Looking Back at 30 Years of Nudity in Gaming

In film and even television in some cases, nudity is becoming less of a rarity, and when it appears, it’s hard to not notice it. In gaming, however, nudity hasn’t exactly been all too common, and the only game I can recall playing that’s had any sort of it was Duke Nukem 3D. Even that was rather mild in the grand scheme (a 3 pixel nipple isn’t exactly photo-quality).

Recently, it seems like game developers are becoming a bit more loose with their subject content, and that includes both bad language and of course, nudity. There’s been many cases of nudity in games over the years, but they’ve really been far and few between, and of course, some cases weren’t even meant to be seen by the public (hot coffee, anyone?).

Believe it or not, though, nudity in gaming has been around for almost as long as gaming itself. In fact, even the Atari 2600 had a couple of pornographic games, including the legendary Custer’s Revenge, which had the player take control of General Custer with the goal of… raping a Native American woman. Isn’t it hard to believe that something so offensive like this is found in a game that’s almost 30-years-old?

The same company produced other games based on similar vulgar premises, but since then, other game developers have taken the odd opportunity to incorporate nudity into their own games as well. Although the nudity is usually focused around women, it’s not always. Most recently, a full-frontal scene in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned took place with a very naked male character.

Does nudity add anything to a game? It depends, but it sure does keep things interesting.

Finally — a videogame for guys! This was a trivia game show where questions are posed to young bikini ladies on spring break, and if they get the answer wrong they have to flash the player. It received very mixed reviews, from a 1.5 in Official Xbox Magazine to a 7.7 on IGN (how the hell did that happen?!). But The Guy Game is perhaps most notorious for being pulled from store shelves after it came to light that one of the girls in the game was only 17 when she was filmed topless. Let it also be noted that The Guy Game was developed by Topheavy Studios. The studio went on to do nothing else.