This was printed in Playboy magazine in April 2001.
It's hard to explain to people who weren't around back then how loose the "rules" were for making games. Conker's Bad Fur Day was definitely trying to market itself as edgy, but aside from some faith-based groups who would be upset, nobody really cared.
Mario in a thong with a ball gag. 🤔
I was around back then and if you think post 9/11 US wasn't a conservative hellscape of intolerance and jingoism I don't know what to tell you?
The reason you don't see advertisements like this is because the kind of investment entities that control game companies big enough to buy ads in playboy don't consider it a profitable venture vs marketing on violence which is considered more family friendly than even the mere presence of a naked body in western globalized societies.
This has been true for a long time and as with anything there are exceptions... and conker is one of them... but it was an exception then as it is now.
If you want to talk about the diversity of topics and tones around sexuality that have been explored in modern indie gaming vs what was acceptable in the past well yeah... nowadays indie artists are able to do waaaaay more without being silenced by christian rightwing fundamentalism and its claw like grip on our society. I don't think that was your point though.
I dunno, I'm pretty sure you can go to the Nintendo e-shop on your switch and find straight up smut. Don't get me started on Steam.
I was scrolling through the eshop deals page and found a game that was called "Real Hentai"
Now I have a tendancy to misread things, and misunderstand reality. So I read the title again.
Real Hentai.
Ok, I'm clearly not getting context here. What's the app icon? Ok, it's half naked hentai girls looking real thirsty.
Ok. I HAVE TO BE missing something here. I must be missing context.
Google search.
"Charming girls in Real Hentai are waiting for your touch. Immerse yourself in a world of high-quality images, where charming girls are waiting for you, demonstrating their seductive forms in the most intriguing poses! The game is created with an emphasis on visual details, conveying the feeling of assembling a real puzzle. As the difficulty increases, the images become more and more piquant. Relax and enjoy every moment of assembling the puzzle."
Ok, no. I read that right. I understood it right. This game IS called Real Hentai, and it's exactly what it sounds like. On a Nintendo system. Sometimes my brain refuses to believe things that are obviously NOT true. I call it my bullshit filter.
It's just this time my brain flagged this as a false positive. That is to say my bullshit filter said "No. Something isn't right here. Nintendo wouldn't allow a hentai game on their eshop. Are you reading it wrong? I bet you're reading it wrong."
And my bullshit meter was REAL persistant that this was obviously fake. I mean, it's a reasonable thought process, right? The same company that censored final fantasy on the nes, and also changed tapper to root beer tapper, and censored the hell out of their own games.
They want to be family friendly. They wouldn't let porn on their system. It made sense for me to think that.
Nintendo let porn on their eshop. I didn't bother checking the esrb rating. I assume M, or maybe even AO. Because I swear. If this thing is rated T, my bullshit filter won't have a functioning barameter to know what's real and what's bullshit.
How do you filter out the bullshit, when the real world is a living breathing onion article come to life??? Even The Onion wouldn't accuse NINTENDO of peddling smut! The satire has to at least be BELIEVABLE!!!
Teen: partial nudity and sexual themes
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/real-hentai-switch/
So it's soft porn
The images are all AI generated as well, which anyone with a few hours and a consumer GPU could create. Low effort AI slopware should disqualify it more than any porn-iness...
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The ONLY game that I'm capable of being pissed about on the Nintendo eShop is Night Trap. Because the President of Nintendo of America testified before congress that Night Trap would never be available for play on Nintendo hardware. I am physically unable to forgive the sheer amount of lying that happened that day.
I am going to trot out the perhaps tired old question of why we're less squeamish of teenagers or children playing violence-based games than we are sex-based games, why we're more comfortable with a 15 year old boy thinking about bullets going into heads than penises going into vaginas. But. Society has failed, answers are noise, nothing matters. Bring on the sea people.
Ok, you had me for the first half....but then that last line threw me.
Bring on the sea people? What do mermaids have to do with this?
I'm referring to a phenomenon of the late Bronze age in which poorly identified people came from the sea to attack the likes of ancient Egypt. Writings of the time do not identify who they were, where they came from, exactly what their mission was, but basically bronze age civilization was coming apart and these folks decided to be on the side of entropy.
It's a reference to the sea people that have been theorised to have brought about the end of the bronze age. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples
Long story short: The USA are not the moral compass of the world (thank god).
+1 basically went through the same mental process.
