The Rule of First Adopters

"If you really look into the history of our technological development, you'll notice that the force driving us forward all this time wasn't our need to better ourselves or seek out truth in all its forms, but rather our desire to see naked people touch each other's junk."

— Cracked, "5 Ways Porn Created the Modern World"

Supposedly, the first group of content providers to colonize a new medium once it becomes commercially viable will almost always be the producers of adult-oriented material—i.e., pornography.

They will, of course, attempt to maximize their profits by flooding their customers with product. This, in turn, will drive up demand, pushing the new medium into the mass market, where economies of scale come into play and make it affordable for increasing numbers of consumers. As more consumers can afford the medium, more non-adult content becomes available, until finally the adult material becomes a niche rather than the primary content available. (But not before the media and Moral Guardians get ahold of it and create a moral panic about all that "smut".)

This belief does appear to be promoted by the adult industry itself with the result that a significant number of claims don't hold up to scrutiny.

For the scientifically inclined, this trope may be seen as the technological equivalent of the biological concept known as "Succession", which — in its most basic form — goes like so:

• A new but hostile land surface is created (new medium), deterring all but the hardiest forms of life — the pioneer species (site-makers) — with the most basic needs (such as profit) to exploit the only available resources (in this case, desperation). As a result of this, a community develops (the site-makers, who are the producers/pioneers, and the consumers who feed on the efforts of the producers).
• The attempted colonisation of the pioneers erodes the hostile elements of the environment (new medium), making it friendlier. New organisms (producers) move in — seeing the potential of the changed environment [new medium] — and establish themselves, which would not have been able to survive before the first pioneers had altered the environment [new medium]. New producers also bring new consumers and the face of the resultant community changes.
• Like the pioneers, these new organisms alter the already changed environment [new medium] by their very presence, making it even friendlier and attracting even more new organisms with even greater needs that previous versions of the environment would not be able to support. With regards to new media, the alteration of the environment relates to pushing the new medium's boundaries. A positive feedback loop is hence set up, improving the "new medium" in the aforementioned way over and over. (the internet is currently in this stage, as a medium)
• Eventually, the medium reaches its developmental limit, forming its "climax community" (pun not intended, seriously). This is the point at which the new medium and its associated community will no longer develop because said medium's boundaries have been pushed as far as possible. As such, it can no longer support any more organisms than it already has (radio is at this stage).

A result of this rule is (in part) why The Internet Is for Porn. Can contribute to the perception that New Media Are Evil. May be a Mundane Utility. See also Rule 34 and Intercourse with You. See Video Game Perversity Potential for this trope as applied to video game editors.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Hentai. An actual strange case, hentai actually precedes the anime forms most Westerners are familiar with; the Rule of First Adopters applies to anime in microcosm as it's applied to individual series, with often the first adaptations of successful anime or manga series being pornographic "retellings." Hentai even subverts this trope, as popular hentai anime, manga, or video game series are then turned into more "Moral Guardian-friendly" adaptations.
  • And don't forget The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, (link is The Other Wiki) which is tentacle hentai dating back to 1814...
  • More importantly, the anime/manga ecosphere gets quite a bit of talent from the doujinsphere, which is very often populated with hentai doujins of popular anime/manga. Other pornographic authors, such as eromangaka that make original comics for magazines, also get work for relatively SFW (or at least borderline) series.
  • More than one old art master dabbled in depicting the favorite bedtime activity of all. Along with The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife mentioned above, Japan has Shunga as a classical genre, there's an etching of Rembrandt van Rijn depicting a couple mid-coitus, and Leonardo da Vinci made a sketch of the act in cross-section as part of his anatomical drawings.
• Before Sailor Moon, Pokémon: The Series and other children-targeted shows were brought to America, anime was practically synonymous with porn. This was because the only people who could afford it and had an interest were older sci-fi nerds looking for something different. Amusingly, that also brought in a group of people that cop to the idea that characters for those children-targeted shows were designed specifically so that porn would be made out of them (given the above statement that former eromangaka also work in clean comics), thus bringing the concept full circle.
• Similarly to Caprica, the Shirow Masamune series Real Drive. The potentially world changing Meta-real was popularized as and continues to be used for sexy purposes.
• Sex is possible in-game in Sword Art Online. While that wasn't the first adopter, when the designer built his VMMORPG deathtrap, he made sure to include the option.
• History of Pleasure argues that every historical and legendary event, no matter how serious it was in real life, was designed to distribute porn to the masses. It runs in the H-magazine Comic Kirakuten Beast (so that's what the historical figures will be fighting over), but it's surprisingly merely Ecchi.
• Interspecies Reviewers approaches this topic with a certain amount of frank levity. Grand Mage Demia, who has her own stake in the adult entertainment industry, uses her "business" to fund her research, and markets some of her discoveries and creations in terms of said adult entertainment in order to recoup research expenses and raise funds for more projects. She has employees running facilities for 'enjoying' gender-bending potions and water-based magical slime, maintains a large crew of Decoy Doll clones that dominate the Succu-girl scene in her hometown, and she actively discusses this trope when she talks about how it was more lucrative for her to market rings of fire resistance towards men eager to have sex with Salamander fire spirit women rather than to have them only as niche specialist gear for adventurers looking for a source of fire resistance.

