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 if anyone's interested).

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.

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.

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

I remember getting kicked out of Leisure Suit Larry because it asked "age verification" questions in a time before I could just use Google.

https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

As long as you were able to get Larry a "date". It gets a little dark if you don't...

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).

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.

Yeah it was pretty bland in that way.

The scene at the end was a little bit better but not much.

"Ken sent me"

I had not thought about these ads in forever, but when I saw the ad in the article I had a somewhat Pavlovian response.

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.

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.

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

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!

All I did was swap Melissa5.pic with Melissa1.pic so that she would start off naked.

Hence I'm still shit at poker...

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.

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.

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.

"I was there when the strength of Men failed"