The often gross and rarely sexy history of video game sex scenes

It’s Summer Lovin’ Week here at Mashable, which means things are getting steamy. In honor of the release of Crazy Rich Asians, we’re celebrating onscreen love and romance, looking at everything from our favorite fictional couples to how Hollywood’s love stories are evolving. Think of it as our love letter to, well, love.

Warning: This article contains images and videos that may not be safe for work.

In the earliest, most technologically limited days of video games, developers concocted the simplest of designs, leading to some extremely efficient, iconic creations. There were the balls and paddles of Pong, the spaceships of Space Invaders, the asteroids of Asteroids, all of which conveyed so much with so little.

It was only a matter of time before horny people got their hands on those pixels.

Like with all kinds of media, horny creators saw the potential in video games, a medium which offered a level of interaction that was unlike anything else that came before it. They were ready to hop right in.

The only problem was, video games weren’t ready for erotica.

Early erotic era

When the Atari 2600 launched in 1977, it was the home console that launched a thousand home consoles, helping to turn the video gaming industry into a home entertainment titan. Around the same time, the MS-DOS operating system was making computer gaming a big hit.

As the Atari and MS-DOS became more popular in the early ’80s, some developers realized that perhaps there was a certain private market that they could tap into. A market that wouldn’t really succeed in a public place like an arcade.

The first erotic video games (outside of text-based games) began popping up on home consoles and computers in 1982, an era when no developers could have possibly been bragging about the graphics of their games — if they did, they were simply wrong.

Look at that. Look at that naked man. That is the unnamed protagonist of X-Man, a 1983 game for the Atari 2600 that had absolutely no relation to Marvel’s X-Men. Not exactly an appealing image.

Or how about this image, from the 1982 Atari 2600 game Custer’s Revenge:

Not only do these images look truly terrible, the games they come from are kind of horrific — something that seemed to be a theme in early adult games. 

Back before the ESRB existed and nobody was keeping a check on the games that anyone was making, developers of adult games had only one thing in mind: sex and nudity. In building games around that, they threw all decency out the window and came up with games that were almost always degrading to women and sometimes even centered around sexual assault and rape.

Take Custer’s Revenge, for example, one of the most notorious games to come out of the ’80s. Players control the titular Custer, based on American General George Armstrong Custer, who’s sporting only a cowboy hat, kerchief, and cowboy boots. Custer has to dodge arrows in order to reach a naked Native American woman tied to a pole and, presumably, rape her.

Meanwhile in X-Man, the game opens with a scene of a naked woman running away from a naked man, who himself is being chased by a pair of scissors, a crab, and a set of teeth. After navigating through a maze, players are met with a scene of the man and woman having sex.

Check out this (not safe for work) gameplay footage:

There were a handful of other early adult games like that. In Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em, players control naked women who run around try to catch semen dropping from a man masturbating on a roof. In Burning Desire, players control a naked man hanging off a helicopter who is trying to put out fires around a trapped woman, who will grab onto the man with her mouth to be lifted to safety.

Of course, not all adult games were completely tasteless in the early days. Japanese company Koei produced Night Life in 1982, the first video game to have any nude imagery, was intended as an aid for couples’ sex lives. But examples like that are few and far between.

As technology gradually improved, one would think that more and more erotic games would pour into the world and they would get better and better. But that’s not what happened.

Growing pains

In 1983, the video game market crashed, thanks in part to reckless spending and competition from the home computer market. Companies and investors were pouring too much money into the production of games and hardware, expecting every project to be a hit, but consumers just couldn’t keep up with the output. Developers didn’t make their money back and effectively put themselves out of business.

Two years later, Nintendo slowly began introducing the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to the world. With the NES came a new kind of video game market, one in which the company behind the hardware didn’t play so fast and loose with the kinds of games that people made for the system.

For quite a long time, developers basically ignored romance and sex, otherwise they wouldn’t get the Official Nintendo Seal of Approval. For a while, the only place to find anything even remotely sexy in the world of video games was on home computers, but even then options were pretty limited.

It wasn’t until the proliferation of the internet in the early ’90s that erotic games really resurfaced. With the help of the internet, horny developers once again had a market they could work with, able to work around the limitations placed by hardware developers who didn’t want to tarnish their family-friendly brands.

Visual novels and point-and-click adventures proved to be the most popular genres of adult games in that era, in which players navigate through dialogues and/or solve puzzles to eventually see nudity — sometimes just straight up digitized pornographic photographs. Sometimes it was tongue-in-cheek fun, like with the Leisure Suit Larry series, other times it was even more disturbing than the games from the early ’80s.

Visually, these games still had a long way to go.

Approaching the uncanny valley

Over the decades and into the current age of video games, graphics continued to get better and better. At least, in some ways.

In the mid-’90s, 3D games became a thing, and you better believe horny designers wanted to take advantage of that extra dimension. Things didn’t look great in the beginning, of course, because round shapes were a little too difficult for the technology to handle at the time and textures were still pretty rough. 

Still, technology kept getting better, each new console bringing better hardware that allowed developers to make their games look more “realistic.”

Image: Vivendi Universal games

As we moved into the current decade, we began taking steps toward the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley is a sort of relationship between design and human emotion and the theory of it postulates that, when something like a video game character or robot looks like a real life human, it can cause a weird discomfort.

Take a look at this “sex scene” from the 2010 game Mass Effect 2, in which it’s impossible to ignore that the two characters aren’t moving quite right and thus causing a weird dissonance from what’s intended to be a sexy moment.

There’s just something not quite right in this scene. The movements are a little off, their faces are a little off, everything’s a little off.

And then there’s this scene from The Witcher 3, which came out in 2015. It’s very clearly in a fantasy setting but that doesn’t mean the two characters’ interactions should look unreal. But that’s the sad fact of intimate scenes in gaming right now.

If you don’t pay too much attention, it’s not so bad, but once you bare down on the details it can be very off-putting.

Look at this image and tell me it’s sexy:

Maybe someday we’ll get to a point where we can make video game assets not look completely horrifying in these situations. But right now we’re not there.