During the late-'80s and into the early-'90s, computer games got decidedly... horny. Despite the rudimentary visuals of the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, some developers still did their damndest to sneak in pixelated 8-bit nudity, while being a little more provocative with the cover art - see Barbarian (1987), Vixen (1988), and Game Over (1987).

One title that took advantage of gaming's teen audience was Hewson Consultants' StormLord (1989), a fantasy adventure game published on a wide variety of home platforms, including Spectrum, C64, Amiga, and Atari ST. Combining Norse mythology with (very soft) explicit imagery, StormLord was essentially a digital take on the sword & sorcery films of the era, themselves renowned for frequent Sins of the Flesh.

So trust Sega to come along and ruin the party for everyone, with the 1990 Genesis port of StormLord, asking conversion team Punk Development to cover up the offending mammeries and glutes with very Norse-like blue bikiniwear. Still, StormLord was a fairly quiet release for Sega (and wasn't even released in the European market), and so the controversy, or lack thereof, passed by unnoticed.

But fast-forward some 36 years, and a fun little titbit tidbit has been discovered, courtesy of Rings of Saturn. While investigating the code for StormLord's Genesis port, tinkerer Bo Bayles discovered a number of cheat codes, including that urban myth of many games past: a Nudity Code. Pausing the game and entering the correct sequence removes the garments from the game's pixies and flowerpot fairies, revealing the hilariously tame "X-rated" content for the first time ever.

Alongside the nudity code (the second such code discovered by Bayles) also uncovered were a hidden credit roll (because God Forbid a 1990s dev team gets spotlit), along with the three previously known cheats for Extra Lives, Extra Time, and a Level Skip.

But, obviously, the more fascinating element is the nudity code, which, alongside the cheesecake images, also reveals that the Genesis port was coded uncensored, and then tweaked later in the process - quite possibly to improve StormLord's chances of being localised for the Asian market.

Nudity in gaming is almost worth an essay of its own. It's amusing how programmers would attempt to squeeze explicit (or even tasteful) nudity into a platform's graphical limitations. It still helped sell, regardless; look at the success of the Gals Panic (1990) series in Japan, or notoriously unsexy but nevertheless iconic games such as Sam Fox Strip Poker (1986).

Regardless, this amusing discovery shows that the playground whispers of "Nudity Codes" didn't begin with Tomb Raider (1996) and Mortal Kombat II (1993).

Now go take a shower, you filthy heathen.