Courtesy What is remarkable about Softporn isn't that it existed, but that it was commercially sold. The water is bubbling up around her….A ‘10’!! She’s so beautiful………….A guy really could fall in love with a girl like this.” Even Eve, the final girl sought by the player, is sketched in little more than boyish exuberance: “What a beautiful face!!! She’s leaning back in the jacuzzi with her eyes closed and seems extremely relaxed.
#Mystery house game mobygames full#
There’s a gawkiness to Benton’s lines and lines of textual description, from the “swinging singles disco” full of “guys and gals doin’ the best steps in town,” to the prostitute’s bedroom, where “the bed’s a mess and the hooker’s about the same!” For all of Softporn’s exhausting chauvinism and wearied sexism, the game is absent of actual obscenity, and earnest to a fault. The game was a silly thing, programmed and play-tested on the weekends, but Benton's guy friends took a liking to it and encouraged him to publish it. Many of the game’s cleverest features have the quality of introductory programming exercises: playing the blackjack and slot machine simulators, spending and earning money, a question and answer scenario using basic programming routines, and graffiti on a bathroom wall represented like ASCII art. He intended the game as satire, a self-amused catalog of the unique sufferings of his species-the embarrassment of buying a pack of condoms, or accidentally going home with someone who ties you up and steals your cash (Benton claims parts of the game were drawn from his own experience, but has never fessed up to which parts).īenton wasn’t trying to innovate on the text adventure genre so much as he was iterating from a pattern of pre-existing games. A self-described “conservative New Englander,” Benton was a single guy in his late twenties at the time, and he initially designed the game as an exercise to teach himself programming on the Apple II.
#Mystery house game mobygames software#
Softporn was the creation of Massachusetts-based programmer Chuck Benton, an unlikely man to herald the erotic software revolution. Softporn captures a different kind of aspirational landscape, a contorted, pulpy vision of a bachelor’s night on the town. Computer games had escorted players into underground caves, realms of starry space, and sport fields of every kind since the 1960s. Softporn is set in a vague, 70s-infused urban dystopia entirely comprised of a bar, a casino, and a disco. Upon booting the floppy disk, the player was given control of a “puppet,” a human male through which the player executes textual commands. Softporn was a text-based adventure game, meaning it had no graphics.
Photo courtesy of Sierra GamersĪs an erotic episode, Softporn would leave much to the imagination. Time reported that 4,000 copies had already been sold, making each and every purchaser the proud, unsuspecting owner of America’s first commercially-released pornographic computer game. This image was the promotional photography for the “computer fantasy game” Softporn, in which “players seek to seduce three women, while avoiding hazards, such as getting killed by a bouncer in a disco.” For $29.95 (plus $1 shipping and handling) a company named On-Line Systems would mail out this “funny, provocative, challenging adventure game for adults only!” on a single 5.25-inch floppy disk. But it ran with a warm, risqué photo of three brunettes in an outdoor hot tub, their breasts bobbing and nudging the waterline. “Software for the Masses” might have been an otherwise arid tech story, buried and forgettable. The possibilities were endless, and for many consumers, overwhelming. If 1970s computer ownership had been limited to hobbyists who built and programmed their own machines, the 1980s were reeling in a new world of potential, non-specialist users: small business owners, housewives, children. On October 5, 1981, Time magazine ran a story called “Software for the Masses”-a retrospective meditation on how computing became personal.
0 kommentar(er)
