Sex and Nudity in Console and Arcade Video Games

To re-state an old-fashioned cigarette commercial, “We’ve come a long way, baby.” This can apply to a great many areas of video gaming, but what I’m referring to this time is an area that has, for the most part, remained untapped in this era of rating systems and controversy, the final frontier for console video gaming: depictions of nudity and sexual situations in games.

This will be a rather long article, a sort of investigative study and history lesson all rolled into one, so if lots of reading turns you off, you may just want to ignore what I am writing here and instead post your own thoughts and ideas about the topic. For the rest of you, take my hand (keyboard?) and join me for a trip down memory lane. You’ll probably discover a great many things you never needed (or indeed wanted) to know about nudity in video games.

One final note before we begin: this article/essay focuses specifically on nudity and sexuality as they have appeared in console and arcade games only. No provisions are being researched or discussed herein about the appearance of such themes in the home computer market (except as far as a crossover would be concerned: a PC translation of a console game featuring these...well...’features’ might be mentioned). The reasons for this are two-fold. First, I need to keep my subject as narrow as possible, and excluding the home computer market lets me get away with writing a much shorter article. Second, the PC market by its very nature usually allows a far greater degree of customization than any console system or arcade game does. After all, the arrival of the user mod system allowing the editing (legal or not) of PC games frequently spawns such items of note as “Nude Raider”, the nude Rynn patch for Drakkan: Order of the Flame, and a whole host of nude/topless skins for games like Quake, Doom, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life. Even scratching the surface of such mods is far beyond my abilities and my desires, thus I am excluding them. If anyone else wants to pick up this slack area, feel free to do so. I simply don’t have the desire to do more than touch on it in here from time to time.

With that out of the way, let’s set the Flux Capacitor for 1983, when the Atari 2600 was king of the home video game market, and an unknown company named Mystique decided to make a little game called Custer’s Revenge.

“Custer’s Revenge?”

Yup, if you thought that the controversy over sexual situations in video games showed up the same time as Night Trap for the Sega CD did, then you lost the bet, my friend. Custer’s Revenge was first on the scene, and it caused quite a stir, let me tell you, though most people have not heard of it since. The concept behind Custer’s Revenge was simple: you played Custer (yes, the same US general who lost the battle of Little Bighorn) who was quite naked except for a little purple scarf around his neck and his large blue hat, sported a massive hard-on, and was determined to make it to the other side of the screen through volleys of arrows to get the Native American woman tied to a cactus, and have his way with her.

The graphics were abysmal, the storyline nonexistent, and even the sex scenes were so poorly drawn that it was difficult to tell what was going on. (This is the Atari 2600 we’re talking about, here...) Despite all this game had going for it, Mystique was lambasted in the press for generally poor taste, snubbed by the editors of the few gaming digests being printed at the time, and even taken to task by Women Against Pornography (WAP), which is more than can be said for the oh-so-violent Mortal Kombat.

There’s a business saying that any publicity is good publicity, and Mystique decided that if one game featuring nudity and sex generated that much talk, more could only be better. They released two additional games for the 2600. The first, Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em sounds like a bizarre hybrid of Double Dragon and Pac-Man, but buyers of the game wouldn’t be that lucky. What they got instead was an X-Rated remake of the classic 2600 game Kaboom! This time, instead of catching bombs in your trusty water buckets that you moved along the bottom of the screen, the player took on the role of a pair of naked women running back and forth with their mouths open wide while a man with an extremely over-sized organ spewed forth little drops of...well, you know. The object was to catch all the “stuff,” which would send you to the next level after what can only be described as the most horrific depiction of lip-licking ever seen in a video game. Play two stages and call a psychiatrist in the morning.

Not content to rest on their laurels after this act of perversity, Mystique decided to release Bachelor Party, a sideways clone of the popular game Breakout. This time, players controlled a jar of Spanish Fly (a supposed-aphrodisiac) instead of just a regular old white rectangle, and bounced a man towards a gaggle of women on the right side of the screen. According to the instruction manual, contact between a man and a woman counted as them having sex. Perhaps 4k of cart ROM wasn’t sufficient to get this point across, since on screen, it wasn’t quite as exciting: the woman simply disappeared. After the man “had sex” with every stick-woman on the screen, the round was cleared, and a new one began. Gee...does this sound exciting to anyone else?

Mystique fell upon hard times when none of these games became popular, and they folded in 1984, just one year after Custer’s Revenge hit the scene. Convinced that there was more to this X-Rated video game market, however, was another software company named Playaround, who picked up Mystique’s line of X-Rated titles and proudly continued to carry the banner. Despite their name, Playaround did not play around. Their first release was a clone of Bachelor Party aimed more towards women entitled (strangely enough) Bachelorette Party. This time, the roles were reversed, and it was a woman being rebounded towards the herd of men.

Their next effort came in the form of a clone of Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em where the roles were again reversed: a man ran back and forth at the bottom of the screen, trying desperately to catch the drops of milk which dripped from the breasts of a woman at the top of the screen while trying not to fall over his own massive hard-on. When the sales of these single-cart games failed to perform up to expectations, Playaround decided to try a new strategy. They began releasing their games in a 2-in-1 cartridge format where, no matter which end you plugged into the Atari, you got a pornographic game.

