It's the early 2000s. New Zealand has many cool things like New Zealand Idol, the Motorola Razr flip-phone and overly-gelled hair. It also has its very own and very famous porn magazine, NZX.
It was our answer to Playboy, except it outsold Playboy in New Zealand. Our number one porn mag was run by the man the media called 'The Porn King': Steve Crow. He started his empire in 2001 with the magazine, expanded into DVDs, an erotica expo and the infamous Boobs on Bikes parade.
But eventually it crashed into a distant, sticky memory.
The question is how? How did a homegrown porn rag beat-off its international, multi-million dollar competition? And what happened to it? The obvious answer is the internet, but there's a much deeper story to the rise and fall of New Zealand's most infamous magazine.
So what was NZX? It wasn't Boticelli's 'Birth of Venus'. Everything from the typeface to the girls was amateurish. It looked like the girl-next-door got bored one evening and decided it was time to test the new Kodak.
"We would never turn down any girl," says Mr Crow. Anyone from a stripper to a supermarket cashier could make it in. All looks, all body types, ages, races, colours, and sexual persuasions.
"We didn't use Photoshop," he says, although pimples were airbrushed out. "I wanted it to be real. If you wanted elegance then [you could] go to Playboy."
Nobody could accuse NZX of sterility - it looked like a cross between porn and a schoolboy's Powerpoint presentation, or like a Taranaki truck driver's wet dream.
"It was a wank mag," says Mr Crow. "There were bugger all words in it, but lots of blokey jokes."
Mr Crow himself didn't read it: "I'm not a man's man. I can't stand bloke small-talk about boobs and arse and whatever."
He might not have opened it, but many others did. The magazine was New Zealand's highest-selling pornographic magazine by a long way.
So what made it so popular? Mr Crow thinks it's the local touch.
"Kiwi men want the local girl, not some porn star from the US," he says.
Amy Wee, an NZX producer and filmographer, also sees this as a key factor. "They want someone more accessible than Playboy bunnies. They want girls naked on Mt Wellington," she says.
The magazine built a name and a readership on the suggestion that not only could you possibly date the model, you might even know her. "You could walk into a bar," says Mr Crow, "and see your neighbour's girlfriend and she'd have been in it".
New Zealand was not alone in its obsession with perving on the girl next door. Porn has steadily changed from high-end production to amateur shoots. Author and pornography historian Shira Tarrant writes that in the '70s, pornographers made upmarket feature films.
But the money and time producers were prepared to sink into porn dropped over time, with cheaper recording equipment and VHS production making smutty movies easier to produce. By the '80s and '90s, porn began to go amateur-style. NZX rode that wave.
NZX was down and dirty, and that is apparently exactly what Kiwi men wanted. "NZX was unashamedly legs spread," Ms Wee says. "There were no frills, no fancy sets... and it worked for us and our Kiwi aesthetic."
The audience loved the dirty little rag vibe. In fact, when the magazine went to a classier A4 format, sales plummeted. "It was catastrophic," Mr Crow says, spreading his hands in a gesture of resignation. "It's a wank mag."
In 2009, Steve Crow's empire reached its climax. But then digital media dealt a knockout blow to professional porn, just as it's now pummelling newspapers. No one can tell you better than a pornographer how much the internet cost the publishing industry - with the possible exception of the people behind the Yellow Pages.
Between 2011 and 2014, NZX lost hundreds of readers each month. "Circulation dropped 70-80 percent in three years," says Mr Crow. "I sold it because magazine and print went into freefall ... Playboy went, Penthouse went, I sold NZX when it was still commercially viable, but the writing was on the wall."
Digital media, and specifically the easy piracy that comes with it, is estimated to cost the porn industry $2 billion a year. "There's no way we will ever make money from making porn in NZ again" says Ms Wee. "No, those days are done."
And so NZX's revenues dried up. Mr Crow sold it in 2014 and it folded soon after. Erotica and Boobs on Bikes, the PR stunts that supported NZX, are on ice. Part of the decline related to Mr Crow's legal issues with authorities. But Ms Wee suggests the shock factor also wore off.
"At one Boobs on Bikes 300,000 people came to watch. Then there was like less than a hundred people," she says. "People just weren't shocked by a parade of topless women."
You get the impression Mr Crow isn't heartbroken by this. NZX was no personal mission to liberalise and revolutionise Kiwi sexuality. "I just thought I can make money from this," he says. "It's a business."
He's moved on now. Once he convinced women to disrobe; now he strips layers of fur off alpacas to be sold for use in luxury duvets. It's hard to imagine someone who looks like an extra in a Guy Ritchie thug movie selling fluffy pillows. But hey, there's money in alpacas.
Besides, Erotica and Boobs on Bikes may not be dead. "I never stopped doing them!" Mr Crow says excitedly. "In fact, I think it might be time for me to…." he trails off, but leaves the suggestion dangling. New Zealand's king of porn might be planning a comeback.
Verity Johnson is a Newshub feature writer and columnist.
