The cat’s out of the bag now, so it will be interesting to see what happens when another developer inevitably picks up the baton. Now, how that socio-cultural theme will play out over the longer term remains to be seen, but supernormal stimulants are an observable phenomenon, and Illusion, for better or worse, was the foremost developer in bringing that into sex-themed video games.

While Honey Select isn’t quite there as it is ridiculously limited by what happens after you’ve created a character, that character creation mode, and premise of the game is very much that of supernormal stimulant.” “Humans might be more intelligent than beetles, but we’re no less susceptible to supernormal stimulants – something the advertising industry regularly consults Hoffman for, he told me in a conversation a few years ago. A beetle in Australia nearly went extinct when it mistook the design of a certain kind of beer bottle, when discarded on the road, for being a hyper-idealised mate, and stopped breeding with the females of its actual species to instead try and breed with the bottle. We wrote about that game on DDNet at the time, and how the character creation features were actually something that we should take notice of, because there are some socio-cultural implications of having that level of control over digital sex experiences (and, now, VR/AR sex experiences) that go well beyond the boundaries of video games.Īs I wrote then: “For example, a man called Donald Hoffman has been doing research into supernormal stimulants ( you can watch an excellent TED talk by him here), and basically supernormal stimulants are when something is so “perfect” that it effectively replaces the real world interaction that a person (or animal) should be having. Illusion was perhaps best known in the West for Honey Select, and particularly the game’s character creation options, which gave you incredibly fine control over the looks of the women that you would then… play with. In short, Illusion was one of the first to really master 3D graphics for the purposes of pornography and then use that to make explicit, interactive sex a kind of thesis on the aesthetics of sex. Many of Illusion’s games also had a kind of aesthetic/artistic sheen and higher concept that helped set them apart from the grimy nonsense that makes up the bulk of stuff released in this niche. These sex games of a very high visual fidelity that pushed the boundaries of what was possible at the time that they were released. But within its own tiny niche, it was a true giant.

It’s not Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Capcom or Square Enix. The company has announced its imminent closure, and in its shutdown notice, also said that it would also be taking all its games with it. The studio has been around for 22 years, having been founded in 2001, but it’s all over now. Illusion Software is one of the genuine trailblazers in video games.

Illusion soft video games