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Sexy video game from the Apple //e era

Cory Doctorow at 5:41 pm Fri, Aug 10, 2012

Kindle

I'm a little unclear on how "Interlude," the early-1980s pornographic video game advertised here, did its thing. Was it just dirty stories? Were there computer-generated pornographic animations? Jaggedy low-rez scans?

Vintage ad after dark

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: ads • Gadgets • Games • Old school • Sex

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voiceinthedistance

Va va va voom ASCII art perhaps?

http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/pinups/pinup00.txt
- Box of Cotton Swabs
  
  MMMMMM
- cdh1971
  
  A limited version of this was included with Castle Wolfenstein as a kind of Easter Egg.
  
  IIRC, you’d have to type ‘hot coffee’ at a certain point in the game – I forget which. After the erotic easter egg, it would show a brief advert and info for obtaining the full version.
http://twitter.com/Epers Eddie Perkins

Jeez. You’d be better of just turning the dial on that TV to the scrambled porn channel.
- http://unutterable.org GiovanniGF
  
  Or the t-shirts ad above the comments.
  - israfella
    
    There’s ads on Boing Boing??
    - cfuse
      
      For some.
  - BombBlastLightingWaltz
    
    The “I Use To Care” T-shirted pycho stare is getting old fast.
grimc

The internet knows everything
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niVR02W2xwA
- Donald Petersen
  
  Stack o’ dimes, ladies & germs… at least, that’s my own personal result. YMMV.
- haineux
  
  I found this one for Interlude II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8W7wmA7rnU
  
  I think we’ve found the distant ancestors of the Kama Sutra Apps.
Antinous / Moderator

And….by today’s advertising standards, she’d be considered obese.
- Godfree
  
  I wouldn’t say obese. I would say…mature. This day & age, she looks more like a MILF.
- benher
  
  Chubby chasers always come out ahead! Damn them all to hell!!!
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  Maybe in certain circles, but the only people that would be saying it are trashy magazines trying to stir up controversy.
  
  Or, you know, blog moderators ;)
bcsizemo

I remember way back in the BBS days there were gl softcore animations out there. Probably more advanced than what an Apple II could handle, but certainly 386 territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRASP_GL_library_format
- Lexicat
  
  Nope, the Apple II had x-rated animated postcards (ah what fellow high school students will share during assembly language programming class in the mid 80s).
  - oldtaku
    
    And they’d use the disk drive to make ‘obscene’ sound effects. grind grind shooka shooka.
  - ponzicar
    
    That must be what I found as a kid. With our Apple ][ we got a big box of copied discs, and I loved to try random games out. I found one that was a picture of a man on a beach, who would get pleasured by a woman in a crudely animated scene when you pressed a button. Being quite young at the time, I didn’t quite understand what was going on. However, my mother did, who quickly threw out the disc and yelled at the people we got the computer from.
oldtaku

Porno Mad Libs!
http://www.facebook.com/kevinbingham Kevin ‘Bynk’ Bingham

Oh, baby! Just look at that monitor! Wonder how much RAM is in that baby.
- http://mattdm.org/ Matthew Miller
  
  48kb.
  - Kathy Applebaum
    
    Looks like it was attached to a TV, so may have been only 16K.
    - nixiebunny
      
      When I worked in a store that sold them (1978), they were all sold with 13″ Trinitron color TVs. The RAM was user-upgradeable – but I think you’d have to pay upwards of $200 for 16K of chips.
      - vrey_oneida
        
        I remember when I upgraded my Tandy 1000 SL from 384K to 640K–I got 8 32K chips that I had to install directly on the board. I felt l33t before l33t existed. :D
Ant

http://www.filfre.net/2012/02/sex-comes-to-the-micros/
- Jorpho
  
  Wait, what? You were supposed to take the number and then look it up in an accompanying booklet!?
  
  Well, at least that would have made it difficult to pirate.
  - nixiebunny
    
    And difficult to obtain satisfaction.
- http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
  
  That first image was only a little worse than Strip Poker for the Commodore 64 (but then, I only had a black-and-white TV)
Preston Sturges

Ludes figured prominently in sex back then.
nixiebunny

Judging from the photo, the only way to get your computer nerd into bed back then was to bring the computer to bed with you.
- http://twitter.com/vornicus Dan Uznanski
  
  So, not much different from today then.
GersonOnTheT

Here’s the complete text of the program (courtesy of a quick Google search): http://www.textfiles.com/sex/EROTICA/S/sexinter.txt
LinkMan

I’m pretty sure that’s an original Apple ][, which predated the //e by about 6 years.
- nixiebunny
  
  I was going to mention that as well. The punctuation matters a lot.
- http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11
  
  Could be a ][+.
  - LinkMan
    
    I thought ][+ at first, too (my first computer was a ][+), but the power light in the lower left corner of the keyboard was raised like a key on the ][ and was made flush with the case on the ][+, so I'm pretty sure this is a ][.
    - http://bhtooefr.org/ Eric Rucker
      
      It’s also the wrong color to actually be an Apple, so it’s a clone. So it’s most likely a 48k ][+ clone (because by the time the clones were actually widespread, 48k was the norm), Taiwan was cranking those out like crazy.
      - Vian Lawson
        
        I rather adore that you are taking the time and effort to identify the, er … hardware. And with such affecting particulars!
http://twitter.com/jtnix jtnix

In the early 1980′s, the ad alone would have been a enough for me!
- http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland
  
  And likely was, for many.
http://www.cruft-private-janitorial.com/ Michael Johnson