Burning Desire was almost another remake of Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em except this time, the woman stood on a raised platform in the center of the screen and the man was flown back and forth by a helicopter, while two other naked women (presumably natives of some jungle, judging by the game’s title screen) danced back and forth on the ground on either side of the platform. The storyline this time? A woman had been captured by these natives, and the only way to save her was to guide the hero (played by you) from a helicopter in the sky down to her platform. Except you weren’t trying to untie her or anything like that...you just had to get your member into her mouth.

Playaround was also the first game company to release two separate versions of games: one for the horny male teenager of the household, the other for the horny female teenager of the household, thus most of their titles had clones for the “appropriate” sex. Burning Desire’s clone was Jungle Fever which just swapped the man and the woman and made her breasts the object which would save her lover. The companion cart to Jungle Fever, if you flipped it over, was Knight on the Town which really wasn’t a copy of anything. You played the Knight of the title, and what a Knight he was: dressed in his armour and sporting an erection large enough to joust with, his task was to avoid the penis-munching crocodile in the moat and a gremlin intent on doing bizarre things with his behind while laying (no pun intended here...) a bridge, one brick at a time. This bridge, when completed, would lead to a tower on the right side of the screen. If he accomplished this noble(?) task, his reward was a session with the backside of the damsel being held prisoner in the tower. Apparently, the concept of Chivalry was still a few years away during the time this game takes place... And as before, Knight on the Town had it’s opposite sex cart, known as Lady in Waiting.

The list continued to grow with Playaround, as they released more adults-only games for the 2600. Gigolo/Cat House Blues had a woman (or man depending on which version you bought) running around trying to find the person of the opposite sex who had hidden in one of the houses on the screen so you could score with him/her. Philly Flasher was another clone of Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em where, this time, men ran back and forth trying to catch something yellow (I’m not even going to make guesses at what it was supposed to be) dropped by a naked woman wearing a witch’s hat.

Not content to be left out of the loop, another game company surfaced to make an adult 2600 title. Calling themselves “Universal Gamex”, they came up with the ultimate fusion of a maze book and an adult theme by releasing X-Man. No, it has nothing to do with Marvel Comic’s mutant superheroes. But it does have everything to do with a man, a woman, and that special thing that happens when daddy and mommy love one another very, very much. See, X-Man’s girlfriend decided to play hard-to-get (even though she wasn’t wearing any clothes...) and ran away from him to hide in the middle of a large maze. Hot on her heels, X-Man braves this massive maze, a time limit of 99 seconds, and strange enemies like an animated pair of scissors, a set of teeth, and a menacing crab in order to get to the door in the center, which leads to his true love. Should he manage to reach this door without getting snipped, chomped, clamped, or running out of time, the player is taken to a new scene where the guy and girl are going at it. But your work is still not done, as you must now produce a ‘satisfactory result’ for the girl in thirty seconds, or else you lose all the bonus points you had accumulated. (Personal statement here: it’s fairly obvious that everyone who developed this game was a guy, as every girl knows that thirty seconds isn’t enough to do anything, no matter how great a lover your partner is). After this, the game starts again with a new maze...how much fun can you take? Apparently, this one game exhausted the creative juices of everyone at “Universal Gamex”, because the company never produced another title for any platform.

Meanwhile, in the arcades, a game company known as Exidy was making waves of its own. Known for producing light-gun based games like Cheyanne and Crack Shot, they turned the arcade game world on its ear when it came to violence and nudity with their game Chiller. If ever you wanted to take gun in hand and blow people apart in a torture chamber, then Chiller was made for you. The nudity in the game was very basic, didn’t show up unless the player survived to the fourth stage, and it was not apparent at the start of that stage. One “target” in the center of the screen was a woman buried in the ground up to her waist. Shooting her twice removed her shirt to reveal her naked breasts.

Further shots popped her head and burst her chest. Like most other games that portrayed graphic violence at the time, Chiller was quickly lambasted by the press for being too graphic, and as a result, the game sold very few units (though one of them, oddly enough, wound up at the family-themed “Indiana Beach” amusement park in Monticello, Indiana, which was the first and only time I ever personally saw this game in public). As if that weren’t strange enough, there was an unofficial port of Chiller made for the NES that featured all the blood and the topless woman of the arcade version. It was a strange use for a Zapper gun that was used to shooting ducks.

After the video game crash of 1984, Atari and every other console system disappeared from the US market. It wasn’t until the NES (Famicom in Japan) arrived in 1985 and gained extreme popularity in 1987 that people realized the home gaming market was far from dead. But with the arrival of the NES, there were still some people who felt that the failure of the adult video game market so far was just a fluke, and those people all worked for a company named Panesian Ltd. All in all, there were a grand total of three “adult” games made for the system. None were authorized by Nintendo, of course, but then again, neither was Tengen’s version of Tetris, and it got released anyway. The first of the unholy trilogy released by Panesian Ltd. was called Hot Slot, and it premiered in 1991. The premise of the game was that you played a slot machine and accumulated money, just like at a normal casino. The difference was that, once you had made a certain amount, you were treated to a scene of a girl in varying states of undress who spouted such lines of bad dialogue as, “Score some more and I’ll let you play with my lucky slot.” Um...no comment.

