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I was a videogame-obsessed teenager in the 1990s and it seemed like every single gaming magazine (and several of my friends) had one holy grail: The Tomb Raider nude code. The small detail of Core Design’s blockbuster adventure game not actually having one was irrelevant: Thanks to a few doctored screenshots and irrepressible playground murmurings, the legend persisted and, for decades to come, it felt like no Tomb Raider feature was complete without the “nude mod” explainer boxout.
One need only look at some of the more questionable corners of modding to see that the human impulse to see virtual humans naked shall never subside. But now we may have a new origin point for one of videogaming’s most persistently grubby habits. Brace yourself: It’s over four decades old, and involves… Smurfette.
Nothing new under the sun is there. This news comes courtesy of the wonderful Videogame History Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the medium’s history, and recently added a scan of Electronic Games magazine, volume 2 issue 16. As well as featuring an excellent cover photo of a nerd fighting a bald man wrapped in a curtain, it includes a reader letter relating to the nude Smurfette discovery.
“Content warning: glitched naked pixel smurf,” says VGHF, in what is both one of the greatest content warnings of all time and four words you probably won’t ever see jammed-together ever again. “Just discovered in our archive: We thought ‘nude codes’ in games dated back to the original Tomb Raider, but we found a functional one in Electronic Games way back in 1984.”
Content warning: glitched naked pixel smurf
Just discovered in our archive: we thought “nude codes” in games dated back to the original Tomb Raider, but we found a functional one in Electronic Games way back in 1984. archive.gamehistory.org/item/4f6b3af…[image or embed]@gamehistoryorg.bsky.social
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The game in question is Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle, and on the letters page one enterprising soul shares their discovery. Unfortunately this contribution is not named, so our hero must remain unknown.
“There’s a way to keep Smurfette’s dress off until your energy runs out.” No notes on that part. “You need the Roller Controller, or two joysticks plugged into one port through a Y-adapter. Stand on the skull and push one joystick down and the other up. Smurf gets lower and lower. When he disappears, the lady does her striptease act. Smurf will reappear at the top of the screen.”
As can be seen from the image, if you squint a bit this does look like the Smurfette sprite suddenly has no dress, and a blue pixel beneath her arm one could very arguably describe as a breast. It seems self-evident that this is a visual glitch rather than anything intentional on the part of the programmer/s, though it is also a set of inputs that leads to an apparently naked character so certainly fits the definition of “nude code.”
Props to Jupiter Jazz on Bluesky whose reaction inspired this article’s headline: “Good to know the exact year we left gods light.”
Well I hope we’ve all learned something today, especially those of you that zoomed-in on the image of poor Smurfette. Our nameless discoverer choosing to describe the moment of activation as “the lady does her striptease act” really does drive home that, back in the day, you had to make your own entertainment.
Kurt Indovina
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