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Jim Moloshok just launched the multimillion-dollar Entertaindom portal. Can he create the successor to network TV?
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[12/06/99]

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[12/01/99]

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The music man
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[11/29/99]

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Forces of decency scored high during the Reagan years. The group Women Against Pornography loudly protested Mystique at a 1982 electronics convention in New York. Though this sort of publicity is generally nothing but helpful to the porn purveyors, this time it brought Mystique to the attention of a powerful new antagonist: Atari itself. Having ushered the video-game industry from America's barrooms into the family living room and the entertainment mainstream, Atari was not about to see its empire sink into the sleaze of locker rooms and adult bookstores. Never mind that Atari had donated a full 2600 setup to ill-fated "Playmate of the Decade" Dorothy Stratton in 1980. The freewheeling 1970s were officially over.

Mystique switched off in 1983, but others persisted in the ongoing attempt to marry joystick and pixel in search of the ultimate pulse-quickening simulation of fleshy love. The rights to every Mystique game but the odious Custer were quickly snatched up by the Playaround company -- which then tempered the unabashed sexism of its newfound "intellectual" property, hoping to recruit female veterans of the sexual revolution to fight the digital revolution. First, the upstart company invented novelty double-ended cartridges, which could be inserted into the console two different ways. Then they revamped each game by cutting and pasting the character sets to put women on top of the screen: Bachelor Party was joined by Bachelorette Party, under the unsound assumption that female players would want to take their turns bouncing digital stand-ins off the genitalia of the opposite sex. Similarly, the masturbation game Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em begat Philly Flasher, and a digital group-grope called Gigolo spawned Cathouse Blues.

Then came the gleeful Knight on the Town, and its "feminized" variant, Lady in Wading. In this bawdy medieval romp, a "Sir Lancelot," who has somehow lost his pants, avoids castrating monsters while he lays bricks to bridge a moat. When our pants-less knight reaches his maiden fair, the player wiggles the joystick up and down three times for a quick romp in the turret. This premise is a favorite sexual subtext of mainstream video games today. Rescuing a princess from her prison is a time-honored myth symbolizing the surrender of virginity; it also happens to be the plot of scores of Mario, Zelda, Sonic and Crash Bandicoot games.

In the pioneer era, the erotic overtures are blatant and crude, but they presumably serviced 1981's bumper crop of divorced dads and proto-yuppies well by providing some psychological companionship and the accompanying status of technology. A generation later, we have alt.binaries.adinfinitum and eBay auctions of original Custer's Revenge cartridges for a sexy $50.

It doesn't matter. While we await the shabby first attempts at true virtual sex, we may contemplate two truths from the past: Video games can indeed be an effective form of contraceptive; and, whatever our media -- magnetic, mimeographed or multi- -- the marketplace will find a way to draw a pair of tits on it.
salon.com | Dec. 6, 1999

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