Doin’ it Atari 2600 style

Naughty productions featuring nudity and sex have helped to drive various industries, including printed books and home video. Yep, you can thank that the porn industry for helping spawn and evolve the development of various video formats that ultimately put that shiny My Little Pony DVD collection on your shelf (soon in HD, I’m sure).

With a polite nod to naughty nostalgia, Kotaku takes a look back at the earliest days of home videogames, featuring those 8-bit beauties on the Atari 2600.

Some of the most infamous were created by Mystique, which later sold the rights of its three games to Playground. Of the three, Custer’s Revenge (1992) may be the most famous with a rather happy, pants-less pixelated cowboy looking for something other than a horse to mount. The other two games were Bachelor Party, a poor excuse for a Breakout clone, and Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em, playing much like Kaboom! but with very different bombs.

These games were more silly than sexy, proving that vulgarity is in the eye of the gamer and can involve a lot of imagination. Still, it was enough for various groups to protest. When Playground took over the games, they repackaged the three games, produced a few more and sold two games per box as “double-ender” cartridges, a pretty unique format that some collector’s still appreciate. Of course, Playground’s new games had even worse graphics than Mystique’s, so only six carts (12 games) were released.

The Kataku post is a nice nostalgic look at those naughty 8-bits, pointing out the graphic details in Beat ‘Em that were pretty advanced for the time and reminding us of how naughty even the game manuals can be:

With the power shut off, gently insert your Mystique video game cartridge into your Atari 2600 Video Computer System in the same manner as you would with any compatible game cartridge. Turning the switch “on” will activate the “foreplay” mode. This is very similar to the “attract” mode seen on many arcade games.

Oh, so very, er, naughty?The very joystick that came with the system was naughtier than these games. A post at FlowTV also reminds us that Universal Gamex also tried to get in on the pr0n with its single game, X-Man (1983). The maze game’s money shot was a larger pixelated image on the screen that was meant to offer more detail yet was still as silly as the Custer and his l’il Custer.

In the ‘80s my friends where emailing each other ASCII text calendar pages of naked ladies (and yes, it took hows to get the file on our 400 baud telephone handset coupler modems – yeah, I still have mine in the original box). Once you got it printed on the dot-matrix printer, you had to stand back 10 feet and squint at 8 printed pages just to make it seem like you actually saw some naughty bits. Games and porn have certainly gone from titillation and “strip tease” to “here ya go, there it all is” thanks to inexpensive home video equipment, super powered graphics engines and the internet.

Read [FlowTV] Also Read [Atari Age] Via [Kotaku]