They gave it a kind of test run at the January ia2000 in Las Vegas and now it's going out to the great unwashed: Vivid Interactive's unique gaming feature of an erotic puzzle game.
"Just as the porn industry created and sustained the half-inch VHS videocassette market in the 1970s and pioneered the technological possibilities of the Internet and (the) CD-ROM," says Vivid Interactive spokesman Brian Gross, "the industry is again leading the charge in exploiting the full interactive capabilities of the DVD format."
The new Vivid puzzle game lets users match the body parts of various women. The game is called "Interactive Body Parts," the first of several planned for inclusion on a number of Vivid DVD titles at no additional charge over the standard $34.99 retail. With eight women partly or fully undressed, the game has sixteen variations with a total of 57 minutes of video clip rewards, Gross says.
The strategy is to offer the kind of interactive game-playing on standard DVD movie players which was available previously only on computers with DVD-ROM drives. "Our whole (objective) is to get people to use every button on the remote control," says Vivid Interactive vice president Jim Monroe. "It's important to have a game feel to the movie with the PlayStation2 coming out."
Coming editions of PlayStation 2 and X-Box video games can play standard DVD movies and video games. Monroe says Vivid is in talks with distributors to include a Vivid adult DVD title with other DVD movies and games bundled with a game player - an unprecedented step, he says.
The deal would not be with Sony but with the third-party distributors of PlayStation2.
