This is eighth of fourteen essays contained within the third issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Liz Alfos

Introduction

A beautiful woman is sitting alone at a bar. You want to approach her. What would you say as your opening line?

• “What does it feel like to be the most beautiful girl in this room?”
• “Good evening miss. What’s such a pretty lady doing here?”
• “Hey chick. How’s it going?”

This is the introduction of Meet and Fuck Leila, an adult Flash game released in 2008. It’s five minutes long and not very original. And according to its stats on Newgrounds, it has been played more than sixteen million times.

Back in the 2000s, there was Flash, the most popular platform for games and animations online. First developed by a small independent studio, bought by Macromedia and later acquired by Adobe, it changed the course of online entertainment during its two decades of lifetime. So, of course plenty of porn was made with it. It was not a niche genre; many Flash portals such as Newgrounds or Funny Games featured an adult section. And among those, the Meet ‘N’ Fuck (or MnF for short) games stand above the rest. In terms of view, Meet N’ Fuck: Ocean Cruise has more than twenty million views on Newgrounds alone. Meet N’ Fuck Detective RPG? Twenty-five million.

This alone indicates the popularity of the franchise, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, these games had an undeniable impact on the Flash pornography landscape, popularizing tropes we are still finding in adult games today. This is why I wanted to explore this series in the first place. I talked to adult game creators, researched Flash games of the era, and I’m ready to discuss what is exactly a Meet ‘n’ Fuck game. And it starts, as always, when a man meets a woman.

Step One: Flirting

Whichever episode you play, the story always contrives to have the player character, a conventional-looking young male, meet a big-breasted lady. You have to pick one of three sentences to say to her, ranging from boring platitudes to obscene pickup lines. But do not worry, if you pick the wrong line you are just brought back to the previous choice. Of course if you don’t care about all of this you can just click at random until you progress further. This is the iconic part of MnF, the first thing that people remember when asked about the MnF saga, even though this is not an original concept.

During the early 2000s, another famous adult Flash series utilized the same presentation and gameplay: Sex Kittens. They were low-effort, trashy games wherein you talked to badly-cut-out jpegs of anime girls, answered a short quiz, and were rewarded with a compressed gif from a random hentai. It was the kind of game that was popular at the time; they weren’t made to tell a story or develop characters, or anything other than to make the player want to crank one out. And honestly, this is a way to see the culture of adult Flash games. As game creator Outsider Artisan told me, “There’s a gritty, DIY smallness to flash games that was a necessity back then but has become more of a stylistic choice now”.

This part doesn’t just serve as an obstacle to get to the sex scenes. In my opinion, they make the later sex scenes more meaningful. A lot of dating simulators are about making the character hear what they want to hear in order to maximize affection. And for most of the time in the MnF games, the goal is, surprisingly, to have a normal conversation. You can be flirtatious, you can make jokes… also, it might sound like an innocuous detail, but I appreciate the part where the characters introduce themselves with their names.

Especially in the later games, there were moments where I straight up chuckled, with some dialogue option deliberately written to sound purely nonsensical, like the legendary “have you seen my enormous jar of penis reducing cream?”. (Bluesky user Kimera Royal helpfully pointed out to me that this was basically oestrogel).

Step Two: Foreplay

When the lady is hot and ready, it’s time for Simon Says: caress various body parts in the right order to make the pleasure meter fill up. If you fondle her boobs before caressing her forearms, she will get upset. Put in context of the story, it makes sort of sense. After the flirtatious part, it’s time to explore each other’s bodies. But in reality, the reason for this part is simpler: You are rewarded with an animated picture of the lady naked, delivering on its promise of a porn game. (This is also when it starts to show very clearly that the women’s drawings are ripped from other sources – typically Japanese visual novels). The animations consist of conventional-but-competent anime drawings, with badly drawn body parts such as unshaded hands or weirdly-veined cocks added on top.

Flash games have different priorities than regular games.They were made to be played for a short time, and so they often went straight to the point. In non-porn games, the point is ‘the good stuff’, the thing that hooks the player, whether it’s story, gameplay or art. As for porn games, you would think it’s the sex. But if the sex is the good part, people would watch regular pornography. Outsider Artisan told me: “The reason I like to play adult games when I could just look at porn instead is because of the context the games provide,[…] or whether it’s a good gameplay loop that makes the sex scene itself interactive and interesting”.

One thing I find noteworthy are the male-on-male games following the same formula. Portraying men subjected to the same salacious palpation on erogenous zones makes me appreciate this sequence a lot more in the MnF games. It’s not just for your own pleasure, you have to think about your partner’s pleasure. And also, not putting your hands between your lover’s legs right aways is sound advice. Adult creator DocxDocxDocx said “Adult is a theme so it could be any part of the gameplay loop, you just need to make the part work in itself before applying said theme”.

Step Three: Fucking

Finally, it’s time for you to jump on the action. After all, real sex doesn’t start until the man gets some: vaginal, anal, fellatio, etc. Those sequences, cleverly designed to be played with one hand, are animated images of your character and the woman doing the beast with two backs. In the first game there was a minigame where you have to move the mouse up and down faster and faster, making you believe that in order to make a woman cum you have to ram it as fast as possible. (Although it is not clear whether the woman is having a climax or not – we’re getting ahead of ourselves).