Art

• It's older than that too. Note nudes in art and people have got to have been the bodies for all those naked Greek statues.
  • Those pristine white marble statues were originally painted. With extreme accuracy.
  • Older Than Dirt: Erotic cave paintings have been found that are between 30,000 to 40,000 years old.
  • Sometimes, as in the case of Khalil Bey, a patron of the arts engages in commissions and acquisitions that make his motivations rather evident.
• Researchers in Germany found an ivory statuette of over 35,000 years old, one of — if not the — oldest pieces of art found. It's of a female figure with extremely exaggerated breasts and a detailed, enlarged vulva.
  Regardless of its precise age, the figure shows that artists have been interested in certain aspects of the female form for a very long time, says Conard. "I showed it to a male colleague, and his response was, 'Nothing's changed in 40,000 years.'"

Comic Books

• The first comic books were repacked newspaper funny pages. The first comic books with original content were actually the (illegal) Tijuana Bibles; most of the earliest ones from The Twenties were basically the Rule 34 of the day, featuring newspaper comic characters (or in some cases, real people.) It wasn't until The '30s that original comics were published in the mainstream. The Tijuana Bible held on until The '60s.
• Related, from the 1950s to the 1970s Brazil saw the "catechisms" (yes, another "hiding sex with religious names"!) of Carlos Zéfiro.

Fanfiction

• In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, the first use of the Imaginarium was to... well, satisfy a Smurf's desire to be alone with a Smurfette. The real Smurfette was not pleased to see Brainy replaying the role of King Smurf having an imagined version of herself being his personal servant.

