Japanese for Gamers 101: Eroge -One for the Trenchcoat Brigade! (18+ only)

Why hello my fine lad! How would you like a shiny new 500 yen coin? All you have to do is reach into my pocket. My pet mouse is in there, and I need to pull him out. Just reach in, grab him, and tug gently. I would do it myself, but as you can see this police officer is handcuffing me because I was masturbating furiously over the “My Horse and Me” demo at the Toys-r-Us over there. Hey! Where are you going?

Word: ｴﾛｹﾞｰ
Romanization/phonetic: Eroge/eh-row-gay
Etymology: Ero (from English, eros), ge- (abbreviation of ge-mu, from English game).
Definition: A video game that features nudity and/or sex as a gameplay element or payoff. Eroge vary from relatively harmless softcore dating sims to stuff that will suck out your soul.
Origin: I was unable to find any information on when/where this expression first appeared.

Notes:
The eroge, also known as adaruto gemu (adult game), hentai gemu (pervy game), or H gemu (H for Hentai), is a style of game that emerged in the 1980s as the personal computer spread throughout Japan. The term is broadly applied to any game that features sex or nudity. According to Wikipedia’s Japanese entry on the subject, the first piece of erotic software in Japan was called Nightlife (1982), however this was not strictly a game. Rather, it was aimed at amorous couples and included a “safe day” calculator (for determining on which days of the month the woman was unlikely to become pregnant) and could compute optimal sexual positions (God knows how –possibly based on the height of each partner).

In any case, actual games featuring sex quickly followed and and at some point began to be called “eroge”. The term eroge encompasses many genres, including dating sims, adventure games, interactive novels and RPGs. They are characterized by artwork styled after that of anime, a tradition which Wikipedia speculates may have arisen due to the technical limitations of early hardware (low number of colors, small memory, etc.). Some now fairly mainstream companies including Koei and Enix (who made the disturbing-looking and nsfw Lolita Syndrome) created eroge for early PC hardware, especially the NEC PC-88.

Eroge rarely appear on consoles. Nintendo in particular was famous for forbidding adult games. While the company was under the leadership of Hiroshi Yamauchi, not only were adult games banned from the Famicon, companies that made adult games on other platforms, including the PC, were not allowed to develop for Nintendo hardware　-this could be why Koei and Enix nixed their porn game divisions. Over the years, such draconian measures have loosened but it is still very unusual to find hardcore eroge on home systems (excluding unlicensed games, which are a whole other story). However, for trenchcoat-wearing console fans, eroge are often ported over to home consoles, albeit with most of the sexual scenes/references removed.