I vividly remember it as if it was yesterday. I was probably 11 years old, and I remember not being able to get one particular issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly Brazil because that specific issue was talking about a new revolution in showcasing sex in videogames. Apparently, console gaming was finally going to cross the line and feature actual nudity in a few games. What were those coveted titles? Would porn become mainstream in console gaming? Was this the gaming equivalent to the 1969 Summer of Love? In the fertile (and immature) mind of a preteen, that taboo magazine I never got, and the games covered by it, became objects to be admired. The centerfold (pun intended) of it all was Playboy: The Mansion.

The devs were smart enough to, at the very least, make you play as a different Hef, and not the 120 year old Viagra-powered mummy he was at the time.

Bear in mind, this was 2004, so the Playboy magazine was still a big deal at the time, especially in Brazil. Hugh Hefner’s empire was still a freaking juggernaut, as the internet wasn’t as fast and developed as it is today; downloading a mere JPEG scan of a raunchy magazine would take a while. So announcing that a game where you could play as the founder of Playboy, throw parties, and take pictures of nude ladies, caught the attention of some, the ire of many, and the amusement of anyone with a few hormones back in the day. I never got to play Playboy: The Mansion when it first came out. It would take me a further twenty years to see what the fuss was all about. Would this be the game to kickstart a sexual revolution in gaming as we knew it?

The models’ wardrobe is consisted of a ton of swimsuits and their topless variations. You’re basically playing Horny Barbie.

I don’t think so. Maybe it’s the fact I’m playing this game as a cynical adult in my 30s, in an era where you can even see full frontal nudity in games released for the Nintendo Switch, but man… was this all that Playboy: The Mansion was all about? I remember the hype and excitement over this game back in the day, but upon booting it up, all I saw was an utterly mediocre The Sims clone, where you can only actually control one Sim, the one and only Hugh Hefner. Instead of being able to live the carefree and sex-filled life of the man every 14 year old boy once dreamed of being, you just need to follow some very formulaic tasks in a set gameplay loop, which just so happens to feature the occasional boob.

The gameplay loop goes as follows: as the owner of the Playboy magazine, your task is to constantly come up with enough material for a new issue. You’ll need an interview, some articles, and of course, some nude pics. You can basically come up with the content in any order, but you gotta perform some tasks for each one of them. For interviews, you need to talk to celebs and convince them to answer a few questions for you. You don’t even see what are the questions, in fact – all you really need to do is press the “strike a conversation” prompt with them until you magically become friendly enough to convince them to do said interview. For articles, you need to basically do the same, but with writers in your staff. Considering this is also a business simulator, you gotta hire them and take care of your finances.

A true casanova’s activity: buying and placing furniture.

Then there’s the nudies. First of all, you need to hire a photographer. After doing so, you need to either talk to one of the Playmates who just randomly decide to crash into your mansion, or, once again, throw a random party and use your macho charms to entice a famous gal to show her breasts to the world. The actual pictorial part is monstrously disappointing. All you can really do is decide the model’s clothes (or lack thereof), and the angle of the picture. The amount of poses they can perform is shockingly small, and their body types are all the same. Every single chick in this game, from the models to the girl you hired to write an essay on politics, features the same silicone-infused DDD cup size.

It’s quite ironic that I thought that Playboy: The Mansion just wasn’t sexy enough. From the unrealistic body proportions to the incredibly tame photo poses, you’d have to be completely desperate and thirsty back in the day to have used this game as your stockpile of erotica. You can actually convince chicks to have sex with you during normal gameplay, but this game’s idea of intercourse is to see two clothed low-poly Sims models dry humping on a couch whilst “Swing Swing” by The All-American Rejects is being blasted through your mansion’s expensive audio equipment. There’s nothing as sexy as seeing PS1-era characters bumping on each other like cars stuck in a traffic jam to the sound of emo music, I gotta tell ya.

An issue is comprised of a few articles, an interview, and the boring nude pic you can take every now and then. I can already smell the Pullitzer.

After finally playing Playboy: The Mansion after all these years, the only thing I can think of is… is that it? Was this the game that briefly became the most controversial piece of software of all time? The game all conservative mothers were considering to be the Antichrist in byte form? I didn’t expect a lot from it, considering the state of gaming and looser censorship nowadays, but boy, what a nothing burger of bland gameplay and underwhelming erotica this was. It only managed to garner fifteen minutes of notoriety due to some clever pre-release marketing, because, as a game, even for 2005’s standards, it felt tame, limited, cheap, and most importantly, not very sexy at all.