Films — Live-Action

• Motion pictures seemed ready to follow the pattern until Moral Guardians of the period complained, leading to the establishment of The Hays Code.^note A short story called The Pierce Arrow Stalled, and... theorizes what Hollywood might have become had the trigger for said code being implemented never happened. Up to that point, though, early cinema was far more daring that most people might believe. For example, few remember that the glamorous star of the 1930s and 1940s, Hedy Lamarr,^note That's Hedley! initially became famous for doing topless and nude scenes in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy. It took the counterculture movement, and the advent of New Wave cinema in the 1960s, to rejuvenate the adult film industry.
  • During Weimar Germany, Berlin had an extremely thriving porn industry.
  • Said film is often mistakenly believed to be the first example of female nudity in mainstream cinema. However, the earliest credited example of this is the 1915 film Inspiration. See this page for background.
  • Eugène Pirou made a short film in which a woman performs a striptease in 1896.
  • Pioneering filmmaker Georges Mèliès created a short film about a woman taking a bath in 1897.
  • Pah, Johnny-Come-Latelies, all of them. Eadweard Muybridge did photo motion studies in the 1880s featuring nude (or in some cases very lightly clothed) people (also horses; he settled a long-standing argument about whether or not a horse in full gallop ever had all four hooves off the ground simultaneously that way and was genuinely interested in studying how people moved when performing everyday tasks ... but figured they might as well do them naked). He also created a device called the "zoopraxiscope" to display photographic images in quick sequence... in other words, he was essentially the guy who invented movies. You don't get much more "first adopter" than that.
  • And that's all just "mainstream" film. So-called stag films had been around since the turn of the twentieth century and some of them are pretty hardcore even by today's standards. The oldest surviving hardcore film is The Good Inn, a French production from 1908.
• Tropic Thunder: Discussed about how Blu-Ray overpowered HD-DVD:
  Kevin: Now, if you recall that whole hullabaloo where Hollywood was split into schisms, some studios backing Blu-ray disc, others backing HD DVD. People thought it would come down to pixel rate or refresh rate, and they're pretty much the same. What it came down to was a combination between gamers and porn. Now, whichever format porno backs is usually the one that becomes the uh most successful. But, you know, Sony, every PlayStation 3 has a Blu-ray in it.
  Kirk: ...You talkin' to me this whole time?
  Kevin: I was talking to whoever was listening.
• While it doesn't show up in the plot of OtherLife, the characters specifically namecheck that porn is likely to be one of the first adopters of their technology that allows insertion of new memories that will be experienced as dreams.

Literature

• This trope is older than photography. When the printing press made book publishing commercially viable, guess what the two most popular types of books were? Religious tracts, and pornographic stories.
• Appears in-universe in Magicnet—the titular Internet replacement was built off a forum for occultists, but the moment they realized how convincingly it could simulate reality, they immediately started creating virtual simulations of boyfriends and girlfriends. The system administrator turns out to have an entire harem of nonexistent women at his beck and call.
• Appears in-universe in the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Patent Pending" (collected in Tales from the White Hart). A young French (but of course!) scientist invents VCR for the brain. He quickly comes to the obvious application. And the story gets more interesting from there...
• Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You Need claims that the first popular work of fiction to be produced by the printing press was a pornographic novel titled Hot Moist Serfs.

