A (brief) history of modern adult gaming

Last time, we walked you through the history of porn games in Japan – how they came to be, their rise to fame, and how they reshaped anime culture for good. But while we covered a lot of ground overseas, we didn’t spend much time elsewhere!

While Japanese audiences got to bask in the glory of the ‘80s and ‘90s eroge boom, Western porn fans were left high and dry for many, many years. That isn’t to say we didn’t get any – it’s just that the American government made it much harder for aspiring devs to “get to the good stuff,” so to speak, in the early ‘90s.

You see, between a little fighting game that rhymes with “Portal Wombat” and a cheesy FMV (Full Motion Video) title that sounds like “Fright Rap,” American politicians were scared that video games were going to make children commit crimes, steal from their parents, and worship Satan. Newspapers and cable news outlets alike proclaimed, from mount on high, that games were going to corrupt an entire generation and lead to widespread moral degeneracy.

Of course, looking back on it now, this was an extreme reaction. The games that were causing all this controversy look, ironically, like kids’ stuff today. Blood and guts that caused outrage just look like MS Paint splatters now, and even the most “extreme” FMV titles don’t even pass the late night “Skin-e-max” sniff test. Regardless, the outcome of ugly legal battles, increased regulation of video games, and the creation of a strictly enforced rating system was that developers were scared of what they could and couldn’t do. Bloody brutality was fine, but showing a boob? A butt? A – gasp – vagina?! That was enough to get your game slapped with an “AO” (Adults Only) rating, meaning that it couldn’t be sold at any retailer.

(So… it’s fine to blow someone’s head off, but not having your “head” blown off? Weird.)

Point being, sex was often a surefire way to earn that dreaded AO writing, and most games avoided it. FMV titles like Voyeur attempted to toe the line, offering taboo subjects like incest and BDSM up, but showed nothing in the way of explicit sex and nudity. Smaller games were often distributed through direct order in adult magazines, and were largely variations on pre-existing games like strip poker or Tetris. Because these titles were direct-order software, they could be released on PC without being rated by the ESRB – just not consoles, which have historically stayed away from adult titles.

That started changing a bit at the turn of the millennium. Flash websites made porn gaming more prominent than it ever had been in the West. Early hits, like Meet N’ Fuck and Frank’s Adventure, paved the way for a bawdier, cruder take on porn gaming than Japanese audiences were often getting. Most porn games around this time were laced with crude (and now-dated) humor much in the way American porn has historically been, but even more extreme considering there were truly no limits to what could be done on the internet. In the mid-aughts, Flash animation and game communities with dedicated adult sections like Newgrounds gave users unprecedented access to porn gaming.

Meanwhile, the aughts also saw small outfits like JAST USA localize Japanese eroge in earnest. These were often advertised on the very same sites that hosted Flash games, giving players a peek into the world of the highly polished, professional hentai that we could only dream of getting. While we got the occasional sex scene in a AAA game, or extremely horny M-rated romps with the occasional exposed nipple, it was nothing like the scene over in the Japanese gaming industry. In other words: while otaku were getting their hands on stuff like Des Blood, we got Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.

Of course, there’s actually another side to this. In the aughts, Japan’s hentai scene started pressing more and more boundaries with the extremity of their content – often earning international attention. RapeLay, a visually impressive but morally reprehensible game in which the player stalks, tortures, and assaults a mother and daughter, caught the attention of CNN and other major US news outlets. While, unfortunately, the conversation largely turned into anti-Japanese sentiment in many Western circles, there is a larger point to be drawn from this controversy. America’s relationship to sex in gaming is unhealthy, but there is something worth criticizing about an industry in which titles like RapeLay can make it to production. With an almost totally unfettered ability to just put nasty stuff in games (just so long as you pixelate the genitals,) an industry-wide co-signing of vile content allowed extreme content to metastasize in an alarming way.

In other words – it’s important to have true freedom in artistic expression, but it’s also important to limit the harm said artistic expression does. Too much censorship is puritanical, but too much content that specifically targets women for physical harm made by multi-million dollar corporations is irresponsible and ultimately harmful.

Luckily, a beautiful thing happened around the early 2010s: more indies and mobile gaming. Finally, there were ways to get games to millions of people at once, without the pesky ESRB getting in the way of things. Over the next decade, porn games from all over the world began to crop up on indie platforms and corporate ones alike. Steam opened up the gates to adult content a few years ago, and sites like Itch.Io made it even easier to just make something, put it online, and get it in the right hands. This allowed not only for more international experiences, but more games from people from all walks of life. More titles by women, POC, members of the queer community, and others historically marginalized in mainstream game dev finally had chances to show the world their creations. Those creations are important, too – it reframed adult gaming as not just something for horny dudes, but an outlet for all sorts of people to express their wildest (or most vanilla!) sexual fantasies.

But where do we fit into this ecosystem? Well, at Nutaku, we like to think of ourselves as an evolution of all the ways we consume and talk about porn gaming. Our platform has a fair share of goofy and fun adult titles, like the early Flash games that helped Western gamers dip their toes into the waters of hentai. We also have serious, robust games with equal amounts of in-depth narratives and porn. Our platform hosts free-to-start titles and premium ones alike, with developers working all over the world on all of our titles – big and small! Because these days, you don’t need to order a CD-ROM from a fishy magazine, click around a dodgy Flash game to see some boobs, or spend $50 on a boxed copy of a hentai game that came out five years ago. You can get everything you possibly want in one place now, and Nutaku is proud to be one of those places.

(We’ve even got VR games! But more on those in a future article.)

So – no matter what you “came” up playing, Nutaku’s got you covered. Here’s to a brighter and sexier future for porn gaming!