Original Release: AIVR, 1995, PC
Possibly the world’s first graphics-supported “virtual girl” chatbot, Girlfriend Tracy is simple and limited but ambitious for its time
Girlfriend Tracy (PC, AIVR, 1995)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
“Predictive language” and “language learning model” AI experiments go back farther than most people realize, and Girlfriend Tracy is in this general lineage, albeit a very rudimentary one focused on cooming more than Reading Rainbow.
It’s still an ambitious and interesting title for a 1995 release. AIVR’s company name indicates they were ahead of the time on at least anticipating two big computing trends, and here they essentially try to hack together a modern graphics-supported chatbot under mid-90s and MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 limitations. They even made the software modular, with the ability to buy and plug in other “virtual women” (several more are at least described in their literature, but I’ve only found one other than Tracy for download so far).
Firing up the software has us visit the modest apartment of Tracy, who appears to have just done a couple of nude posing videos in the 90s before either getting out of “the biz” or disappearing under another name (certainly has the rockin’ bod for the job though). The overall goal of the game is to elevate her “Mood” meter, which eventually convinces her to take off her clothes and do assorted fun things with you.
You could just conversate with her too, I suppose, but that aspect is pretty limited. You generally have to keep your sentences to no more than five words, and as you play around with the game you gradually find that the only real options are showering her with compliments and asking how she feels about things before you get down to the nookie nookie. Tracy seems to have no life outside of her virtual PC prison so there’s no asking about her day, her job and so forth.
There are at least some slight touches of sophistication to the conversations, though. She remembers basic details between sessions, like your mood and physical characteristics you’ve told her about. She’ll sometimes follow up on your compliments or questions with a related question of her own, though answering it in a way that continues to conversation rarely seems to work. The game also taps into your PC internal clock to determine the time, and she’ll comment on how long it’s been since you last spoke. And visiting at different times can produce some different results, like if you visit late at night she may be waiting for you in her teddy when you knock on the door.
As far as the sexy content goes, I guess the models could only be talked into nekkid posing and a little self-examination for lumps and irregularities. Anything beyond that is handled in some rather awkward descriptive sex apparently written by some British programmer (“SLURP SLURP SLURP”). The bitmaps are sorta strung together to create a choppy flipbook approximation of video at times, though. I guess the metagame is exploring the parser to figure out what brings these up. Tracy has several outfits she can be commanded to switch between, but once you get her Mood up to 3/4 of the bar or so, you get an animation of her pulling the outfit off and then she’ll lounge about nekkid until told otherwise. There are also several apartment rooms to visit and a couple of poses for her in each, and some video clips to be found through these.
There’s really no challenge to this other than patience, the designers clearly wanted you to get to the “good stuff” without much headache. Grinding her “Mood” up is just a matter of repeated compliments and what are hopefully fairly obvious foreplay techniques, the biggest obstacle is that it can take up to a minute for her to understand and respond to your sentences (this might be alleviated in DOSBox or a similar emulator by playing with cycles). On the technical front, the game directory is peppered with voice clips that are apparently supposed to play in-game, but I couldn’t figure out how to configure the sound and was stuck with PC internal speaker.
Links
- One of the common “abandonware” versions of this floating around requires you to enter the name “Nikel” to get into the game
- Girlfriend Tracy made the New York Times O_O