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Concept
Bishōjo game
Summary
A bishōjo game or gal game is "a type of Japanese video game centered on interactions with attractive girls".
Bishōjo games are similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books in the way of narrative, in which the game tells a story but the player may make choices to change how the story flows.
Bishōjo games began to appear in Japan in the beginning days of personal computers. The first bishōjo game commercialized in Japan appeared in 1982 as Night Life by Koei. The first bishōjo games were not too popular, being limited to graphics of 16 colors or less. At the beginning of the genre, almost all the games were pornographic.
A notable landmark was Jast's Tenshitachi no gogo (1985), a precursor to the modern dating simulation. Among early bishōjo adventure games it had a degree of polish that previous games lacked. It was also the first to have recognizably modern anime-style artwork: its characters had very large eyes and a tiny nose and mouth but were otherwise basically normally proportioned, characteristics which today are found in virtually all bishōjo games. Prior to 1985, girls were generally drawn either as normally proportioned adults or super deformed children.
Some games involved elements of force and brutality. These came to national attention in Japan in 1986 with the release by dB-soft of 177, a game where the player takes the role of a rapist (the game's title originates from the number of the Japanese law criminalizing rape). 177 was not actually the first game designed around this premise, but it was unusually explicit. The game caused debate in the Japanese parliament and was eventually recalled and re-released with the most controversial scenes removed.
The industry gradually moved away from proprietary Japanese hardware to the burgeoning DOS platform, and then later in the decade to Windows. Throughout the nineties, bishōjo games underwent an evolution from being one of the most technologically demanding types of games (because their detailed 2D graphics required a large amount of storage space by the standards of early computers) to one of the least (they rarely use 3D graphics).
Official source
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