However, collecting them is time sensitive, as they only appear during missions. What I have described is sometimes the case in Mafia II, the centerfolds that exist in the game world are sometimes down a hallway that you might not otherwise have explored.

They rarely intrude much on gameplay, as the player is free to act after picking one up.

Additionally, most collectibles are things that can be retrieved with a simple push of a button or simply by running over them. By being placed off the beaten path, they encourage the player to explore the world in ways that that player normally might not because there isn’t any action going on in that particular nook or cranny of the game world. Most often collectibles are items that are hidden away in games. These centerfolds are featured as collectibles in the game, and as such, they function in a subtly different way than most collectibles do in games. Nevertheless, the game makes it abundantly clear that these nudes are here to be viewed. Many of them feature women merely in sheer clothing or often feature a bare bottom rather than bare breasts and are generally less raunchy than contemporary pornography. None of these images feature full frontal nudity (as no Playboy pictorial did prior to the 1970s). In that regard, the nudes featured here are certainly more buttoned up than what one might expect to encounter when performing a Google image search with SafeSearch disabled in 2010.

The authenticity of these nudes is probably derived more from their more demure quality (something that most players would associate with pornography of a period perceived to be more prudish than the current one) than an adherence to real historicity. While the Playmates presence in the game are actually anachronistic if the game were set in a historical United States (since the game’s main action takes place in 19, years prior to the release of Hefner’s magazine in actual history), assumedly the fictional city of Empire Bay resides in an equally fictional alternate timeline of United States history, in which Playboy emerged on the American scene about a decade early. The inclusion of 1950s Playmates apparently is intended to add an air of authenticity to the period in which the game takes place and to the seaminess of the mob lifestyle of the game’s protagonist. There is also one nude in the in game sequences themselves. I know this because the game features 50 collectible Playboy centerfolds that can be viewed (after collection in game) in the main menu.

Mafia 2 playboy