Nintendo in the late 1980s was very interested in playing in different storytelling genres, and they tasked Sakamoto with developing a game focused solely on the narrative. Sakamoto said Nintendo was considering "unraveling the story line and enjoying being part of an interactive story" as one pitch for game design.

Video game characters do not have great sex lives. The sex in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the biggest releases of the decade, was lambasted by PC Gamer as "horrifying" and "truly awful" for its weak writing and general clunkiness; character models designed to run and shoot just look strange when made to contort in moments of intimacy. But while Cyberpunk was criticized for its bad sex--and for flubbing LGBTQ representation--the erotic indie title Hardcoded was gathering praise for its explicit, queer-friendly sexuality set against a dystopian cyberpunk backdrop. Sex has been part of gaming from the beginning--Atari 2600 owners could buy Custer's Revenge, a heavily criticized rape fantasy that sold 80,000 copies--but for most of the medium's history, any sexuality was aimed at straight white men with all the subtlety of a horny sledgehammer. It was seen as a mark of maturity for the God of War franchise when its 2018 installment abandoned the subject entirely rather than return to the cringeworthy "Here are some tits, you rube" minigames of previous entries.

Much like sex itself, it's hard to get a sex game right on first try. While the genre known as interactive fiction often explores themes of sex and sexuality, players of mainstream video games are used to little more than the occasional, awkward and intensely unerotic cut scene. Creators, consumers and critics of this relatively young artform are still figuring out what the culture deems acceptable. That can lead to difficult conversations – as it did this month with one highly divisive scene in a game released early this year. Christine Love is a writer and programmer known for making visual novels: interactive narrative games with static 2D art, in which the player's choices often involve selecting which response to give in conversation scenes.