The second game really wasn’t much better. Named Peek-A-Boo Poker, it was a simple strip poker game. When it started, you picked your opponent from the choice of three presented to you (Full-House Francine, Poker Penny, or Double-Dealing Debbie) and played a normal game of poker. For every $1000 you won, you got a new picture of your opponent getting just a bit chillier. Once you won $5000, you saw her rendered naked in all her 8-bit glory.

The last of the trilogy, however, is surprisingly fun. Bubble Bath Babes took the best parts of Tetris, threw in a splash of Bust A Move, and turned it into a puzzle game with the reward that clearing the level gave you an image of a girl who continued to lose clothing as the stages progressed (do you sense a recurring theme here?). Like its sister titles, however, it still featured the same bad dialogue and sexual innuendo. A sample line? “Bubbling Bunny wants you to pop my bubble now! I bet I can make yours burst!” I’m not making this up, folks...

Even if you weren’t interested in completely adult titles and despite Nintendo’s enforced family-oriented stance and Seal of Approval, there were still some NES games you could find containing nudity. Sqoon for example showed a topless mermaid on the title screen when you first inserted the cartridge, though her nipples were simply one pixel each in size. River City Ransom got kind of risqué when Alex or Ryan slapped down their $3.50 to have a sauna, showcasing a pair of naked male butt cheeks. I’ve heard people attempt to make the case that the statues in the background of the third level of Castlevania are of naked females, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t much evidence to support this. Either that, or my imagination just isn’t as good as some peoples’. The nudity in the ending of the classic Metroid is another story: after getting the best ending, watch as Samas flashes and her armour disappears. For a couple seconds, nipples are visible. This is even more pronounced if you complete the game a second time in under an hour (don’t pitch a fit, it really can be done) when Samus removed even more of her already-risqué swimsuit. It’s almost laughable that Nintendo wound up with the reputation of being a “kiddy” system when examples like this can so readily be pointed out.

As far as I know, there are no Sega Master System games which feature nudity, but I’ll update this when and if I can confirm the presence of any. Considering how poorly the Master System sold and how few companies were developing titles for it, this really isn’t surprising.

Shortly after the emergence of the 16-bit console era, Nintendo of America earned its “family friendly” reputation by starting to clamp down on anything even remotely adult in nature, be it sexy or sexual dialogue, revealing artwork, or graphic violence. The Super NES port of the popular arcade game “Final Fight” received a multitude of censorings, including character names (“Sodom” from the arcade became “Katana” in the home version, etc...), character models (the female punks from the arcade were removed and replaced with male versions instead), and in-game cinema (the attract-mode video of Haggar’s daughter in the arcade showed her tied to a chair wearing only her bra, while the SNES folks put a pretty red dress on her for modesty’s sake).

Note the differences between Arcade Roxy on the left, and Sega CD Roxy on the right.

From what I can tell, there were no Super Nintendo games released officially or otherwise with anything even remotely resembling nudity in them, with one exception: Super Castlevania IV, one of the flagship titles for the system at its launch. At the end of the second stage, you fought against a medusa, and while you may not notice it in the heat of the action, a quick pause or glance at a few screenshots will confirm that she is running around without a top on. Research still continues, of course, but this is all we’ve been able to uncover so far.

This isn’t to say that Japanese Super Famicom games didn’t have more risqué pictures and dialogue – there are some fairly saucy bits to be found – but the American versions certainly didn’t retain them. Prime examples include changing the dialogue in Final Fantasy IV to remove Cid’s swearing, changing the dialogue for a scene where Rosa visits Cecil in his room with the intention of sleeping with him, and altering the graphics of a dancer in the first town who, when talked to, sheds her top to reveal a bikini and does a rollicking dance all across the ground and in a nearby water pool. Amusingly enough, it wasn’t the bikini that upset Nintendo of America, it was merely the stripping part. The girl in the US version just wears the swimsuit the whole time. And, of course, there’s the infamous “Porno Mag” item in the secret developer’s room to be found. Final Fantasy VI also suffered from edits in the form of a re-drawn model of the ‘Goddess’ boss monster, who was partially naked in the Japanese version, and got clothed in some flying ribbons for the US release. And while Pretty Fighter (a Street FighterBishoujo Wrestler Retsuden rip-off with nothing but female fighters) and Blizzard Yuki Rannyuu!! (an anime-themed wrestling game involving nothing but female contestants) were clearly made to titillate and appeal to the mostly-male audience who enjoyed watching boobs bouncing about, there wasn’t a hint of nudity to be found anywhere. Needless to say, these games never reached US shores anyway.

Sega, on the other hand, didn’t jump on the censorship bandwagon quite as early, trying to earn a reputation with gamers who considered themselves more mature than the Nintendo crowd. For a while, Sega’s motto was “Sega does what Nintendon’t,” a blatant dig at the fact that Nintendo of America censored their games, while Sega’s were (supposedly) released completely intact. And for a while this was true. In 1989, Sega released Mystic Defender, one of their first titles for the system. (This is a direct sequel to an earlier game called Spellcaster made for their Master System). Mystic Defender played like your typical all-ages side-scroller until you reached the final boss, then all bets were off. The final boss, Zao, (who resembled a massive mound of semi-organic matter like a compost heap), held Alexandra, the daughter of the supreme deity, in his disgusting form, and it was pretty impossible not to notice that she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on her top. Once Zao was beaten down, however, it got better. Alexandra rose from the remains, surrounded by a glowing purple bubble, and everyone took notice that she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on her anywhere. Now, true, she is a fairly small figure on the screen, only about an inch and a half high, so there isn’t much detail, but there is no mistaking the fact that she was naked from head to toe.

