game-by-game retrospective on some of those titles, along with some interesting history:

Many of these explicit titles were developed by Mystique, an offshoot of porn film studio, Caballero Control Corporation. In Mystique’s two-or-so years of existence, it published several “X-rated” games under the “Swedish Erotica” banner (though the titles were all created in the U.S.). As the completely predictable (and surely sought-after) furor erupted, Atari ended up suing Mystique to block the production of its digital debauchery.

But then came the video game crash of 1983 and Mystique went under. The games, however, enjoyed a few additional years of novelty existence when the rights were purchased by a new company, Playaround, which also created gender-switched versions of the original Mystique titles.

Are the games any good? Eh, not really. And while the basic blocky graphics of the era were a natural barrier to anything being too explicit, some of the concepts are just downright gross, even by the standards of today’s porn-on-demand culture.

Youngsters these days, they don’t know how good they got it…

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