In the first panel, it is referring to an old Commodore 64 game called “Sex Games”. In that game, there were five levels: four of them with a woman in one sexual position, and the final one was a five person gangbang with only one woman. You had to wiggle the joystick to match the motions to get to orgasm and go on to the next level. The graphics were awful, but, hey, this was 1985.
In the second panel, it is referring to a program called ELIZA which was written in the 1960s but eventually ported onto the C64. At the time, it was an amusing program that would try to “talk to you” by finding key words in your output and reflecting them back to you. To get the dialogue correct, I played with an online version a bit to get some interesting responses to use.
In the third panel, it’s referring to ZORK I, an excellent Infocom game that I loved playing. Even now the imagination behind these games is still second to none, and I spent many an hour playing them again and again. I think this panel is the only time a young girl appears in the comic; because of the nature of the comic I purposely made sure young people didn’t appear unless they had absolutely no sexual role in the comic.
In the last panel, I made a deliberate flub. Commodore 64 generally used 5 1/4 floppies, not 3 1/2, but 3 1/2 is funnier so I went with that.
Holy crap! I played all those games on my Commodore 64. I remember that first panel was a game that started off as jerking off with a crudely drawn hand on a dick, and eventually made it to the gang bang with a chick in the middle and two guys on either side running a train. Porn Games have come so far since then.
You know, what really made me think was how progressive that game actually WAS. I mean, the final panel where there is actually male-male anal sex involved, and NO ONE COMPLAINED, makes me wonder if we’ve actually gotten more homophobic. People would definitely say shit about that last panel now.
Is the psychoanalysis dialogue related to ELIZA/Emacs-Dr?
It’s actual ELIZA dialogue.
Heh, nowadays retro-computing and make YouTube videos about that hobby is all the rage, so chances are people will understand this strip’s references even if they never used the real thing.
The 3.5 is kind of a wash, funny-wise. Smaller, but unlike 5.25 disks, they weren’t actually floppy.