Penthouse sex magazine founder Bob Guccione died in Texas Wednesday after a long bout with cancer, his family said. He was 79.

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The Wall Street Journal reported his family said in a statement Guccione died at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano.

Guccione created Penthouse in 1965, immediately setting it apart from Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine through its more graphic photos of unclothed women and less reliance on the written word. If Playboy was the publishing world's version of the Beatles, Penthouse was the Rolling Stones.

"Unlike his future arch-rival Hugh Hefner, he did not suffer from sexual shyness and repression," John Heidenry, a former Penthouse Forum editor wrote in his book "What Wild Ecstasy."

"He liked girls, pure and simple, like any average healthy Italian boy from New Jersey, and he was no virgin."

Guccione diversified into other magazines, movies and other ventures and his fortune at one time was estimated at $400 million but Penthouse's popularity waned with the advent of Internet pornography.