A brief history throughout the industry.




Custer's Revenge was a game for the Atari 2600, released by Mystique under the brand "Swedish Erotica" that featured a naked General Custer advancing across the screen, dodging arrows, until he could reach a topless Native American woman who was apparently tied to a pole, and then raped her. The game was controversial for its racism as well as its sexuality, and, while television news coverage on the subject featured game animation, parts of the screen were concealed with black rectangles in order to avoid showing nudity.


Duke Nukem 3D The 1996 PC first-person shooter game, which features many topless women throughout the game, posters of nude women, strippers and prostitutes, and even a pornographic book store/movie house. The main character even offers prostitutes and strippers money and asks them to "shake it baby." In the case of the strippers, they will open their top and expose their breasts.


Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry computer games were popular tongue-in-cheek adventure games for adults in which the protagonist constantly attempted, usually without success, to convince women to have sex with him. The games did not excite much controversy despite showing partial nudity with increasing graphical quality over the years.


Eidos's Tomb Raider series were action-adventure games which featured a female protagonist named Lara Croft with extremely large breasts. The series did not explore sexual themes at all, but Lara was featured in video game magazines as a sex symbol, and it is generally believed that the success of the series over the years was partly due to the prominence of her appearance in the game's advertising and packaging


Thrill Kill was canceled by Electronic Arts a few weeks before shipping after EA acquired it's original publisher, Virgin Interactive. In a release, EA stated that they didn't want to "publish such a senselessly violent game", as they felt that it would harm their image. They also stated that they deemed the game so offensive that they would not even attempt to sell the game to be released by another publisher either. Later, former employees that had worked on the game released the full game onto the internet, along with various beta versions. All are still widely available through filesharing.


Acclaim released a BMX game called BMX XXX in 2002 which included a topless woman as the game character riding a bicycle, and rewarded players with video footage of topless strippers. The game was originally intended to be a Dave Mirra title without nudity, but it is generally believed in the industry that the game was of low quality. Acclaim decided later in the game's development to attempt to create a controversy and hopefully prop up sales by including some nudity. The attempt at publicity was rather successful, although the publicity achieved was of the wrong sort for Acclaim; with television reports that Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, and most major IEMA retailers in the United States declined to carry the game in their stores due to the nudity. Consequently, sales were poor: under 100,000 copies were sold. The game was not greeted with controversy or with much sales interest in Europe, while it was sold with the sexual content removed in Australia.


In June 2005, an entire portion of unused code for an interactive sex mini-game was found within the main script of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The game could be accessed in the PC version via a modification, and through Action Replay codes in the PS2 and Xbox versions. The fact that the scene was left on the disc and could be accessed by altering a few bytes of the game's code via a hex editor prompted the ESRB to change the rating of San Andreas to "Adults Only" on July 20, 2005. The game was pulled from many stores; Rockstar Games posted a loss of $280.8 million that quarter.


The US version of the game Fahrenheit (re-named as Indigo Prophecy for American audiences), published in September 2005; had scenes depicting sex and other "adult content" removed in order for it to be classified as a "Mature" title, as opposed to an "Adult Only" rating.


God of War featured several scenes of big-chested topless women, including a particular scene where the character could have off screen sex with two half naked women in order to gain red orbs.


The US version of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was re-rated from "Teen" to "Mature" after it was discovered that a topless skin on female characters could be revealed through a Mod.


The Sopranos: Road to Respect-Towards the beginning of the game, the player enters the Bada Bang, the strip club owned by Tony and the gang. During many of the scenes, women are seen topless. There is also an option that if the player walks up to the stripper area, he can watch the show. Also, the player allows a stripper to do a lap dance for him.