NSFW Tomb Raider 3 ad has not aged well at all

Lara Croft, one of the most iconic video game mascots of all time has been with us for decades, through the good times and the bad. Yet, here we are 27 years later and Tomb Raider is as popular as it ever was (probably).

The first Tomb Raider arrived in 1996 offering an action adventure that had never quite been seen before changing the video game landscape forever. For the most part during that time, we were mostly used to 2D sprite visuals and the concept of 3D video games was a relatively new approach. Tomb Raider led the way setting the standard of 3D action adventures and its influence still resonates today.

Check out the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered trailer below!

That being said, the 1990s was also a very weird time. It was a very different world than it is today. Something that would be considered politically incorrect or offensive today, was the norm back then. What’s more, the sexualisation of characters was a key focus of many forms of advertisement across the whole entertainment industry. Perhaps Lara Croft exemplified that approach more than any other.

Lara Croft was not only designed to be a badass adventurer inspired by Indiana Jones that takes sh** from nobody but she was also designed to be a sex symbol. Sure, it made sense to have real-life models such as Nell McAndrew, Rhona Mitra or Lara Weller be faces of marketing material, but even back then, it was strange to see teenage boys drooling over a pixelated, low-poly Lara Croft with triangle boobs. Still, that didn't stop the digital Lara Croft from posing butt-naked in marketing material across the world.

One such piece of marketing material is from Tomb Raider III (1998) of Lara Croft posing on a bed suggestively in nothing but her pixelated pants, as shared in a recent Reddit post.

“As a kid, I had a habit of spending hours in the bathroom reading on the toilet. That came in… handy in later years,” replied a Reddit user. “Lmao. I mean, I was exactly the target audience and I did get the game, but maybe the marketing was a bit too effective,” said another.

“These [ads] ran in the PlayStation magazines in the UK as well,” reminisced britinnit, and I’m pretty sure that I had one of those PlayStation mags. Redditor getthetime suggested that this piece of Tomb Raider III marketing material may have been inspired by a famous Rolling Stones cover from 1996 featuring Jennifer Anniston, and I think they might have hit the nail on the head.

If you lived through the 90s, then you’ll know it was a wacky time and to some extent, I miss those days. No microtransactions, no battle passes or live services. You just bought a video game and played it. On the flip side, if that game was faulty, there was no online patch to fix it.

In related news, the original Tomb Raider trilogy is getting gloriously remastered, and the first trailer for the anime adaptation on Netflix has recently dropped.

The aforementioned Tomb Raider I-III Remastered will be released on 14 February 2024 (my birthday) on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.