Breakdown
- There has been a bunch of controversy around the removal of Lara Croft's pinup posters in the Tomb Raider Remastered collection.
- The developers Aspyr have confirmed this was done by mistake during a texture update.
- They plan on adding the pinup posters back in on Patch 3 of the game.
The recently released Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection had a seemingly innocuous change where some pinup posters of Lara Croft were removed. There was a huge uproar about this in certain segments of the gaming community and the developers, Aspyr, have confirmed this removal was a mistake.
The posters in question exist in a single section of the game and Aspyr acknowledged the removal but clarified that "the posters in Sleeping With The Fishes (The Lost Artifact) were inadvertently removed" rather than some attempt at censorship as many were quick to claim.
This makes sense as these pinup posters were flagged by the official Tomb Raider website as an Easter Egg players can go and find. Therefore, it makes no sense for Aspyr to remove them on purpose.
As such, they'll be patching and adding the missing pinup posters of Lara Croft back into the Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection. They stated in a small update post on their website that "This has been resolved and these textures will be restored in Patch 3."
Hooray for pixelated pinup posters, I suppose. Now we can all go hunting for Lara Croft's 3D model from the early 2000s laying down in various poses atop some lockers.
Jokes aside, many people took offence to this as they saw it as a remaster trying to erase the legacy of one of gaming's original and most iconic sexy female lead characters. Some went so far as to claim it was an erasure of culture.
Aspyr is not one to change the content of the original titles because, despite some dated portrayals of several racial and ethnic groups in the original trilogy, they did not remove them.
Instead, they added a warning that the games contained "offensive depictions of people and cultures rooted in racial and ethnic prejudices", but they decided to keep them.
Their reasoning for it was fairly straightforward too, "Rather than removing this content, we have chosen to present it here in its original form, unaltered, in the hopes that we may acknowledge its harmful impact and learn from it." they claimed
For those who cared, this will serve as some good news. Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered launched on 14th February for PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.