Histories of media technologies involve diverse experimentations with erotic, pornographic, and sexually explicit content. Sexual content was adopted early in photography as it was in visual variations such as the stereoscope, 16 mm, 8 mm, and 35 mm film and video, and, later, in networked media from Usenet to the WWW (e.g., Williams, 1989; Coopersmith, 1999; Paasonen, 2018a). The videogame is no exception. While the role of erotic, pornographic, and sexually explicit early videogame development has been cited by historians earlier (often in passing), few case studies chart the region-specific functions and roles of such titles. In this article, we do exactly that: our goal is to analyse independently developed Finnish ‘fuck games’—playable software typically implying or simulating sexual intercourse—of the 1980s and 1990s in order to identify their fundamental elements as objects produced in specific regional space and time. While these elements can thus be claimed to reflect Finland's computer and media culture during the era, they also provide a perspective from which to better understand the overall development and history of local, pre-Internet DIY labour within game design.

We use the marker of fuck games to capture some of the material's specific style and mode. Made by young people for other young people in a male homosocial context, the games are hardly adult. To call them erotic would be inaccurate in that they exhibit little aesthetic or artistic intent; they are not concerned with depictions of desire and it is not obvious that their intention is to sexually arouse. This is also why we have chosen not to label the games as pornographic (additionally, they display little familiarity with the generic conventions or aesthetics of pornography).