Softporn Adventure: “Women! Erotica! Derelicts!”
Sunday, April 7th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
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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