“30 Rock” story line about porn video game ripped from the headlines

Last year on the critically acclaimed NBC comedy “30 Rock,” lunatic comic actor Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, hit upon the idea to combine his two passions: video games and pornography.
The show parodied the movie “Amadeus,” portraying Jordan as a tortured artistic genius, while a jealous coworker played the Salieri role. Ultimately his porn video game was a huge success. On the show, that is.
The idea of a porn video game is nothing new. Others have attempted it, but they’ve pulled their punches when they realized the hurdles of getting distribution. They ultimately opted for a Mature rating, the video game industry’s equivalent of an R movie rating. The rating of Adults Only is the kiss of death for getting distribution for video games through traditional channels.
But now a startup company, D-Dub Software, is attempting to defy the odds. It’s produced a story-based adult video game, called “BoneTown,” where characters do drugs and engage in explicit sex.
The Albuquerque, N.M, company launched the game in October and has been slowly rolling it out. D-Dub promoted “BoneTown” at the Adult Entertainment Expo Jan. 8-11 in Las Vegas.
Andrew Hall, a.k.a. “Hod,” the chief executive of D-Dub, said the PC game has been in development for four years. But creating the game was easy compared with the difficulties of financing and distribution, he told me.
Venture capital firms were put off by the subject matter, so Hall used family connections to get funding.
D-Dub also couldn’t distribute the game in traditional video game outlets because they sell to kids. So it’s been selling the game in adult video stores. It also has been reaching out to the target market of men in their 20s and 30s through men’s magazines like Maxim and Playboy.
So far, “BoneTown” has been getting most of its sales in Europe, where people are less uptight about sex than in the U.S.
The main point of the game is to get players to laugh, Hall says. In an industry full of violent video games, humor is a rare commodity, he says.
Speaking of laughs, Hall was familiar with the “30 Rock” story line.
“It just points out that many people have seen the lack of this category of video games,” he said. “We made this game because it’s a game we wanted to play. We wished there was a video game like this out there.”

Porn video game on “30 Rock”

Tracy Jordan hatched his idea for the porn video game in season two, episode 13. The episode, called “The Uncanny Valley,” first aired on April 24, 2008, according to TelevisionWithoutPity.com.
Frank, a writer on Tracy’s show, says that the game is doomed to fail, just as past attempts have.

“History’s greatest perverts have tried: Walt Disney, Larry Flynt, the Japanese,” says Frank, played by Judah Friedlander.
But Tracy says he was born to invent a game where “characters get weird with each other for golden points. I’m like Mozart. You’re like that guy that was always jealous of Mozart.”
In season three, episode one, we find out that the video game was a huge success. The episode, “Do Over,” aired on Oct. 30, 2008. Again, thank you, TelevisionWithoutPity.com.
Tracy says the game, called “Dong Slayer,” sold 61 million copies at $60 each. He calls his video game “the most profitable thing since the war on terror.”