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Technology: View from the top
Prime time online
Jim Moloshok just launched the multimillion-dollar Entertaindom portal. Can he create the successor to network TV?
By Susan Kuchinskas
[12/06/99]

Column
See spot run
Internet firms throwing big money at TV ad campaigns are making an elementary goof.
By Scott Rosenberg
[12/03/99]

Singing the MP3 blues
Indie musicians find online music distributors every bit as greedy as the recording industry they aim to replace.
By Emily Vander Veer
[12/02/99]

Sex sells, doesn't it?
Tales of financial chaos at the heart of an online porn empire.
By Mark Gimein
[12/01/99]

Technology: View from the top
The music man
MTVi's Nicholas Butterworth says he wants the audience to do the programming.
By Janelle Brown
[11/29/99]

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At least, that's what I thought until about a year ago, when I got lucky at a couple of strip-mall clearance sales. Soon after, a full package of vintage "over-18" games appeared on Emulation.net, and I scooped them up. Taken together, they show that as the continuum of technology evolved over the years toward tawdry "you control the action" CD-ROMs, it has remained a sturdy super-outlet for sex.

A bawdy breed of video games created for the Atari 2600 system between 1980 and 1983 holds a special place in this pantheon by virtue of its unrivaled disparity between seduction and execution. At the time, kids were spellbound by the novelty of controlling something on a television set. They were happy to fill in the blanks with imagination. Blocky Atari aliens came from unreality, and were perfectly fine; but when the same technology was applied to love and procreation, the results were amateurish and weird.

X-Man is the only known cartridge produced by a company called Universal Gamex. In this nervous-making game, a naked male protagonist heads toward a blinking bedroom door through a maze filled with treacherous gnashing teeth, snipping scissors and something sinister that looks medical and sharp.

Once this tiny Lothario reaches his point of entry with manhood intact, the game shifts to a full-screen shot of two copulating adults; the player is then supposed to wiggle his computer joystick rhythmically to take the sex act to completion. There are three levels of this, covering the first three pages of the "Kama Sutra." Once the X-Man reaches his climax, it's back to the beginning for another go-round.

As regular pornographic movies lack plot, so does X-Man the game suffer from poor gameplay. It looks horrid, too. Rendered in utterly crappy Atari block maps rather than studied 9th century Asian watercolor, this hardly recognizable hardcore looks something like a tan E.T. dancing with a pink Yar. It is, literally, two-bit copulation.

The most prodigious producer of low-res luridness in those days was Mystique. During its prurient three-year tenure, this imprint developed perhaps a half-dozen games designed to "create a fantasy situation that offers a challenge." The packaging of these cartridges was lavish -- they came in leatherette cases inside glossy cardboard volumes. Mystique also licensed the popular Swedish Erotica brand name for the box art, thus buying an association with porn pioneers Seka and John Holmes.

Rendered at a zillionth the resolution of a Sega Dreamcast, Pac-Man himself was hardly recognizable in Atari form, but video-game magazines knew even indecipherable pornography when they were playing it, and derided the sex games as tasteless and smutty. Editors of game magazines turned up their nerdy noses at the nudity, though they could have stuck with complaining about the shortcomings of the gameplay. Bachelor Party, for instance, brazenly plagiarizes the primitive paddle game Breakout. It merely replaced the ball with a grinning, blocky, naked man, who scores with two rows of naked women instead of a wall of bricks.

Next page | Sir Lancelot has lost his pants!