FWIW, I don't have a problem with adult content on game stores, hell I think we should be more chill about it, but let's call a spade a spade and say what it is. Better yet, separate it into its own category that you can lock or something. Whoever approved it clearly doesn't care.
let’s call a spade a spade and say what it is
I'm not sure how you could get any more explicit and direct than 'real hentai'.
I mean the fact that it's mixed in with all the other games and not in a T&A section.
Nintendo (and Sony, actually) have been highly criticized for censorship of games on their platform. Particularly, adult anime styled games.
I know this may come as a shock to you, so please sit down before you read this, but adults do infact buy and use Nintendo consoles.
Hentai games (or rather called by their proper name, "eroge," which is a portmanteau of "erotic game") are pretty popular amongst Japanese gamers. In fact, many of Japans biggest games or game franchises started off as eroge. Nintendo intentionally cutting out that much of their market would be stupid, as it means less sales of their hardware, obviously.
I am unsure how these games are filtered in the eShop, though I would imagine that a parent would be able to control the ratings or tags of games that would appear in the eShop of their child's account, to prevent these games from being in their child's eShop feed. I don't know how, as I haven't used a Switch since about 2018.
I know this may come as a shock to you, so please sit down before you read this, but adults do infact buy and use Nintendo consoles.
He said, as he tries talking down to a 41 year old, old enough to remember playing an NES in the 80s.
And then follows up with this gem:
I haven’t used a Switch since about 2018.
You can't make this shit up. Or, well, I guess I personally can't make this shit up. I'm not creative enough to create this level of self satire.
I am old enough to remember consoles connecting to an RF Switch, which then plugged into the TV. Channel 3, baby. Whats your point?
Me not using a Switch since shortly after it came out doesn't mean anything. I brought it up because it was part of my point that I could not remember if there was a profile or parental setting to filter eroge on the Switch eShop. Perhaps there was not when I had used the Switch but now there is, a lot can change in 6 years.
I mean, I am pretty sure this hard (not pun intended) advertisement was especially created to not confuse this game for children... And I am pretty sure some didn't care regardless.
Back in those times gaming was still seen as mainly a kid's hobby by most, so I would almost guarantee Conker fooled a lot of parents (didn't fool mine, though), especially being on the N64 and starring a "cute" squirrel as the main protagonist. I would actually argue, though, that parents cared a good deal more then than they do now. Night Trap and Mortal Kombat almost got games censored by the US government in the early 90s, and they'd be seen as quaint now. We've had a ratings system for 30 years and more underage kids than ever are probably playing adult oriented games today. An M rating is just what marketers need to sell their game to the junior high market because parents are ignorant and retailers just want the money, doesn't matter from where.
Conker was a bit of an anomaly even back then.
The best kind of anomaly
In the south park game you could piss on snowballs to make them deal more damage.
Bonus that it’s a coloring page.
If you’re going to make a lewd ad about finding nuts, having his face stuffed between a man’s legs makes way more sense imo.
Haha the culture in 2001 was not ready for that kind of humor. Maybe not even today.
I could see that in the playboy version of the ad.
Even back then this kind of advertisement (and game) was an anomaly coming from Nintendo.
Even back then this kind of advertisement (and game) was an anomaly coming from Nintendo.
Yeah. One reason being that this wasn't a Nintendo game. It was a Rare/THQ game. Nintendo didn't publish this.
This even being on a Nintendo system--subject to Nintendo's review--was a major change. Nintendo of America was as puritanical as it came up through the 16-bit era. Something like this releasing on a Nintendo system was unconscionable as late as 1995.
Nintendo famously changed their mind when Mortal Kombat 1 sold better on Genesis/Mega Drive than Super Nintendo.
Rare was basically a second party developer back in those days. They were given access to internal tools from Nintendo, a direct hotline for help, hell they even developed Nintendo IPs, which was unheard of for a western developer and is still rare even today
is still rare even today
Yes, very Rare of them.
Doesn't change the fact that Nintendo only owned a minority share and that this specific game was not published by Nintendo. They had access to the development tools already, so it was no special treatment for Conker.
Ah, from the minds that brought us Warhammer in electronic form.
More of an anomaly than it is today, TBH. The console stores and Steam really do not care anymore what goes up on their shop, as long as they can see even a little $$$ from it. Porn games on the eShop and Steam are rampant.
Bears vs Squirrels was some of THE BEST multiplayer for it's time.
Still my favorite asymmetric multiplayer
The best part is that the original Conker game was a kids game. A pretty well-designed game for a GBC game, though!
Event for its time it was crazy that it existed
He’s a bit confused, but he got the spirit.
no one that cared had a voice or say in culture or society
Vintage gaming community.
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