Original Release: New Machine Publishing, 1993, PC
An early CD-ROM era porn “game” starring a fairly major publisher of the video scene
The Interactive Adventures of Seymour Butts (PC, New Machine, 1993)
Where to Buy: eBay
Review by: Master-B
Like many of these early CD era “adult” games, Seymour Butts is basically a collection of Quicktime movie clips that rattles along tied together by an interactive Powerpoint. “Gameplay” is limited to clicking on locations, as Seymour trawls a beachside California street near his house for its unusual stock of loose women, and very occasionally you’ll be asked a question you have to answer correctly (or face a huge rejection). Think a more hardcore but even less interactive version of Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties and you’ve mostly got it.
To be fair to the production, in 1993 this kind of thing was a much bigger deal and these janky-seeming discs actually did good business for a while. Consider that nobody but the most hardcore nerds had the internet yet, AOL had just started mailing out its infamous discs when this came out, and even if you did have the connex you were on slow dial-up where downloading one decent-looking picture was an event you might as well fix some coffee or a snack for. “High speed” internet enabling video downloads was still almost a decade off for most people, so you still had to buy your porn vids the old-fashioned way and the CD-ROM era with any thin “interactivity” gimmick was a new and interesting deal.
The downside, of course, is you’re getting somewhat grainy and low-frame-count Quicktimes in terms of axxxion. And I don’t mean to be unkind, there are at least a couple nice-looking girls in the mix here, but this venture didn’t seem to get the cream of the crop in the industry. Mr. Butts eventually became a pretty big name in porn, even famously being taken to court in California for publishing the first “fisting” scene in 2000, but as of ’93 this seemed to be a more scrappy low-budget operation.
The only way to pull something like this off would have been some serious charisma / entertaining weirdness, combined I guess with good porn quality. The videos are about the best you can hope for in terms of resolution at the time having to stuff a bunch on one CD, there are about a dozen “encounters” to come across running five or six minutes each. Butts is just an annoying charisma vacuum though, and while the 90s California setting could have provided an interesting slice of life, it’s pretty much an afterthought will all the focus on getting right down to the competent but generic porn scenes. Butts himself is an omnipresent voice behind the camera but seemingly didn’t want his face out there at this point, so he outsources most of the hard labor to some porn star guy with a glorious 90s hockey mullet.
Anyway, this is another one of these titles that you’ll probably need to set up some kind of Windows 3.1 emulation for, but all the videos are just sitting openly as .MOV files on the disc if you don’t want to bother playing.
Links
Profile on publisher New Machine
Videos