Even Sega’s limits could be tested. One year later, in 1990, a company named Razorsoft was ready to release its newest Genesis title, Stormlord. Sega of America took one look at the beta and freaked out! What had Razorsoft done to earn this kind of reaction? Underage, preteen lolita rape? (Watch the hits on this page skyrocket after that word grouping... *laugh*) Graphic sexual encounters between humans and animals? Copyright infringement of some form (Sonic the Hentai Hedgehog)? Nope. They simply wanted to release the game with...well...topless fairies in it. (Note that these are the mythical, tiny winged creatures I’m talking about here, not any other variety). Either EGM or GamePro magazine (can’t remember which) managed to get pics of the beta, pre-censored version, and they printed them in one of their issues, which probably did more for sales of Stormlord than any ad campaign ever could, but the fact remains that Sega ordered Razorsoft to clothe the little sprites or they’d never be allowed to sell the game. Razorsoft caved, and the naked fairies were given modesty-sparing panties and bras.

It’s interesting to note that the Sega Genesis version of this game is the only version that was censored in this way, as versions for several home computer types were released with the nudity intact.

Sega had apparently reversed its policy on nudity in games at this point, because a second version of Mystic Defender was released around this time with a minor graphical update that clothed Alexandra in a pretty purple dress instead of her birthday suit once she was rescued from the vile Zao.

Nobody knows if it was retaliation for Sega’s treatment of Razorsoft, or if it was just a bunch of guys trying to test the rating system’s limits, or if it was nothing more than a joke that wasn’t supposed to be found, but another developer, Naughty Dog Software, released Ring of Power for the Genesis in 1991.

By all respects, this RPG/Strategy hybrid title fit perfectly within Sega’s guidelines. At least, until you plugged in a secret code that altered the startup logo, giving you a rather graphic rendition of a very well-endowed topless woman alongside the Naughty Dog Software title card instead of the standard opening.

After this was discovered, Ring of Power became the first and last Naughty Dog title on the Genesis. (They later went on to produce Way of the Warrior for the failed 3DO system, and then hit pay dirt with Crash Bandicoot on the Playstation. Sony snapped them up in 2001 to bolster their first-party development line). That wouldn’t be the final appearance of bare breasts on the Genesis, however, as Konami released their only Genesis Castlevania title, Castlevania: Bloodlines in 1994 and, just like in Super Castlevania IV, the Medusa boss still hadn’t found her shirt.

Maybe some of you remember NEC’s contribution to the 16-bit world, the Turbo Grafx-16 (also known as the PC Engine in Japan)? Though technically not a 16-bit system, it was marketed as such, and it gained a small, dedicated following, mostly for it’s nearly arcade-perfect translations of games such as Splatterhouse. Unfortunately, by the time Nintendo and Sega started slugging it out in the Genesis/SNES arena, there clearly wasn’t room for three, and the Turbo Grafx-16 died despite attempts to once again appear on the cutting edge of technology by offering the Turbo Duo, the first portable 16-bit system, and the Turbo CD add-on that allowed you to play CD games. One of the games released for this short-lived console was Strip Fighter II (one wonders what became of “Strip Fighter I”...). And it was a bad game. A really bad game. A terribly horrible game. The sort of game to which magazine reviewers simply hate to give a rating of 1, because even that seems generous. But, bottom line, it featured a whole host of women who beat the snot out of each other in a Street Fighter-esque fashion. Between rounds (assuming you won, of course), you were treated to either a scantily-clad (one round win) or fully naked (two rounds won) picture of the girl you just beat. I don’t know exactly when this game was released in comparison to the 1991 PC-only game Metal & Lace (Ningyo in Japan), but one of them was probably taking lessons from the other, as Metal & Lace featured the same type of battle system, where the more times your fighter defeated one of the other girls, the more skin you got to see.

Then, in 1992, a huge catastrophe occurred in the realm of home gaming. At least, to the mind of Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat--Connecticut) it was apparently right on par with Armageddon itself. Lieberman had already gotten hot under the collar back in 1991 when Mortal Kombat was released in arcades around the country, and lines formed around the block to play it. Now, however, Tom Zito, CEO of Digital Pictures in Palo Alto, California had released a game called Night Trap for the Sega CD, and lines once again formed around the block. Even if they weren’t interested in buying it, people at least wanted to get a look at the game that this Connecticut senator was fuming about. Lieberman managed to pack the Senate floor to capacity while he displayed footage from two games (the afore-mentioned Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, which had just been released to home console gamers a few months earlier), along with testimony that violence and sexuality in video games had reached an all-time high. It has since been discovered that much of Senator Lieberman’s testimony consisted of half-truths or outright lies (despite playing my way through Night Trap several times, I’ve found bad acting and only average game play but I’ve yet to run across the supposed-rape scene that the Senator described in his tirade), but after it was all over including the testimony from both Sega and Nintendo, a video games rating system was adopted, and the Electronic Software Ratings Board (ESRB) was formed. The theory was that it would keep violent and sexual games out of the hands of children. Naturally, as children already knew from the movie ratings system, anything rated ‘R’ in the movies or ‘M’ on a home console suddenly became much more attractive. Though it didn’t save the system, the diatribe against Night Trap coming from Congress probably resulted in a lot more people buying the game than might have in the first place. Really, though, if people wanted to see young women running around in their pajamas, videos like “Slumber Party Massacre” and the like were just as good at showing this, and they came with a pause button on the VCR.

