Marathon Man

Gaming legend Todd Rogers played Atari for eighty-seven hours — and he can talk about sex for nearly as long.

by Daniel Nester

Todd Rogers with porn legends Ginger Lynn (top left) and Marilyn Chambers (lower left). Below: Todd Rogers, with more fans.

Were you one of the only gamers to walk over to the porn star section and introduce yourself?
Yeah, I guess I was curious to find out if they really are as big and flappy as they are in the movies! [Laughs.] I wandered around after I did my stuff at the booth, and during lunch I would mingle. A lot of people recognized the Activision name, the T-shirt and badges I had on, and they came up to say hey. I gave people like Marilyn Chambers and Lisa DeLeeuw my phone numbers. They were so approachable. Cody Nicole, oh, she was a sweetheart. People would hit me up for copies of games all the time. You have to remember that this was cutting-edge back then. People wanted to get the first Activision games, and games in general that no one else had except me.

Did the Activision people scold you for sullying their image?
I don't know what they were thinking internally, but I did hook up the people in the adult-film industry with some of the personnel with Activision to distribute product. They're not gonna sell 5,000 units to these people just because they're in pornography? They enjoy the games just like anybody else, they want to entertain people like anyone else.

You told me before you didn't really watch pornos. So how did you recognize these people in the adult-film industry?
Well, I just don't make a habit of it. To me, it's a tease. You're gonna do one of two things: you're either gonna masturbate or fuck your girlfriend. And I don't masturbate. If I don't have a girlfriend, my attitude is, what's the point of egging yourself on? Plus my hands are like fucking sandpaper — if I start jacking off, I'm gonna have some bleedage down there, ya know?

Is that because of all the video games you've played?
Well, not only that. I used to do a lot of construction work and weightlifting, a lot of deadlifting. I got like triple and quadruple calluses on my hands. No lotion would soften that.

Wasn't it distracting when you were fifteen and you would be in an arcade or at a tournament racking up a high score, and all these girls were staring at you?
Well, I definitely felt a few hands grab my ass, and they certainly weren't guys. But when you were playing the game, that was what you were there to do. In my mind I was a professional, I made money at it. I mean, when you watch the Indy 500, you don't see a woman jacking her off in the car.

Do you think a lifetime of playing video games has influenced how you look at sex?
As far being competitive? Well, I never said I was perfect at having sex, and practice makes perfect, so I just wanna have sex all the time. I guess it's the same as playing video games, because being a consistent player is what you strive for.

Do you have memories of your first sexual experience?
Well, I once got a BJ for two hours playing Bop'n Rumble on the Commodore 64. I remember that distinctively. I was sitting there playing the game, and I'd go soft, and she'd still be there. I think I had to wake her up at one point because I felt the drool going down my nutsack. She had some fantasy about blowing me while I was playing a game.

Why Bop'n Rumble?
Well it was just one of those games that at the time I really wanted to beat. And this girl had this fantasy of giving me oral sex while I was playing a game.

How old were you?
Fifteen, sixteen, I guess. Another story is I touched my first pussy playing Wizard of Wor. The people at the school used to call this girl Scratch 'n Sniff. The waters of Lake Michigan couldn't cool this girl off.

So she was the town bad girl?
Well, she was two towns over. We had sex 330 times in 10 months.

Were you trying to rack up a high score or something?
For sex? I guess. I don't get that now, that's for sure.

Do you still get fan mail?
Every now and then. When I was interviewed in Joystick magazine in 1983, there were a bunch of girls who wrote me who wanted to know about secrets to playing Pitfall and Space Invaders, and what makes me better than everybody else.

What do you think of the sexual content of games these days?
Someone asked me about Hillary Clinton before. I have no respect for her lashing out at the video-gaming community. Just because one game has somebody giving a blowjob, she says all video games are a waste of time. She's an idiot and a moron. And I'll add that she should single out the independent developer of that game, not the whole video-gaming community. Not everybody makes or plays pornographic games.

There were pornographic games back in the early days, too, right?
Sure. There was Custer's Revenge and Porky's right at the beginning. That's precisely how I got involved with the porn people and the Playboy people. I still have the high score on Custer's Revenge. I have the high score on Porky's, too. It's 8,814. Porky's was a controversial game at the time.

Yes, this actually existed.

Rogers set the new high score on Custer's Revenge on Dec. 11, 2005. He decided to stop at 12,069.

When did you set the Porky's high score?
Right when it came out, and then in 2001.

Why did you do it again?
To update the database, so they could verify my score according to the current rules. A lot of my scores aren't found, so I have to do them all over again.

What's it like to play these twenty-year-old games?
You feel like a kid again. You associate different games with different times. I mean, I associate Wizard of Wor with the first time I touched a woman's bush. Every time I hear that opening sound [hums it], I think about that first time.

So what did you associate with Porky's?
Just the neighborhood, trying to hose up on all the girls in the neighborhood. I distinctively remember watching the movie, too, then playing the game.

You don't think, even back then, video games had an effect on what people thought about sex?
You know, there was a lot we didn't know about. I was privy to a lot of games in development overseas, a lot of beta versions of games that were never released. I had one where you controlled a joystick to make a penis go in and out of a vulva. It was from Germany. You had the guy going ja! all the time. Then there was another where you just stroked your player's penis, and the faster you went, the faster he'd splooge. And it would go ja! or schlecht! if you did bad.

Did you get the high score on those games?
[Laughs.] Well, they weren't really high-score-type games. You either ejaculated or you didn't. It was around the time you had strip poker with digitized pictures of naked women. I would hack into it so that they would be naked in the first place, and when you lost, they'd put their clothes back on.

I have to admit, I still can't stop thinking about the penis joystick.
It's okay. At the time, I couldn't stop thinking about the lashing I'd get if people got a picture of me swigger-swaggering back and forth with a penis between my fingers. I was horrified. I thought, This just promotes masturbation!  n°