Tee'd Off
Image: Tecmo

Video games and nudity have a long and proud history. We're not just talking about the thousands of randy schoolboys who actually believed the infamous Tomb Raider 'nude' cheat printed by CVG was real, either; there are been countless video games with 'rude bits' over the decades.

Tecmo is no stranger to titillation via its Dead or Alive series, but a much earlier Tecmo release was the topic of an urban myth in its native Japan, as digital archaeology site SUDDENデス explains:

I was discussing Tecmo game history with a Japanese acquaintance on twitter a couple days ago (regarding a certain long-awaited but forthcoming article), and he mentioned something tangentially related:

"There's a Tecmo trackball-based golf game called Tee'd Off, and supposedly during its development, every time you got a hole-in-one, the girl would take off her clothes. Someone found the graphics in the game data, but their account is now private. It seems the guys at the Tecmo office at that time had the nude version. Anyway, it's practically become an urban legend in Japan, so you may want to investigate that. It could be big news."

Tee'd Off was released in arcades in 1986 and used a trackball to control the action. This was intended to give the player more control over the action and allow the player to conquer the 22-hole golf course included in the game. It was never ported to any home console.

After digging into the game's code, SUDDENデス's Damian was able to track down the 'offending' graphics data and actually recreate this infamous scene. We'll spare you the imagery, but suffice it to say, if you're a big fan of low-resolution, pixel-based NSFW nudity, you can check out the full piece here.

That's not all that was discovered here, however; developer credits were also hidden in the game – it would seem that Tecmo, like so many Japanese developers of this period, wasn't keen on having its staff credited, just in case they were headhunted by rival firms.

[source sudden-desu.net]