In the later games, the uninteresting sex minigame is ditched and replaced with some kind of video player. The justification appears to be that at that point, the player is very likely cranking his hog, therefore the only interaction possible is choosing the position and at which speed the sex is happening. Choosing is neat but it ends up being pointless because you have to do every position to progress, even though “progressing” is not the point, the game is over, you can quit once you finish your masturbation. The last interactive part is a big ol’ “CUM” button, and targets to spray your sperm on. If you slept with more than one woman you have to hit at least six targets, which probably drains your balls like crazy.

And that’s pretty much it. This is a MnF game in a nutshell. There can be particularities between the sex scenes or the several women you have to seduce, even special minigames, but when you play one of the twenty Flash MnF games, this is what you are sure to get: a predictable, serviceable and fun bite-sized dating simulator.

Step Four: Rinse & Repeat

During the “golden era” of the first MnF games, we saw a great number of adult games following the same formula, down to the three possible answers and the Sexual Simon Says. Game creator Toni Catino aka astoryinpieces said “It was an easy model to replicate, and […] visual novels and adult materials already have a linked history, so having a bunch of them on Western porn sites, usually very distinctly fetish-based or works involving fandom characters, seems like a no-brainer”.

Interestingly, as the culture of adult games evolved, the Meet ‘N’ Fuck games evolved also, but not in a good way. You might be surprised to learn that they are still being made today (likely because new additions struggle to reach even 15.000 views). They aren’t interactive anymore, leaning too much on sleazy parodic tropes, and the ugly drawings lack the charms of earlier entries. Churning out as many new games as possible seems to be the priority. Developer Tamed Shame summarized it as such: “It has its influences but no one online is asking for games like MnF because MnF hasn’t innovated much since the first game. […] MnF was both ahead of its time and a relic of its time”.

But churning out games was also a priority back in the day. Between 2008 and 2009 alone, twenty entries were released on Newgrounds. I want to highlight this because this essay might give you the impression that the early MnF titles were “high art” in some way. This is not the case – they were formulaic games made as cheaply and as quickly as possible. And while some episodes might have featured good writing, many of them are simply bad; dialogue is very boring, or in some cases, nonexistent, and let me tell you it is so uncomfortable to see your protagonist groping a woman without any dialogue. Though I might have previously praised the games for making the sex scenes meaningful, those moments make me think those qualities were purely accidental, and the design’s priorities were always in allowing the player to grope unresisting women.

Conclusion

In 2021, Adobe shut down their support of the Flash plugin, putting an effective end to the Flash era of the Internet. Most web games based studios either switched to mobile development or closed down. On the other hand, there are today more opportunities to make and share games than ever. Newgrounds is still thriving, and Itch offers a lot of ways to monetize web games. And despite a rise in conservatism that pushed some websites to altogether ban any kind of adult content, we see a new wave of adult creators making great, interesting adult games. Covering those games is still a struggle but some notable efforts have been producing great work  (including what you are reading right now!)

Looking at the current landscape for adult web games, it might be hard to see the connection, but I believe the MnF style is still in the DNA of the game being produced today. And even if it isn’t, it is still on many creators’ minds as a set of tropes to avoid. The most notable tropes like the question/answers have been reassimilated to the visual novel genre, and the foreplay interaction of touching body parts and receiving feedback is still a notable trend, although it greatly improved since then.

I asked adult game creators their feelings about the MnF series, and the consensus is that it was the adult game equivalent of fast food: not the best, but everywhere. Adult game creator Soylent Orange compared it to “the ‘Debbie Does Dallas’ of porn flash games”. Developer
Twinblade General said: “I wouldn’t say the MnF games are good adult games, but they are extremely charming historical artifacts. I think they were largely a delivery mechanism for stolen art from Japanese adult games, and the surrounding writing and context didn’t add that much to the experience […] They opened up a lot of folks to the idea of playing text-heavy porn adventure games, and that’s a hugely rich tradition that continues to this day among western devs on sites like itch.io”.

Although their popularity will ensure that they will be remembered and preserved, what about the countless smaller porn games that weren’t as lucky or prolific as Meet ‘N’ Fuck? As basic, scrappy and broken as those other Flash games were, they were still part of the global Internet pop culture. With adult games the situation is even especially dire since most of the games are uncredited, or credited to a website. It is understandable that adult creators value their privacies – however, this will result in most of the popular adult Flash games only existing as SWF files, without credit, date of release, or anything else.

From Pretty Ink Games: “They were the precursor to so many adult games we have today, and allowed people to realize that they could make their own games in that genre as well. […] Sometimes exposure is all you need to spark creativity and innovation, and MnF series surely has done that for others”.

I would like to thanks all the adult game creators that accepted to answer my questions: The Magical Gurl, Noa S., Soylent Orange, Outsider Artisan, DocxDocxDocx, Forestpunk Tiger, Twinblade General, Pretty Ink Games, Tamed Shame, Toni Catino and Ariranha.

Liz Alfos, aka ToulouToumou, is a French game developer and game researcher, with a hyperfixation on the history of Flash games. Since 2019 she has run the Museum of Screens, an online preservation project for Flash games and the history of the web.

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