With the upcoming release of Date Ariane Remastered, I want to do a series of posts about the strange history of this historic game that inspired two gaming sub-genres. This first post is a look at the evolution of the art.

The above represents a few images from the beginning of Ariane Date Simulator 4.0 (2007) and Date Ariane Remastered. The Remastered images are 1920×1080 while the original HTML game images were 800×500, so they are shown here to scale.

If you want to see images from the many versions in between there are a number of galleries in the Wiki section of this website.

I no longer host copies of my old HTML games, but I believe this version can be found on http://www.funny-games.biz/dating-simulator.html (NSFW) or http://www.jo-jo.net/ariane/start (ad free, but I believe it is an older version on a slower server)

On the topic of 3D rendered art, I think it’s important to note that I do my pictures in Poser. The 2007 were in Poser 5 or 7 I believe, and Remastered images are in Poser 12.

Almost all 3D rendered games in this genre are made in Daz Studio instead. Poser is the older program and I am as “old school”as you can get in this business. Daz Studio has access to prettier Genesis 8 based models, but the rendering capabilites of Poser are better.

I think I have an advantage in creating images that look different than anyone else doing it this way.

I’ll be releasing a free demo in May so you can see first hand how dramatically improved the graphics have become, but this slide show should give you an idea.

Link to Part 2: https://arianeb.com/2022/04/12/the-history-of-date-ariane-part-2-how-the-3d-rendered-western-dating-sim-genre-got-started/