For Nintendo fans, the damage had already been done. Mortal Kombat, dubbed the “Special Champion Edition,” was so badly castrated for the Super Nintendo that the vastly inferior Sega Genesis version sold more than three times as many copies as the SNES competition. For while both versions were shipped in “censored” mode, the Genesis and GameGear carts allowed a player to input a “secret” code (published in most video game magazines a month or more before the game was even shipped) that enabled all the blood, gore, and original fatalities. No more instances of Johnny Cage putting his foot into his opponent’s chest this time...his uppercut took their heads off, just like before. And Sub-Zero’s “Freeze Them And Break Them” fatality was replaced by the far nastier and gorier one where he ripped his opponent’s head and spinal column out (arguably the best Fatality for any of the MK games). After all, what do teenage gamers want in a fighting game: sweat and cheesy, sometimes non-lethal fatalities, or the full blood and guts effects from the arcade? Nintendo quickly learned their lesson from this marketing disaster, and repented of their ways a bit by releasing arguably the best cartridge port of Mortal Kombat II in an uncensored format.

This brings us to perhaps the most prevalent rumour surrounding the arcade version (and later home translations) of Mortal Kombat II. The first initial board set released for the cabinet, version 1.0, was actually a very incomplete form of the game, lacking almost half the special moves and fatalities that would finally appear in the game by version 3.2 (and also including some moves, like Baraka’s Blade Spin, that would be removed in the future). This caused tremendous speculation among players and magazines alike about what was likely to show up with the updates. And once the “Babality” and “Friendship” finishers were introduced in version 2.0, along with a fatality for the “Dead Pool” arena, people’s imaginations went wild, inventing all sorts of other ‘-alities’ that could potentially be locked away in the game’s innards. One of them, the “Animality,” showed up in Mortal Kombat 3, as Ed Boon and John Tobias, the lead programmers of the game, liked the idea so much. But one rumour that refused to disappear from the lips of MK players was the ever-popular idea of the “Nudality.” There has never been any proof that such moves exist in any version of Mortal Kombat, and yet there are people who claim to have seen them. Some guides on the Internet even list moves for them under the different character sections, though most qualify these additions by claiming that they are untested and may not work on all versions of the game. As of this writing, I have yet to witness, either in person or in print, a Nudality being performed in any Mortal Kombat game. Boon and Tobias have told interviewers many times in the past that no such “-ality” exists in their games, despite the fact that they technically could have gotten away with it under the ‘M’ (17 and up) rating of the ESRB. But, from an arcade gaming phenomenon, this was one rumour that really took hold of people and absolutely refused to die.

It was into this arena that 3DO’s Trip Hawkins (the future founder of EA Games) decided to throw his hat. The Panasonic 3DO system was the first 32-bit system on the market, and it boasted some pretty impressive specs...as well as a hefty price tag ($700 US, which makes the most expensive video gaming system ever released, surpassing even the Neo*Geo’s initial $500 price point and the $600 PS3). But the reason so many were watching the 3DO was that the 3DO was the first home video game system to actually cater to the pornography market.

At the time of its release, it was estimated that roughly 70% of the CD-ROM titles sold in Japan were of an adult nature (not surprising, given the number of hentai games that are still being produced there that we’ll never see translated). Panasonic had a grand vision for it’s machine and decided that the way it would crush not only reigning champion Nintendo and close-second Sega, but also new badboy video game console maker Sony was the same way it had done so during the VHS vs. Betamax wars. While Panasonic had come up with a way to cheaply mass-produce and distribute the magnetic media for videotapes, the VHS format, Sony had gone the route of higher quality (and thus, higher price), and released their Betamax video cassette recorder. And naturally, the two formats were completely incompatible with one another. For a time, it looked like home video would forever be split down the middle as the two camps squared off against one another. Video rental shelves were stocked half VHS, half Beta. But then, sex managed to make it’s way into the equation, and Sony’s higher-quality format wound up biting the dust.

Sex with videotapes? Not quite, but closer than you probably realize. Panasonic had reached a deal with the porn industry: VHS tapes, being cheaper and lower quality than their Betamax counterparts, were much more suited to mass-market distribution. Once the pornographers caught on, it was all over for Sony, and the rest of the home entertainment industry made the switch to VHS almost overnight, leaving those who had placed their faith in the Betamax format to flounder and either go without, or shell out another several hundred dollars for a VHS-format VCR to be able to watch all the new movies (not to mention the hundreds more for the VHS format tapes to replace their Beta copies).

Since it had worked the last time, Panasonic had no doubt that sex would sell their console as well, and thus, the 3DO system became the first gaming system to actually endorse ‘pornware’ titles in both the US and Japan. Titles such as Penthouse Interactive Virtual Photo Shoot and Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties made their appearances, being touted as the first interactive adult movie experiences.

