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This was first started as an idea for a browser-playable date simulator to make it like a picture book, but have it branch off like a “choose your own adventure” style book, what we call today a “visual novel” which also has ties to adventure games. It was very simple: meet and greet, have dinner, make out, and if you play your cards right, have sex. In subsequent years, the developer started tweaking it every now and then, adding backyard activities like swimming and a hot tub, a park to walk to and downtown shopping or a nightclub, and adding new stuff in every revision. It later went viral, going from a thousand visits a month to millions of visits a week by March of 2007. It was then made available as a download for offline play. Chaotic, the creator of vdategames.com a site dedicated to HTML based dating sims, and the people at Lessons of Passion took the idea of a 3D rendered dating sim and added flash animation and turned it into the huge online industry it is today. Until 2010’s version 7.0, much of the game was made using video game background screens. Then the developer made his own creations based on licensed models. There have been major visual upgrades every 4 years since then: 2014 for the 10th Anniversary and Renpy version, 2018 for the Renpy HD version, and 2022 for the Date Ariane Remastered version. |