Live Action TV

• Averted with TV in The '50s, largely because government watchdog groups cracked down on obscene material from the start. Softcore pornography can be seen on late-night premium cable channels like Cinemax, and hardcore porn can be found on pay-per-view, but those are exceptions to that rule — those venues don't have to answer to pressure from media watchdogs or advertisers.
• The High Definition train also is getting a delayed reception from the porn industry (yes, even them), mostly because they're busy making scads upon scads of money with the Internet, but also because many porn stars are afraid of previously-obscured imperfections and flaws becoming not just visible but spread across monster TV screens in ultra-high resolution. In fact, it's pretty much eliminated the "cowboy" shot, once standard in the porn business, as imitating the point of view of a man who is having sex with the woman on top with better video cameras means that those breast implant scars are really visible from that angle. It seems television will always be the exception to the rule.
• Parodied in Coupling in which, after making a brave attempt at rationalizing his possession of a movie called "Lesbian Spank Inferno" with in-depth critical and symbolic analysis to the other members of a dinner party after his female friends bring it up to embarrass him, Steve cracks and engages in a lengthy and not-unconvincing rant in which he makes the case that the entire history of human artistic and technological development — right back to the discovery of fire — has been motivated solely so that men could get a better look at women's bottoms.
• In the Battlestar Galactica Spin-Off Caprica, two of the characters are discussing the Holoband, essentially an easy on, easy off, voluntary Matrix. Guess who first adopted the technology.
  Lacy: Oh, please. The porn sites were the first to license the technology.
  Daniel: Those are for adults!
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seemed to be the only Star Trek series to realise that the only thing most people would use a holodeck for would be having sex. Quark's was essentially a holo-brothel, although the Federation characters were just a bit too squeaky clean to ever use it for that (onscreen). You might wonder how anyone would ever get anything done in the 24th Century with the ability to create fully functional, three-dimensional interactive characters that have no free will whatsoever. As Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) once wrote, "The holodeck will be mankind's last invention."
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation implied that use with Barclay and his holo-addiction and Geordi and his recreation of Leah Brahms, that female engineer. In both cases the real people were very angry when they saw how their holographic selves were being used (Deanna Troi, in particular, when she was cast as "the Goddess of Empathy").
  • Riker had to reluctantly tear himself away from Famke Janssen. See it here.
    Riker: If you need me, I'll be in Holodeck Four.
  • Star Trek: Voyager actually featured Tom Paris simulating an attractive female Vulcan for the sole purpose of sex, but only because another Vulcan (Tuvok) on the ship was going through pon farr (and with Tuvok's permission, said female was modelled on Tuvok's own wife, at the time still several decades of direct uninterrupted travel away).
  • Earlier than that on Voyager, the Doctor created a holographic female Vulcan companion for another male Vulcan going through the pon farr.
• Dollhouse took this to a new extreme: the technology that will reprogram humanity into a horde of mindless engines of pure violence and bring about the apocalypse? Let alone allow the technology that would allow the villains behind said apocalypse to gain immortality via erasing innocent peoples' minds and over-writing them with their own mind? It came from technology that allowed for prostitutes/escorts to be programmed into personalized sex puppets.
  • Which itself seems like a Shout-Out to Molly Millions, the best-known character of William Gibson. In Neuromancer the use of sex puppets is the only thing such technology is used for.
  • The most surprising thing about Dollhouse is not that people use the technology for that... it's that not only are there people who use it for other things than that, "other things" seems to actually predominate, at least from the examples we're shown. Of course, even an extremely high-priced callgirl would be cheaper than hiring an operative, so people who just want sex have less expensive alternatives.
• Referenced in 30 Rock, where Tracy Jordan decides to combine two things he loves; porn and videogames. One of the guys in the writing staff tells him it's impossible because of the Unintentional Uncanny Valley, and cites that all the best have tried, including the Japanese. Against all the odds Tracy actually succeeds in creating his porn video game. invoked
  Frank: I played it for a few hours, it's okay.
  Tracy: Frank, you've been in your office for three months!
  Frank: (Cut back to reveal he now sports long hair and a beard) WHAT?!
  Tracy: Yes! I'm gonna be a millionaire!
• In the Babylon 5 movie The River of Souls, a sketchy businessman runs a holo-brothel in Down Below, using holograms and special suits to simulate touch. It is never stated how often the suits are cleaned, but they are glitchy enough to occasionally electrocute the wearer.
  • Not just used for a brothel, but a celebrity/famous person brothel. One of the images used is that of the station commander Elizabeth Lochley.
• The Good Place:
  • When Janet creates a highly realistic virtual reality software, Eleanor's first question is whether she can use it to simulate sex with a celebrity. Janet can't understand why this is the human reaction to new technology, but she later has to argue unconvincingly that a currently running scenario of her love interest in a sauna is "a glitch".
    Janet: Why is it that every time a new thing is invented humans immediately try to use it for porn?
    Eleanor: Because we're disgusting.
  • A later episode reveals that the vast majority of the time, when someone does something that's never been done before, it's for the purpose of a weird sex thing. This trope is then Double Subverted when a new activity is tracked, which is a man hollowing out an eggplant and filling it with coins and hot sauce, which strangely doesn't seem to be a weird sex thing... and then they get an update of the situation, and confirm that it was. (The guy responsible for filing anything classified as a weird sex thing is very depressed.)
• A variation happens in Cobra Kai in which Johnny Lawrence buys his first computer (an 10-year-old Dell laptop) and discovers the Internet for the first time. The very first thing he searches is "hot babes" and "wet t-shirt contests."
• The Naked Director: This occurs in episode 1.3, set in the early 1980s. The folks behind VHS, locked in a battle with the folks who make Betamax, go to Izekawa the pornographer and offer him a Briefcase Full of Money as a bribe to adopt their format. It works.