So, what happened to Panasonic this time? They had the brand recognition, they had the sex, they had the console already out compared to Sony’s forthcoming “Play Station X” project, and had a firm grasp on a huge market share in Japan. Panasonic even had developer’s licensing fees that were far lower than Nintendo’s and Sega’s. Yet something went wrong.

Everyone knows that new technology will always cost you an arm and a leg, and the 3DO system was no exception. Whereas people were willing to pay several hundred dollars for a VCR back in the late seventies and early eighties to be able to watch their VHS porn collection, almost nobody was willing to throw down the $700 (or more) that Panasonic wanted for their new system. By the time Sony released their $300 Playstation unit, Panasonic realized that they had played the game backwards. By trying to market the best technology coupled with the best games coupled with the availability of adult titles and the best specs of any gaming console around, Panasonic had inadvertently turned itself into the Betamax of the video game industry. Sony, having learned from their mistake last time they butted heads with Panasonic over something as serious as an almost-full market share of a particular technology, simply released their Playstation unit at an initial price point of $300, $400 cheaper than the 3DO. And while 3DO titles were selling for over $100 a pop, Sony’s $45 and $50 games looked like a much better deal, especially since the medium for distribution was exactly the same: a simple CD-ROM. Panasonic had also forgotten than the video game crowd was a much different group than the porn crowd, while Sony had invested virtually all their marketing dollars towards targeting gamers exclusively, especially the twenty-something crowd with the largest disposable income in the world. Thus, the day of the Porn Game in the United States didn’t exactly arrive with the bang Trip Hawkins wanted it to, and the 3DO system collapsed even in Japan under the combined onslaught of the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn...which brings us now to the 32-bit generation of video games: the Atari Jaguar, Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn, and the “CDs are for losers” Nintendo 64.

We’ll start out with the reigning champion of the 32-bit gaming era: the Sony Playstation. Sony, from the start, had a lot of things going against them when they decided to throw their weight into the arena of console gaming. They were the new kid on the block, the one with no experience under their belts. But they had one thing up their sleeves that was poised to give them dominance of the market: they were making games on CD-ROM discs while Nintendo was determined to stick to the cartridge format. Nintendo’s decision to go cart while everyone else was going to CD was made for two reasons. First, it is much harder and more expensive to pirate a cartridge game, and secondly, if you wanted to sell N64 games, you had to buy the cartridges directly from Nintendo, a strategy Nintendo had used to its full potential in the heyday of the NES. This translated into huge profits for the big N, as they were not only getting a cut of game sales, but also a full market share of the cartridge orders (Microsoft, eat your heart out). Sony’s CDs, on the other hand, were easier to pirate (anybody with a CD burner and a blank disc could copy one), and they were available cheaply to anyone. You still had to use the black-backed discs, but buying 100,000 black CDs from Sony was far cheaper than buying the same number of N64 carts. The tradeoff? A CD allowed for a greater storage space for a single game. The upper limit on the N64 cart was 32 megabytes of compressed data. A CD-ROM? 640 megabytes when packed to capacity. And Sony’s machine also allowed for something the N64 did not: multiple-disc spanning games. Nintendo’s first real blow was suffered when Square, a long-time Nintendo supporter, defected to the Sony camp and pledged Playstation-only development of its next few Final Fantasy games. Once that happened, Sony basically had their dominance sewn up, as Final Fantasy 7 went on to become the best selling RPG of all time worldwide.

And Final Fantasy 7 said and did things quite differently than previous American FF games. Sony’s censors were more lax than Nintendo’s, and allowed for more violence and profanity in their games. Capcom capitalized on both the CD format (which allowed full-motion video) and the smaller restrictions, and put together Resident Evil which also went on to sell more than several million copies world-wide and introduced most of the world to the Survival Horror genre (though Capcom was not the first company to create a survival horror game, they were the first one to create such a wildly popular one).

Also taking advantage of the PSX’s looser morals, as it were, was Konami. Drawing on the incredible talents of Hideo Kojima to script an action film into video game format, Metal Gear Solid brought the Tactical Espionage genre into the 21^st century. Not ones to exclude sexiness from their repertoire, Konami modeled a character who wiggled her butt when she ran and who also did a work-out regimen in her underwear while incarcerated. (Don’t believe me? Check on Meryl through the grating, go down the ladder, climb up, and look at her again. Each time, she is doing a different exercise and has less clothing than the time before. After the fourth time you do this, alas, she puts her full uniform back on and starts over from the beginning). They also included a naked man lying on the floor, but used a scrambler-type of blocking made popular by the Jerry Springer show to cover up all the “naughty parts”. Good clean fun all around, right?

I’ve yet to meet a single person who feels that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is not one of the top ten best Playstation games ever made. But how it ever made it past Sony’s censors with only a ‘T’ rating, I’ll never know, as both the Venus Flower and the Succubus look either topless (in the case of the former) or completely naked (in the case of the latter) in-game.

Elemental Gear Bolt was one of those games that nobody ever heard of, mostly because it was one of the few light gun games actually released for the system. If you had Namco’s Gun*Con unit, you could use that instead of the standard control pad. The only problem was, if you wanted to play 2-player mode, the second player had to use the standard controller. There wasn’t much to see in EGB, but the cover art on the box was a little sexy, and a scene in the middle of the game involved some brief nudity (though the scene is very washed out, so details are impossible to see).

