Sex in video games has been around since the highly controversial inclusion of a rape sequence in 1982’s Custer’s Revenge. And ever since then, sex in video games has been a major point of contention and heated debate within the industry. About the only thing that’s more controversial than sex, in fact, is censorship in video games. According to an article from Kotaku, it looks like Steam is guilty of doing just that with another sex game, the point-and-click “erotic thriller” adventure game Strangers in a Strange Land.
Strangers in a Strange Land, surprisingly enough, has nothing to do with Robert A. Heinlein’s classic 1961 science-fiction novel. Instead, it follows a young college student named Billy on vacation with his step-family. It also features a ton of peep shows in which you watch crudely animated people have sex. Unfortunately for developer SOMG, the voyeuristic nature of this game led to it getting caught in Steam’s war on porn games. Valve asked SOMG to censor the sexual content in its game if it wants to remain on Steam. The erotic thriller was actually originally released July 28th, but was then removed from Steam by Valve so it could be censored.
The same thing happened to another sex game back in July called House Party, a party simulator which encouraged players to engineer sexual scenarios for their hedonistic party guests. That game quickly and surprisingly climbed Steam’s top sellers chart in just a few days before being pulled from the online store over its pornographic content. Valve then asked developer Eek Games to censor the more explicit parts of its game before it could return to the storefront. They complied, but the whole censorship fiasco led to some criticism on Steam’s part.
Strangers in a Strange Land is back up on Steam, but now whenever players run into sex scenes, a big red sticker with the word “Censored” covers up the screen. Thankfully for gamers that want to keep sex in their games, the developers of both this game and House Party have made patches available to download on their sites that allow people to play the games in all their original pervy glory.