Bishōjo game

A bishōjo game (美少女ゲーム, bishōjo gēmu^?, literally "pretty girl game"), or gal game (ギャルゲーム, gyaru gēmu^?, often shortened to "galge"), is "a type of Japanese video game centered on interactions with attractive girls". These games are a subgenre of dating sims targeted towards a heterosexual male audience.

Bishōjo games are similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books in the way of narrative. Where the game tells a story, but the player may make choices to change how the story flows.

Bishōjo games are a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. While in the Western industries, those games can be considered as visual novel, this Japanese market for Bishōjo games have its own growth unrelated to the Western world.

They form a sizeable fraction of the Japanese market: the most popular have sold over a million copies, and they make up the majority of offline PC games in Japan. Nevertheless, only a few titles of this sort have been translated or commercialized outside of East Asia.

Bishōjo games began to appear in Japan in the beginning days of personal computers. The first bishōjo game commercialized in Japan appeared in 1982 as Night Life by Koei. The first bishōjo games were not too popular, being limited to graphics of 16 colors or less. At the beginning of the genre almost all the games were pornographic.

A notable landmark was Jast's Tenshitachi no gogo (1985), a precursor to the modern dating simulation. Among early bishōjo adventure games it had a degree of polish that previous games lacked. It was also the first to have recognizably modern anime-style artwork: its characters had very large eyes and a tiny nose and mouth but were otherwise basically normally proportioned, characteristics which today are found in virtually all bishōjo games. Prior to 1985, girls were generally drawn either as normally proportioned adults or super deformed children.

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