Parasite Eve, the cinematic RPG from Square, brought home the idea of combining a movie script’s blockbuster action sequences with the scares and disturbing images from a horror film. It received an ‘M’ rating for mature sexual themes among other things. Eve, the main villain of the game, is shown naked from the waist up several times (though she is not anatomically correct), and the storyline makes reference to her use of sperm stolen from a hospital to impregnate herself and finally give birth to the ultimate being. At the time this game was released, this was pretty heavy-hitting stuff for being released in the US. Squaresoft upped the M-rating ante with Parasite Eve 2 by including a shower scene in a motel as a tired Aya tries to get a little relaxation after the events of the day.

Eidos, the game distribution house for the mega-hit Tomb Raider titles, and Kronos software teamed up to give the owners of the PlayStation something to talk about with a game called Fear Factor. Before anything playable had been released, game magazines were salivating over the title, as Eidos was making some broad claims about the sort of content that would be included. As it was, the game was re-titled Fear Effect before its release, and the technology they pioneered was well-executed. FMV sequences seamlessly integrated into the backgrounds to present moving images instead of the static backdrops of games like Resident Evil had long been thought impossible by developers, but Kronos turned everyone’s head with their animated scenery which spliced perfectly with the sprites moving on the screen. That wasn’t all that turned heads about the title, however. Hana, the game’s lead character, wasn’t afraid to shed her clothing for a brief shower, and actually flashed an enemy soldier to gain an advantage in a combat situation (something Lara Croft fans had been dying to see ever since the first ‘Nude Raider’ images appeared on the Internet in 1996). Kronos pushed the envelope even further with the sequel, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix which turned out to be a prequel to the first game. From the start of the game (and before that, from the marketing blitz that caused game magazines in both the US and the UK to ban certain ads from appearing in print), the player found out that Hana and her partner in crime, Rain, were actually lesbian lovers, a subject not dealt with in any other mainstream title for the system. At the end of the first disc, Hana stumbles across Rain, who has been stripped to her bra and panties and attached to some sort of insectoid pleasure-inducing torture device. The animated Rain on the screen will squirm and moan until the player actually examines the setup with the proper button. Certainly not a sequence you want your mother to walk in on. After extricating her from that situation and escaping fiery death, Rain comments of her experience in the machine: “It was a cheap thrill.” Later on in the game, while changing clothes in an elevator, Rain remarks to Hana, “You’re going to the party dressed in that? (referring to a very-revealing dress) Why don’t you just go in naked?” To which Hana replies, “If I went in naked, I could only hide one gun.” Make of that what you will. So, while neither title displays outright nudity, Kronos and Eidos really toed the line as far as displaying and discussing mature sexual themes up to that point.

While Kronos and Eidos were working on redefining the action/survival horror genre, Tecmo was also hard at work on a concept which would go on to success on both home systems and the arcades as well. Their idea was for a new type of fighting game where the vast majority of the contenders were girls instead of men. These girls would be VERY well-endowed, and the ‘Bounce Factor’ was something that could actually be adjusted by an in-game option. Dead Or Alive was the name they came up, and few games since have been so blatantly sold on the sex factor alone. If this was all Tecmo had going for them, the game would have been an utter failure. As it just so happened, though, Tecmo took the time to put in a very fun, different, and still challenging fighting system into their game, taking the hint from Tekken and the like. There weren’t any fireballs or projectiles, as in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. But there were plenty of off-the-wall maneuvers that could be executed, and combos, not ultra-killer single moves, became the name of the game. Beyond that, however, every character had a plethora of different outfits they could fight in (up to twelve in some cases), most of which were drawn to show off plenty of skin. And, as if that weren’t good enough for you, you could pop the Playstation CD itself into your PC, open it with Windows Explorer, and check out the hidden ‘Omake’ folder for a few bitmap surprises. (‘Omake’ is Japanese for ‘bonus’).

Tecmo didn’t stop there, though. For the Dreamcast version of Dead Or Alive 2, a special code allowed you to unlock the original Japanese opening FMV, which featured a fully-nude clone of Kasumi (dubbed “Kasumi Alpha”) encased in a blob of...something or other. But, covered in green muck as they were, her nipples were still fully visible. It was a small stroke, to be sure, but Sega was obviously relaxing its policy concerning nudity on their system. They did, however, take one last stab at censorship when the game D-2 was ported to the US Dreamcast system. Sega of America removed almost every sexual aspect of the game, save for one particular scene involving a naked woman. The scene in question, however, is nothing that anyone is going to want to sit down and watch again and again for stimulation, as the violence and gore factor for the scene is also off the scale.

I’ll say this: if Nintendo got uptight about their family-oriented image during the SNES years, they were downright fetishist about it during the heyday of the Nintendo 64. Between sweeping hoards of Pokémon video games and virtually violence-and-blood-free Mario Brothers titles, Nintendo got verbally abused by reviewers and gamers alike for being the video game company which refused to grow up. It took several years before anything with a ‘Mature’ rating was released for the system, and only at the end of the 64’s life, when it was all too clear that Sony had won that current generation’s console war, did Nintendo resort to releasing such titles as Resident Evil 2, and Duke Nukem 64. Since these titles were already available on the Playstation as “Greatest Hits” titles (which meant a $19.98 price tag), they couldn’t do much to save Nintendo at the end. Examples of nudity were few and far-between, but cropped up in some unlikely places (for example, who would have expected a naked Ruta in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time?)