New Media, technology

• The rise of home videotape machines has often been attributed to the availability of porn. Those wanting to watch it previously had to go to skeevy porno theaters, where everyone around them was doing exactly what you'd think people would be doing in a porno theater and the floors were very sticky, plus they ran the risk of being seen going into or coming out of the theater. Watching in private has got all sorts of obvious advantages that everyone jumped at. The porno theater industry keeled over and died. Sony refused to license Betamax to pornographers until it was too late to counter the foothold VHS had on the fledgling industry. Read more about it here.
  • This was probably not the real cause, though; one major advantage that VHS had over Betamax was the ability to film an entire American football game on a single tape, which was very pertinent in the US due to the popularity of that sport. Notably, Betamax saw much more success in Japan, where videotaping three hour long shows was less of an issue.
  • History almost repeated itself in the High Definition DVD war between Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD. When reports indicated Sony was going to ban porn on Blu-ray too, the industry reaction was to predict Sony's loss. Sony eventually agreed to license Blu-ray for porn, even if it wouldn't advertise that fact much. It ended up winning the format war this time. Unlike with Betamax, Sony isn't the sole owner of Blu-ray and instead is one of many partners in the Blu-Ray Disc Association. Sony could not actually ban Blu-ray pornography, but in the early, critical days, they held a de facto monopoly on Blu-ray manufacturing (Being the first to have large-scale production facilities), and did not peddle their services to the adult media industry.
    • However, again, it is probable that other factors were more important than porn; Sony notably made the PlayStation 3 an affordable Blu-ray player, which helped to popularize the format and their console. Indeed, this was a repeat of what happened with the PlayStation 2, which could double as a DVD player and was often purchased as a cheap alternative to a dedicated DVD player.
    • It could also be said that the PS3 saved Blu-ray from a scenario where *both* formats were withdrawn in failure. The DVD had only become the widespread standard a few years before, neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray offered anything like the improvement over DVD as it had been over VHS, and the end of the physical-media era was already in sight as far as the public was concerned.
  • Few people remember it these days, but the same dynamic played out in the LaserDisc vs. CED VideoDisc battle in the early 1980s as well. RCA maintained a tight grip on CED manufacturing (there were only 2 plants in the world capable of making CED discs), and a handful of softcore, barely-above-"R"-rated Playboy Video Centerfold discs were as far as they were willing to go into that territory (see also this "internal use only" test disc featuring a stripper). LaserDiscs, on the other hand... Although only a niche market in the the US, Europe, and Australia; LaserDiscs were the dominant video medium in Japan, Hong Kong, and affluent areas of southeast Asia such as Singapore, until the new millennium. Also, by the time it came out, video cassette recorders were already established.
  • The only major use case for multiple angles on DVDs, besides internationalization and on other niche cases such as concerts, is for erotica, as it sure is exciting for the viewer to see the action unfold at different camera angles.
• On the flip side, while porn colonized the World Wide Web at a rate just under the speed of light, the economies of the digital world suggest that it's never going to be relegated to a "niche" market there.
  • As summed up here, as part of that colonization porn led the way (or was right there on the front lines) in technical innovations such as streaming video, secure online commerce, site password protection and verification, CAPTCHAs, and the spread of broadband... as well as a number of plagues like spam, malware, and PC hijacking.
  • Porn broadband traffic wasn't overtaken by social networking traffic until 2011, making porn the biggest thing on the 'net for more than ten years. Summed up rather nicely by the Oatmeal◊.
• One of the early load tests of the original Bittorrent client was a large (*ahem*) "sample video" file.
• Invoked by the IPv6 Experiment. Now over, it was an attempt to get people to switch from version four of the internet protocol to version six, by enticing them with free porn only available to those with IPv6.
• If you download Microsoft's new file player, you can read back issues of Playboy.
  • Similarly, the publisher of Playboy Brazil launched an e-reader (which works on PCs besides tablets). The launch promotion (earn for free some free magazines — which include both that and another lad magazine — and e-books), borderline example. Offering the July 2012 Playboy for free, head-on example.
• When digital image compression algorithms were being researched in the early 70s, they would most probably be tested on "Lenna", the informally default test image that happened to be scanned from the November 1972 Playboy centerfold. This particular image is cropped to a head-and-shoulder shot, with an arguably suggestive expression but no display of naughty bits. Decades later, that image is still being used in papers concerning image compression and noise filtering, simply because so many people have published the results of using that image with their own algorithms that it's an easily usable baseline for how well new algorithm X does compared to pre-existing algorithm Y.
• Cracked published an article regarding this phenomenon and its positive implications, 5 Ways Porn Created the Modern World.
• Defied with Google Glass. A porn studio called MiKandi planned on creating porn that would be both filmed and viewed through Google Glass, perfectly simulating the POV of a man having sex, but Google shot them down and preemptively banned all porn apps from the App Store.
• Demonstrated most convincingly with 4K resolution. At The Pirate Bay, as of November 2014, the search for "2160p" shows over 600 results... filtering out porn leaves three copies of Tears of Steel and an episode of Video Game High School.
• The world of 3D modelling and rendering has invoked this, particularly with the Renderotica web site which has operated since 1999.
• While VR porn certainly exists ^note In 2015 PornHub added a virtual reality category, it has proven rather niche, at least for the time being. The allure of the technology has proven to all but require a fully interactive experience, one of the few things that porn has never been able to do effectively.
  • When the Oculus Rift was introduced, authors scrambled to figure out who would be one of the first to find a different use for it. One of the first articles? A man hooking up a rift to a mechanical rig to simulate sex with MikuMikuDance models.
• The advent of social networking sites, as well as their art-sharing site cousins, inevitably leads to ero-artists looking for a site to share their art. Once they catch wind of a popular new networking site with little rules on image content (like the Twitter-like sharing site Pawoo), no doubt you will find them there within a week or two. One big case was OnlyFans, which was created in 2016 following on Patreon's footsteps of a paid subscription-based platform for content creators, but two years later had a cam girl company becoming its majority owner to show how its biggest appeal was to NSFW creators.
• As the quality of large language models and text-to-image models increased to the point of mainstream popularity, so has interest in using these technologies to generate erotic fiction and images. On Civitai, the vast majority of models under the "most popular" category feature beautiful women in their thumbnails, and a large portion of these models are labeled NSFW to boot.

