Softporn Adventure

It was 1991 and I was sitting at my dad's computer with the feeling I was doing something absolutely forbidden. Softporn Adventure was no mystery — the title said it all. And yet: that game taught me more about text adventures back then than many a serious title.

It's a text adventure from On-Line Systems — the company behind the King's Quest series and Sierra On-Line was just getting started. The goal is disarmingly simple: as a nameless hero, you're supposed to "score" with three different women. You start in a bar with cash in your pocket, but the money disappears surprisingly fast. Women are demanding, gambling is unpredictable, and the game wants you to combine cunning, patience, and luck that you don't get for free in life either.

Control is purely text-based — you type commands, the game responds. The parser is period-appropriate, which means it can be stubborn at times. You try writing something reasonable and the game rejects you, as if it actively didn't like you. The inventory management is intuitive, but the logic of some solutions feels more like guessing than deductive thinking. That's pretty much the curse of the entire genre back then. The gambling sequences add a layer of randomness that can either ruin an entire session or save it — it all depends on the mood of the random number generator.

Softporn Adventure is interesting more as a cultural artifact than as a great game. It's the direct predecessor to the Leisure Suit Larry series — Al Lowe took this foundation and built his world from it in 1987. This original version is rougher, less decorated, and lacks Larry's bittersweet charm. The humor is almost entirely missing, and the appeal comes mainly from its period audacity. On the cover of the original 1981 release — yes, the game came out earlier, this version is a later port — three women were in a jacuzzi, with one of them being Ken Williams, Sierra's boss at the time. That was a scandal back then. Today it's more of a charming historical curiosity.

Who would Softporn Adventure appeal to today? Mainly people who remember those times and want to see where it all started, and game history researchers. As a standalone experience, the game is strict, sometimes frustrating, and very much trapped in its era. But firing it up in an emulator for half an hour, clicking through the first few screens, and realizing this was once considered avant-garde — that has its value. At least once.