Conker’s Bad Fur Day, developed by veteran gaming duo Chris and Tim Stamper of RARE software, however, was something that nobody in the Nintendo gaming camp could have possibly seen coming. Packing enough harsh language, sexual innuendo, violence, and ribald humour to fill a Monty Python film, Conker’s quickly became a rallying cry for the superiority of the Nintendo 64, joining the other RARE ventures Golden Eye and Perfect Dark in the lineup of “must have” games for the system. Unfortunately, the gameplay on Conker’s Bad Fur Day was less than perfect, and it seemed that RARE had skimped on plot in their mad attempt to push the bounds of the ‘Mature’ rating. Still, expletive-spewing squirrels and well-endowed flowers weren’t something to miss on a system which made its millions based almost solely on its first-party development houses alone.

All this history brings us up to the present-day of console gaming, when sexual situations in video games have been growing in number with each passing month. By far, the largest selection of such sexual themes has shown up on the PS2, with the programmers at Rockstar Games leading the charge. With Grand Theft Auto III, they introduced players to the concept of patronizing prostitutes, where a bouncing car told what was going on in a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” sort of way. With Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, however, Rockstar pushed the envelope even further. You could still pick up a girl in your car, but in addition to that you could also buy a strip club where, for $5 every ten seconds or so, you could watch a fully-topless dancer perform her moves for Tommy Vercetti in the privacy of a small, red-lit room in the back hall. And by now, every gamer under the sun has no doubt heard of the explicit "Hot Coffee" mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which forced the company to recall the game and re-issue it with the offending code and graphics stripped.

Alexia Ashford descends the main staircase of her mansion completely without clothing in Resident Evil: Code Veronica X. And on the GameCube and X-Box consoles, topless bike riders and uncensored full-motion video of strippers give gamers exactly what they’ve been looking for in BMX XXX despite crappy controls and the loss of the Dave Mirra license.

But even with all this, sexuality and nudity in the video game industry is still in its infancy. What will the future hold? It’s impossible to say.

Kronos & Eidos are offering up a new Fear Effect title, Fear Effect: Inferno, for the PS2, scheduled for release in May of 2003. The game will take place partly in the Chinese concept of hell, and according to previews of the game, includes a room where the ceiling is composed of nothing but bloody breasts. Hana also spends at least part of the game dressed in a very skimpy hospital gown. And while Stan Liu, the president of Kronos, knows that his past games have pushed the envelope, he told Game Informer magazine to “Immediately vanquish the notion that Inferno is another title trying to capitalize on video games’ trek into the unexplored reaches of sex.” As to what this fully means, though, we’ll have to wait and see. (Update: since this article was written, Fear Effect: Inferno has been cancelled by Eidos despite the game being nearly complete. Kronos is looking for a new publisher to pick up the title, but it has been nearly two years and no one has stepped forward. Chances are, we’ll never get to see this game).

Acclaim’s development team is considering adding more sports games to its “XXX” lineup, including a beach volleyball game that would be competing directly with Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball for the X-Box. If released on a multi-platform level, could it be enough to draw all the attention away from Tecmo’s Dead Or Alive license? And if it comes to the PS2, will Sony step in and request the game be censored as they did with BMX XXX?

Final Fantasy X-2 gives several of the original characters from Final Fantasy X newer, more revealing outfits. With the new merger of Square and Enix, could the same hold true for future Dragon Quest titles, or any other RPGs produced in the future by this giant? GameCube just recently got remakes of the first three Resident Evil games as well as the exclusive version of Resident Evil 0. With Resident Evil 4 on the horizon, could Capcom move into this relatively-uncharted territory? (Update: Resident Evil 4 has been released for the Gamecube, and Capcom hasn’t pushed the nudity or sexuality aspect much further).

Konami’s Silent Hill 3 is also reaching closer and closer to its release date. With the first two games confronting such disturbing themes as incest, child abuse, suicide, drug abuse, and satanic elements, how much further into the dark psyches of the developers will the game reach?

Sony’s own first-party development house, Incog Inc, has been tossing around the idea of a second Twisted Metal Black game for a while now. Given how dark and depressing the first game was, could we see one even darker, incorporating themes more disturbing than the cannibalism, psychological abuse, and other horrific activities already depicted in the first Black title?

In time, all of these questions will be answered. For the present, however, you have to admit that thinking about the possible answers to these questions is quite exciting.

In spite of all the future holds, though, it is important to remember the past. Tracing the steps of how we got to where we are today is an exciting exercise, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. I’ll leave you with one last tidbit of trivia, for what is possibly the earliest use of nudity in an arcade game ever, even if it couldn’t be recognized as such. In 1980, a company named Cinematronics released a game entitled Star Castle. As its name implied, it was a space-themed game. The nudity connection? The designers used the outline of a centerfold from a girlie magazine as their star pattern. Thanks to Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Wilson from “High Score!”, their excellent book on the history of electronic games, for that little tidbit.

Live from the pleasure zone, this is Sarah Crisman, signing off.