6 ms·

It's funny that you treat this as a theoretical tech question rather than, say, just asking one of us ancients who was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago. Yes, it

It's funny that you treat this as a theoretical tech question rather than, say, just asking one of us ancients who was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago. Yes, it was. The Commodore 128, for example, was even capable of displaying extremely short (probably 30 frames or so) hardcore porn loops in what was likely MCGA or the equivalent. I can say this without consulting manuals or spec sheets or anything but being a horny wee geek and seeing my first penetration on my neighbor and fellow adolescent nerd's little TV screen, after waiting a half hour for it to load from a floppy drive (pun intended). We felt like sophisticates at the Playboy Mansion. Also I think I had one monochrome low res boob pic on my Apple IIe, which I hid from my parents like a serial killer hides his special trophy room, at least until I found the box of VHS tapes with the labels torn off under my grandpa's bed. After that, green boobs at like 120x60 resolution or whatever it is wasn't very exciting anymore. So, yes. Yes, it definitely was. :-D

vanderZwan 5y ago
I can't find the source right now, but I recall reading somewhere that aside from being a clever marketing gimmick, Nintendo's official seal wasn't just a response to all the "rubbish" games on Atari (which is what then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi explicitly stated), but also the high number of them that were sex-themed.
- wernsey 5y ago
  Basically the Atari 2600 didn't have any mechanism to prevent third parties from creating games for the system, and this led to a lot of games that were pornographic in nature. Nintendo placed a lot of value in their family-friendly image and locked the Famicom/NES down so that to get your cartridges manufactured you had to go through Nintendo's approval process. Nintendo of America was quite notorious for what they didn't allow, going to some Comics Code Authority-levels of censorship. Here's Angry Video Game Nerd's video about several of the controversial games on the Atari 2600: https://youtu.be/uLOVemRanhw https://youtu.be/uLOVemRanhw
bsenftner 5y ago
Back in '82 I wrote a little Vic-20 assembler that would write over the memory used by the font, so I could create tiles for video games. The first test I made was simply a picture of John Belushi from an "Animal House" still. I showed that at the local Commodore store, and they asked to use it for their display computers and asked me to present at their computer club. After the presentation, a few days later, I started to see all manner of nudes being created with my little program by quite a few people.
kjaftaedi 5y ago
Pretty much every computer magazine from the mid-late 80s onward had lewd software ads in the back. Alas, I was too young to cleverly find a way to purchase these without my parents finding out, and was never able to locate a BBS that hosted this type of content.
- rasfincher 5y ago
  I had not thought about these ads in forever, but when I saw the ad in the article I had a somewhat Pavlovian response.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  My uncle had Leisure Suit Larry on his computer and I remember playing it simply for the fun of the game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry
  - jandrese 5y ago
    IIRC Larry didn't get much more than a mildly risque hot tub shot and some heavily censored humping. Didn't it have a black bar that bounced up and down or something like that? It was a comedy game first and porn game a distant second.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Yeah it was pretty bland in that way. The scene at the end was a little bit better but not much.
  - ameminator 5y ago
    As long as you were able to get Larry a "date". It gets a little dark if you don't...
  - cmsefton 5y ago
    I remember Quest for Glory 2 from Sierra Games had a sequence where you could purchase X-Ray glasses and you could wear them to see Zayishah, one of the central characters, naked in the game (rather pixelated it must be said).
Sharlin 5y ago
Yeah, this article really made me feel old. And I'm only 37. My first contact with digitized smut happened around 1995 I think, when my friend showed me some porn game with short live-action clips on his Amiga (which is sadly not even mentioned in the article, even though its multimedia – and thus porn – capabilities were from another planet compared to PCs in the early 90s.) Incidentally, I just recently wrote a PCX decoder for a retrographics project of mine (https://github.com/jdahlstrom/retrofire https://github.com/jdahlstrom/retrofire if anyone's interested).
Zenst 5y ago
Confirmed, even pre PC micro's as you say could achieve this feat. I personally did a demo that I slipped onto the local computer stores machine that sat in high memory (reset resistant unless held down for few seconds more than a press) TSR kinda thing upon an Atari ST that had a selection of the finest artwork that would cycle thru the selection after a delay of a few minutes displaying a screen capture of a normal desktop. Few weeks later version two had an animated flying phallus sprite across the screen. But for a generation that found amusement in 55378008 upon a calculator, then it was inevitable.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
And them strip poker games on the C64 and the likes: at least we had to learn and beat the computer at five-cards draw (Texas Hold'Em was that famous yet back then) to see naked women!
- dole 5y ago
  C64 Artworx Strip Poker and the pirated data disks that were always corrupted. I think I'm actually pretty good at (video) poker now because of years of playing through these in their different incarnations.
- glonq 5y ago
  All I did was swap Melissa5.pic with Melissa1.pic so that she would start off naked. Hence I'm still shit at poker...
jug 5y ago
This made me distinctly remember a topless Cindy Crawford, but by then I was already on my Amiga 500. That gave the pictures full 4096 color HAM glory though at a time early PC's still largely rocked 16 color displays during roughly the 286 era.
jandrese 5y ago
Not full up retro, but I remember one dial up BBS service in my local dialing zone had a 6 disc CD changer and the sixth disk was loaded full of porn. Downloading at 14.4kbps meant getting about 100kb per minute, but since even the high quality stuff was only 640x480 that wasn't so bad. The big difference on the 8-bit micros is no Internet, so you would have to find someone physically selling the disc, which was very hard to find. Plus digital scanners were extremely expensive professional gear and digital cameras basically didn't exist. Production was seriously bottlenecked. Still, like life, porn finds a way.
foreverathome 5y ago
"I was there when the strength of Men failed"

vanderZwan 5y ago

I can't find the source right now, but I recall reading somewhere that aside from being a clever marketing gimmick, Nintendo's official seal wasn't just a response to all the "rubbish" games on Atari (which is what then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi explicitly stated), but also the high number of them that were sex-themed.