Photography

• Almost as soon as photography stopped being a curiosity, nude photos began to circulate. And (allegedly) within a week of its patenting, a camera was used to take a picture of a woman performing an act that is still illegal in most states. And some authorities believe that the ability for the average person to take nude photos without having to send them to a processing lab was not an inconsequential factor in the initial success of the Polaroid Land Camera.
• Many of the first advertisements for digital cameras slyly hinted — or all but said — that now consumers could make their own porn without worrying about sending it off for processing. See item number four (and its accompanying images) in the Cracked.com article mentioned above.
• It's believed a similar dynamic was at work with the quick adoption of camera phones. Not long after their introduction, "sexting" — sending nude pics to friends (specifically when done by teenagers) — became the latest moral panic du jour.
• This is also one of the reasons camcorders became popular. Couples could make Home Porn Movies without having to develop film with setups for recording and playback that were much less cumbersome than with 8mm film.

Radio

• Discussed in one episode of 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, which concludes that it's not entirely true of the printing press (erotica was certainly printed, but it wasn't the "killer app") or cinema (as mentioned above, adult movie theaters cater to that small minority of the population who don't mind consuming their porn in public), but is true of photography, VCRs, and of course, the internet (the episode even opens with the appropriate clip from Avenue Q!)

Tabletop Games

• One of the first third-party supplements to be produced and sold when Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast developed the Open Game License^note essentially declaring the d20 System and the core Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rulebooks to be open-source was The Book of Erotic Fantasy, which is exactly what it sounds like: a gameplay and gamemastering manual for R- and X-rated adventuring. The same creative team later made a new version for Pathfinder called The Book of Passion.

