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Long before dating apps and cold approaches, there was Giacomo Casanova.
Casanova didn’t write manuals. He wrote letters. He didn’t optimize. He observed. He understood something most men never articulate: attraction isn’t forced — it’s invited. He listened longer than others. He disappeared at the right moments. He let women feel chosen rather than chased.
For centuries, men like him existed on the margins of polite society. They weren’t teachers. They were anomalies. Their success was treated as charm, luck, or immorality — never as something that could be studied.
Then modern life arrived. Rules replaced instinct. Dating became polite, scripted, safe. Men were taught how to behave, not how desire actually moves. Attraction was supposed to be earned through effort, stability, and sincerity. When it wasn’t, men assumed the fault was theirs.
By the late twentieth century, a small group stopped accepting that answer. They didn’t romanticize the past, but they recognized a pattern stretching from Casanova to the nightclub floor: the men who succeeded weren’t following the rules — they were reading the room.
What came next wasn’t romance. It wasn’t poetry. It was observation. And eventually, it became game.
1. Before “Game”: Dating Advice Before the 1990s
Before the late 20th century, dating advice for men came almost entirely from mainstream culture: family norms, religion, etiquette manuals, and later pop psychology. The emphasis was on stability, politeness, provision, and long-term suitability. Attraction itself was rarely examined as a separate psychological process. It was assumed to follow naturally from good character and social standing.
By the 1970s and 1980s, self-help books began addressing confidence and communication, but they still treated attraction as rational and linear. Men were advised to be honest, expressive, and emotionally open. When rejection happened, it was framed as incompatibility or bad luck, not something to be analyzed.
What was missing was descriptive analysis. Nobody was systematically observing what actually happened in real interactions—especially first encounters between strangers. Dating advice focused on ideals, not outcomes. That gap would eventually attract men who were less interested in how dating should work and more interested in how it did work.
2. The Early Pickup Underground (Late 1990s)
In the late 1990s, small online forums and mailing lists began forming where men compared notes about meeting women in nightclubs, bars, and public spaces. These communities were informal, experimental, and largely anonymous. The goal was not self-improvement in a moral sense, but repeatable results.
One of the earliest figures to emerge from this period was Mystery, a Canadian magician named Erik von Markovik. His background in stage magic influenced his thinking: he viewed attraction as something that could be broken down into sequences, emotional states, and timing rather than personality alone.
These early communities operated like informal labs. Men tested behaviors, approaches, and conversational patterns in real environments, then reported back. Success and failure were measured bluntly: did the interaction progress or not? This emphasis on outcomes, rather than intentions, marked a sharp break from traditional dating advice.
3. Mystery and the First Structured Model
Mystery’s major contribution was not pick-up lines, but structure. He proposed that attraction followed identifiable phases—attraction, comfort, and connection—and that many men failed because they skipped the first phase entirely. Instead of trying to be impressive or agreeable, Mystery emphasized emotional contrast, unpredictability, and social positioning.
His ideas spread through early internet forums and in-person workshops. For the first time, men encountered a framework that explained why certain behaviors triggered interest and others caused rejection, even when both were polite and respectful.
While controversial, Mystery’s work brought a kind of order to what had previously been trial and error. He treated dating as a social skill governed by dynamics rather than morality. This framing would heavily influence everything that followed.
4. Neil Strauss and the Public Exposure of Game
Modern game entered the mainstream with the publication of The Game in 2005 by Neil Strauss. Strauss was not the inventor of pickup; he was a journalist documenting a subculture that already existed. His access to Mystery and other figures gave the public a rare inside look at a previously obscure world.
The book became a bestseller and radically expanded awareness of pickup culture. For the first time, average men encountered ideas like social proof, preselection, and emotional spikes outside of niche forums. This exposure brought both growth and distortion.
While Strauss portrayed the psychological side of attraction accurately, the book also led many readers to fixate on tactics rather than understanding. Pickup shifted from underground experimentation to mass consumption, which changed its character permanently.
5. NLP and Influence Theory Enter the Scene
As pickup grew, it absorbed concepts from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a field developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. NLP focused on modeling successful behavior, identifying language patterns, and understanding how emotional states are influenced.
Pickup instructors adopted NLP ideas such as anchoring, mirroring, pacing, and reframing. These tools were meant to explain why certain interactions worked, not to act as magic tricks. In skilled hands, they improved awareness and adaptability.
However, NLP also accelerated the shift toward scripting. As more men entered the scene without understanding the underlying psychology, techniques became mechanical. This marked the beginning of game’s decline in credibility, even though the core ideas were never disproven.
6. Commercialization and the Script Era
By the late 2000s, pickup had become an industry. Seminars, bootcamps, and online courses multiplied. To scale instruction, many teachers reduced complex dynamics into memorized routines and step-by-step systems.
This period produced short-term results for beginners but long-term stagnation. Interactions became predictable. Women recognized patterns. Men relied on scripts instead of developing social intuition.
Criticism of game largely comes from this era. The public image of pickup shifted from observational psychology to awkward performance. The pioneers’ original focus on awareness and calibration was overshadowed by commercialization.
7. What the Pioneers Actually Left Behind
Despite its decline, the early pioneers of game left behind enduring insights that still shape modern dating discussions. They demonstrated that attraction operates emotionally, not logically; that over-investment reduces perceived value; and that unpredictability and self-containment increase interest.
These ideas have since migrated into mainstream dating advice, often stripped of their origin. Concepts like confidence, boundaries, and outcome independence are now widely accepted, even by people who reject pickup outright.
The pioneers didn’t invent attraction. They documented it during a time when few were willing to look at it honestly.