wernsey 5y ago
Basically the Atari 2600 didn't have any mechanism to prevent third parties from creating games for the system, and this led to a lot of games that were pornographic in nature. Nintendo placed a lot of value in their family-friendly image and locked the Famicom/NES down so that to get your cartridges manufactured you had to go through Nintendo's approval process. Nintendo of America was quite notorious for what they didn't allow, going to some Comics Code Authority-levels of censorship. Here's Angry Video Game Nerd's video about several of the controversial games on the Atari 2600: https://youtu.be/uLOVemRanhw https://youtu.be/uLOVemRanhw

bsenftner 5y ago

Back in '82 I wrote a little Vic-20 assembler that would write over the memory used by the font, so I could create tiles for video games. The first test I made was simply a picture of John Belushi from an "Animal House" still. I showed that at the local Commodore store, and they asked to use it for their display computers and asked me to present at their computer club. After the presentation, a few days later, I started to see all manner of nudes being created with my little program by quite a few people.

kjaftaedi 5y ago

Pretty much every computer magazine from the mid-late 80s onward had lewd software ads in the back. Alas, I was too young to cleverly find a way to purchase these without my parents finding out, and was never able to locate a BBS that hosted this type of content.

rasfincher 5y ago
I had not thought about these ads in forever, but when I saw the ad in the article I had a somewhat Pavlovian response.
newsbinator 5y ago
My uncle had Leisure Suit Larry on his computer and I remember playing it simply for the fun of the game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry
- jandrese 5y ago
  IIRC Larry didn't get much more than a mildly risque hot tub shot and some heavily censored humping. Didn't it have a black bar that bounced up and down or something like that? It was a comedy game first and porn game a distant second.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yeah it was pretty bland in that way. The scene at the end was a little bit better but not much.
- ameminator 5y ago
  As long as you were able to get Larry a "date". It gets a little dark if you don't...
- cmsefton 5y ago
  I remember Quest for Glory 2 from Sierra Games had a sequence where you could purchase X-Ray glasses and you could wear them to see Zayishah, one of the central characters, naked in the game (rather pixelated it must be said).

Sharlin 5y ago

Yeah, this article really made me feel old. And I'm only 37. My first contact with digitized smut happened around 1995 I think, when my friend showed me some porn game with short live-action clips on his Amiga (which is sadly not even mentioned in the article, even though its multimedia – and thus porn – capabilities were from another planet compared to PCs in the early 90s.) Incidentally, I just recently wrote a PCX decoder for a retrographics project of mine (https://github.com/jdahlstrom/retrofire https://github.com/jdahlstrom/retrofire if anyone's interested).

Zenst 5y ago

Confirmed, even pre PC micro's as you say could achieve this feat. I personally did a demo that I slipped onto the local computer stores machine that sat in high memory (reset resistant unless held down for few seconds more than a press) TSR kinda thing upon an Atari ST that had a selection of the finest artwork that would cycle thru the selection after a delay of a few minutes displaying a screen capture of a normal desktop. Few weeks later version two had an animated flying phallus sprite across the screen. But for a generation that found amusement in 55378008 upon a calculator, then it was inevitable.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

And them strip poker games on the C64 and the likes: at least we had to learn and beat the computer at five-cards draw (Texas Hold'Em was that famous yet back then) to see naked women!

dole 5y ago
C64 Artworx Strip Poker and the pirated data disks that were always corrupted. I think I'm actually pretty good at (video) poker now because of years of playing through these in their different incarnations.
glonq 5y ago
All I did was swap Melissa5.pic with Melissa1.pic so that she would start off naked. Hence I'm still shit at poker...

jug 5y ago

This made me distinctly remember a topless Cindy Crawford, but by then I was already on my Amiga 500. That gave the pictures full 4096 color HAM glory though at a time early PC's still largely rocked 16 color displays during roughly the 286 era.

jandrese 5y ago

Not full up retro, but I remember one dial up BBS service in my local dialing zone had a 6 disc CD changer and the sixth disk was loaded full of porn. Downloading at 14.4kbps meant getting about 100kb per minute, but since even the high quality stuff was only 640x480 that wasn't so bad. The big difference on the 8-bit micros is no Internet, so you would have to find someone physically selling the disc, which was very hard to find. Plus digital scanners were extremely expensive professional gear and digital cameras basically didn't exist. Production was seriously bottlenecked. Still, like life, porn finds a way.

foreverathome 5y ago

"I was there when the strength of Men failed"