Toys

• There's actually a Real Life example that subverts this trope — yes, Barbie dolls; Ruth Handler, Barbie's inventor, was supposedly inspired by a similar doll she saw in West Germany, which in turn was supposedly inspired by very anatomically-correct dolls given to German submariners during WWII to discourage homosexuality.
• Vibrators were also among the first electrical gadgets.
  • And if it wasn't a vibrator before, it would inevitably become one: Hitachi's famous Magic Wand started out as a shoulder massager, but once women found out the powerful vibrations could also satisfy lower parts than usual, Hitachi embraced the image and never looked back.

Video Games

• While the early computer game industry had relatively few sex related games, the potential was recognized by just about everyone from the start, and one text-based title — Softporn Adventure by Sierra Games — was a notable breakout title. Parts of Softporn eventually became the basis of the hugely successful Leisure Suit Larry series. A number of video strip poker games had some modest success, as well, with a notable example being Artworx's Strip Poker from 1982-83.
  • The early video game industry had even less room for sex, which is not surprising given the perceived target audience. This was especially true on the consoles, where the hardware was hardly up to the task, and the market severely restricted by high entry costs and the watchful eyes of the Moral Guardians. Nonetheless, at least one company, Mystique, released a few such titles, most infamous of which being Custer's Revenge.
  • Averted with the PC-FX. NEC was one of the few console companies to actually license adult games in hopes of gaining a foothold (and even certain, if not most, non-porn games featured some level of fanservice, some even involving minors), and the system still bombed.
• Perhaps not surprisingly, in the virtual reality game/Wide-Open Sandbox Second Life, some of the first animations made were for adult acts, most clothing for females can be described as "club wear" at best. Virtual strip bars and whorehouses were also among the first virtual businesses created.
  Yahtzee Croshaw: Remember Second Life? Once a lovely, wholesome attempt at a community-created online world of imagination, now just zebra dicks and yiff piles as far as the eye can see.
• It's not too uncommon of an occurrence for people to take pictures of their genitals as their first photo on the Game Boy Camera, or on its Spiritual Successor in the DSi. With the 3DS on the market now (with its novel and unique 3D camera), people will ensure that it fits this trope.
• Minecraft and its gigantic penis monuments in Creative mode.
• It didn't take long for players to make sexually-suggestive microgames for WarioWare: D.I.Y., which led people to joke that the game is the first from Nintendo to feature porn.
• This was also basically the first use for the World of Warcraft Dance Studio while it was in beta testing — which resulted in it never being finished.
• The pornographic game Sinful Robot was one of the earliest games developed for the Oculus Rift.
• The PlayStation 4 was launched with the ability to create video streams, supported by twitch.tv. About three days later, people realized they could use its Playroom app to create live non-gaming stream shows. Three hours after they discovered that, people began engaging in sex acts undaunted, to the amusement of stream monsters.
• 2048 soon gave birth to versions where raunchy images or GIFs replaced the numbers.
• Early Visual Novels were almost all porn; it took several years for non-erotic ones to find their audience.

Webcomics

• Hijinks Ensue brings up the Holodeck quite wonderfully right here. (Not entirely safe for work, but good for a laugh.) Turns out they had to change the name.
• The page quote comes from this Three Panel Soul strip, concerning whether HD-DVD or Blu-Ray will be the new format.
• Touched upon in this xkcd, though not strictly porn...

Web Original

• One of Cracked's 22 Terrible Ways We Would Use Sci-Fi Technology is using a Star Trek replicator to make a sex toy.

Western Animation

• In a PG example, The Legend of Korra has shipping magnate Verrick create the Avatar-verse version of Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. His idea for how to use this new medium to its full potential? He wants to have Ginger pose for the camera.

Real Life

• Averted by the commercial space travel industry. Despite a $1,000,000 offer, Virgin Galactic turned down a porn studio that wanted to rent one of their ships for the purpose of filming the world's first zero-G sex. The head of the company was said to have mentioned that it would have made the company's name ridiculous.
• If you visit Amazon.com, the site uses encryption and allows you to use your credit card. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, in addition to free shipping, you can stream free videos. Encryption, credit card acceptance, subscriptions, on-line shopping, and streaming video were all first developed for the needs of the on-line porn industry, but became very useful for non-erotic commerce, too.

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