Renai game
From Free net encyclopedia
Ren'ai game (恋愛ゲーム) is Japanese for romantic game. In the Japanese language, a romantic game is a genre of adventure video games focusing on romantic interactions with anime-style characters, often referred to as dating sims or visual novels in the West. In English usage, the term "ren'ai game" can refer to these Japanese games or fan games produced by English speakers. (See the main article on dating sims.)
Fan-produced ren'ai games
Games with romantic elements have been created in the West, notably The PK Girl in 2002. However, these were not especially influenced by the Japanese genre, and so would not generally be called ren'ai games. Image:Moonlightwalks.jpg The first undisputable fan-made English ren'ai game, Tales of Lemma 1, was created in 2003 by LemmaSoft. Although this game itself was tiny (about 15 minutes in gameplay), it started discussion of ren'ai games in the LemmaSoft forums, based around the principle that a small completed game is better than a large unfinished one.
Ren'ai game fans in the United States and Europe used the Lemma Soft forums to discuss this game and their own productions. The number of fan-made games released via these forums has increased every year since then. Within two years, this fan community had created Ren'Py, a software tool for making ren'ai games and visual novels, and the Ren'ai Archives to keep copies of all fan-made English language games in the genre. In 2005, the first NaNoRenO was held -- a competition to make ren'ai games in English within the space of one month, inspired by NaNoWriMo and NaNoMangO. This produced 6 new fan-made ren'ai games.