quote:
Game magazines love their April Fool’s jokes, and the best such pranks capture the shameful zeitgeists of their own little gaming eras. The best-known is EGM‘s 1992 revelation that players could fight Sheng Long, Ken and Ryu’s supposed master, in Street Fighter II. It embodied both the fighting-game craze and the gullibility of a generation that seized on any minor possibility of secrets in games (the “Sheng Long” mentioned in Street Fighter II is just a mistranslation of Ryu’s Shoryuken move). And then Capcom went and put Ken and Ryu’s master in Street Fighter IV, albeit under his proper name of Gouken.

Games moved on, and by the end of the 1990s, the most bandied-out rumors among kids were… well, they were all about Pokemon. But the second most popular rumors had to do with Tomb Raider, and the persistent talk that a cheat code could make star Lara Croft naked. This was a lie, but the unauthorized PlayStation rag PSM exploited this fantasy with an April mock-up all about Valkyrie Wilde: Full Frontal Assault.

Some of PSM‘s writeup gives away the joke, pinning an April 1st release date on the game and revealing its developers to be unabashed about their Tomb Raider rip-off. On the other hand, some of it’s depressingly plausible, considering what was being made in the game and comic-book industries at this point. Valkyrie Wilde apparently goes naked but for her boots and handgun holsters just so she can distract security guards. How clever.

Is it real now? No, and it thankfully never will be. However, PSM had artist Adam Warren draw Valkyrie Wilde for a swimsuit issue (yes, one about non-existent game women) several years down the road.

I had that issue of PSM and read through it quite a few times………for reasons. This was back in the innocent and naïve days of the internet, if you can believe such a thing existed, so stuff like this was really easy to get by on people. Gamers really bit hard on this one.