Defenders of the Crown always will have my … um… yeah, ok, “heart” I guess … http://extralives.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/defenderofthecrown_ad.jpg
http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

You should run that software on a Tandy. (If you’re into leather)
seyo

hehe. Reminds me of the very first porn game I ever encountered, come to think of it, the last really, if you don’t count the Leisure Suit Larry games: MacPlaymate

It was pretty damn raunchy. My parents’ friends had it on their Mac Plus and when we’d go over to their house for dinner I’d sneak away while they were smoking their after dinner cigarettes over uncleared plates to play a game or two. That’s when I learned that you could eject a 2.5″ floppy disc from the drive much faster using an unbent paper clip (also known in the Mac world as an “ejectrode.”)
Heather C

My friend still had this on her computer when I was in highschool! I remember it. You would fill out a short questionnaire, (I remember one question was a choice between two or three celebrities to date- I chose Steve Martin,) and the program would suggest an evening’s activities for you and your paramour. It was very corny. I was trying to remember what the name of the program was, so thank you!
- Heather C
  
  I even remember which option I was given for choosing Steve Martin:
  
  “99. The Ultimate Experience — Your love-life will never be the same! Congratulations! You have found the most secret, the most sought after Interlude of all time… The Ultimate Experience. And that it is. After this Interlude, your love life may never again be the same!
  
  The Ultimate Experience takes place over FOUR nights! It calls for patience and restraint — and a great deal of both! But the reward can be one of the greatest sexual experiences of your life.
  
  You are going to recreate your “very first time”. You are going to build up to a libido-shattering crescendo with all of the excitement of that very first time, BUT with all the experience that you currently have. The closer you follow each night’s instructions, the more gratifying the experience will be!”…
  - morcheeba
    
    you can’t lose with Steve Martin!
mkanoap

I remember seeing an animation on an Apple ][ that used the floppy drive as sound effects. The animation would cycle between two images with the floppy drive head making a rasping sound with each thrust. The speed of the animation would speed up (along with the drive rasping) until the crescendo, upon which the drive would make the same rattling sound familiar to anyone who has heard an apple ][ boot from a floppy.

I remember thinking at the time that the porn was lame, but an extremely clever use of the hardware.
Bloo

Well, now we know what androids dream of…
- malindrome
  
  Yeah, but only the really boring androids from high school that you never talk to anymore.
- cdh1971
  
  In high-school the android, or rather, artificial person, with whom I was intimate was fully functional — programmed in multiple techniques — fully versatile…
  
  He said he came from the future and I believe him. He claimed his great grandparents were PowerBooks.
David Jones

I used to have this many years ago. If I recall correctly, the program simply asked you a bunch of questions (and asked your partner), and based on your answers at that sitting offered up an “interlude”, which I think was actually a reference to a hard copy manual that listed many of the interludes. However, there were a few interludes that you couldn’t read in advance, and when the computer suggested one of them, it just displayed it on the screen. These interludes were all suggestions for some sort of erotic evening with your partner.
Mitch_M

Makes me nostalgic for the magazines I swiped from my parents. Who is going to be brave and admit that they can name the model? Leslie Bovee I think.
- http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog
  
  Judging from the age of the ad, I am guessing non rasé
- http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson
  
  …and that sent me off to an image search for Leslie Bovee.
  I need to think things through sometimes.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000127879279 Chip Daniels

Didn’t anyone look at the ad? It clearly shows that if you purchase the product, a beautiful half naked woman comes to your house, and curls up in your bed next to your Apple computer.
Jeez.
Mister44

This looks to be per-Leisure Suit Larry.
cstatman

sad, I remember this program. it was a precursor to the “Purity Test” http://www.puritytest.org/ and the idea was you would have a party and “interview” the young ladies at your party, and it would get them revved up by talking about naughty things. Ah, to be a computer nerd in 1982….

Oddly, this leads to the NEXT Gen, mike saenz “Mac Playmate” for the 128k Mac, which semi had graphics… http://macintoshgarden.org/games/macplaymate
boloid97

I had this briefly when I was in junior high. I didn’t have a clue what it was supposed to do at the time. I probably overwrote the floppy with Karateka or something more worthwhile not long after.
- http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland
  
  Windwalker FTW.
noah django

man, it must’ve been hard times for Gilda Radner.
Souse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure

Back when I was writing computer games, me and my business partner had lunch with Ken and Roberta in Boston, discussing a purchase of our company.
- zish
  
  That computer is too close to the hot tub! They could all get electrocuted! Do they have no concern for personal safety?
  - Felton / Moderator
    
    Hot Tub Time Machine II
- http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland
  
  Oh wow. I read about them in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
  
  Did you ever make human soup in their famous hot tub?
zish

I believe the point was that the Apple II got hot and bothered. Rather, it got overheated, because the ports underneath it were blocked by the satin sheets. The Apple II did not have a fan to cool it’s innards down, after all.
snagglepuss

No hard drive jokes yet ? You people really ARE nerds.
David Trotsky

Ahhh, still have my Apple IIe. Starts right up. I remember my father paying around $2,200 in 1980. He had to apply for an Apple Credit card to float the payments. That would be something to have now. I remember a white credit card with the apple logo on it.
Frank Diekman

It’s all about when you view the page…
Paul Guertin

I remember being confused by those ads in Nibble magazine. I must have been 11 or 12 at the time.
picklefactory

I can’t help but leave this here — Jason Scott’s “The Atomic Level of Porn” which discusses this game among many others. http://vimeo.com/7088524