Explosive Fighter Patton from 1988 is believed to be the first video game to use the swear word "fuck", referring to the Famicom Disk System as the "fucking box". It is not known if this is an in-joke or a translation error.

This is followed by Skweek for Amstrad CPC in 1989, whose development builds leaked to the UK market, featuring a variety of vulgar in-joke placeholder phrases. The swearing version of the game has not known to be preserved, but it is alleged that one of these quotes was "fuck your mother!". This would make it the first use of "fuck" to be known for a fact to have been intentional, even if its distribution wasn't.

1990's Paranoia, the Japanese version of Psychosis features an 8-bit sound effect upon stage clear that appears to be made to evoke the phrase "fuck you!", which is played in accompaniment with an alien flipping the bird. This is technically the first vocalized use of "fuck", but is not a recording of a human voice, and is the first for-a-fact intentionally included use of "fuck".

1991's Llamatron contained a voice sample of the word "oh, fuck!" which was cut off. A glitch made it so that if you paused the game upon dying, it would play uncensored, making it the first clear vocalised use of "fuck", even if still not intentionally added.

1995's The Orion Conspiracy contains one of the earliest known uses of "fuck" that was clearly spoken, uncensored, and known for a fact to not be an oversight. Also of note is Discworld, released in the same year, having an Easter egg referencing John Cleese's 1989 eulogy to the late Monty Python member Graham Chapman. While both games released in the same year, it is unknown which game came out first as Discworld is the only one of the two to have a known release date, coming out on March 17, 1995.

In the PlayStation version, in Act 4, through a specific set of touch and click commands, Rincewind (voiced by Monty Python member Eric Idle) will say "I want to be the first person in a game to say fuck". This appears to be a reference to a humorous eulogy for the late Monty Python member Graham Chapman in 1989. Fellow member John Cleese, the writer of the eulogy, claimed that the spirit of Chapman while writing it acknowledged that Cleese was very proud of himself for allegedly being the first person to say "shit" on British television, but wanted him to one-up it by asking him to be the first person at a British memorial service to say "fuck". Whether he was actually the first to do either of those things is not known, but Eric Idle trying to be the first person in a video game to say "fuck" seems to be his tongue-in-cheek way of trying to one-up Cleese.