American Multiple Industries

~ the eulogy ~

American Multiple Industries did business as Mystique and existed for about a year. Its entire product line was three pornographic games for the Atari 2600, sold as Mystique Presents Swedish Erotica, a brand name licensed from Caballero Control Corporation's adult film series and attached to cartridges that had nothing to do with Sweden or with the films. All three were written by Joel H. Martin, who co-founded the company. They were manufactured in Hong Kong and sold sealed, at $49.95, with a warning on the package.

Two of them are forgotten now, Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em and Bachelor Party. The third was Custer's Revenge, released in November 1982, in which the player moves a naked caricature of General Custer across the screen to rape a Native American woman tied to a post. The company's president, Stuart Kesten, said in public that there was a sexual act in the game but that it was not rape. Martin said the woman was a willing participant. Neither statement was made in good faith, and neither was meant to be believed. They were there to keep the story running.

Custer's Revenge was withdrawn from circulation by April 1983. The rights to all three games were sold after the 1982 Christmas season to a spinoff called PlayAround, which continued the line under Castlespring Enterprises and reissued Custer's Revenge in Europe as Westward Ho. American Multiple Industries was out of the video game business before the crash of 1983 arrived, which is the one thing it timed correctly. I was born the year after the cartridge came off the shelves, so everything here is archive material for me, down to the price tag.

~ the dossier ~

~ the outrage engine ~

The development was deliberately cheap and fast, because the product did not need to be good. It needed to be on a shelf and it needed to be talked about. The graphics are crude even by 1982 standards and the gameplay is a copy of games that already existed in non-pornographic form.

What the company spent effort on was the reaction: it previewed Custer's Revenge for women's groups and Native American organizations before release, an act widely read at the time as a stunt, and it printed a line in the manual telling buyers that if children asked, they should say the two figures were dancing.

It worked exactly as designed. The National Organization for Women called the game a blatant statement of racism and sexism. The Tulsa Native American Coalition, the Native American Political Action Committee, the NAACP, the Urban League and the YWCA all came out against it. Every one of those statements was free advertising, and the game sold roughly twice what the other two Mystique titles managed. Atari, which had no connection to the company and no control over what ran on its console, took the complaints and tried to sue.

~ the counties ~

Los Angeles County voted three to one to ban all three Mystique cartridges. Suffolk County, New York went further and voted to ban X-rated games entirely inside its jurisdiction, at which point American Multiple Industries sued the county and legislator Philip Nolan for $11 million. Oklahoma City passed a resolution condemning the game as distasteful and not in the community's interest, and the company briefly stopped shipping there, though the city never actually banned it despite what gets repeated.

Those votes are the first serious attempts by American local government to remove a video game from sale, and they happened in 1982 and 1983, a decade before the Mortal Kombat hearings that usually get credited as the start of the argument. The company that provoked them was gone within months and left nothing behind worth preserving, which makes it an awkward ancestor for every content-rating fight that followed. The precedent outlasted the publisher by forty years.

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