Original Release: Victory Games, 1986, MS-DOS/C64/Apple II
An adaptation of a board game by the same name, Dr. Ruth quizzes you on your sexual knowledge.
Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex (MS-DOS, Victory Games, 1986)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
If you’re under the age of 35-ish or so, you likely have no idea who Dr. Ruth Westheimer is. If you were alive and had a developed-enough brain to have been conscious in the 1980s, however, you may remember her as the kindly, wizened older woman who became the public face of sex advice for a while.
Dr. Ruth actually has a really fascinating background — she fled Germany as a child as the Nazis were coming to power, ended up enlisting in what would become the Israeli army as a sniper, then after being wounded by an exploding mortar in battle ended up emigrating to the United States and getting a doctorate in psychology and human sexuality. She became the media face of sex ed in the early 80s by hosting a very frank Q-and-A radio talk show in New York, which became super-popular and landed her several appearances on the Letterman show. From there she moved on to a series of TV shows that lasted into the early 90s, but around the mid-90s she kind of disappeared entirely from popular culture, so people born from like 1990-ish onward may well have never heard of her (though she was a household name before that).
Well, even former Israeli army badasses turned kindly sex therapists aren’t immune to the occasional chintzy licensed product, I guess. The Game of Good Sex is a very simplistic sexual/health trivia quiz game that was probably slapped together in a week at most. A lot of horndog kids pirated it back in the BBS days anyway, because huh huh huh huh sex. Well, they actually probably learned some things they didn’t know, since this was the pre-Internet dark ages, but as an actual game it’s about as boring and unerotic as it gets.
The game seems to be intended to be played by a male-female couple, alternating turns at the keyboard answering questions and trying to outscore their partner. In the days before graphics in computer games I could actually maybe see some people doing this as a novelty, but it couldn’t have aged any worse. Anyway, the questions are pretty much just basic knowledge, and they sometimes even repeat themselves in the same sequence. Apparently it’s based on a board game released around the same time — maybe that’s more interesting.
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Gameplay Video