Naked Bob, Animal Crossing: New Horizons glitch
Image: u/chanandler-kun

What is it with Animal Crossing: New Horizons and surprise nudity? Whether it's the accurate portrayal of classical statues (junk and all!) or the weird glitch that made villagers lose their clothes, we're starting to wonder if this is some plot of Tom Nook's to generate interest in some kind of nudist vacation spot.

Anyway, there's more nudity to come, and this time it's in the form of everyone's favourite purple cat villager, Bob:

This glitch has existed for a while — possibly even from the start, as the first instance we could find was from June 2020, just months after the game's release. So, how does it happen? Why is Bob naked? For that matter, why is it always Bob?

Bob is the first regular villager card in the amiibo series, and he's also got a January 1st birthday. This isn't coincidence — Bob (or Nikoban, as he's known in Japan) was actually the first villager created for Animal Crossing, as confirmed in this Famitsu interview. Since he's number one (or zero, because computer programming always starts at zero) of many, it's likely that the game defaults to him when something goes wrong — which it obviously has here.

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Interestingly, Bob doesn't actually say his name when he appears, nakedly, instead saying something like "Hi! It's !" or "I'm !" with a space where the name would be. And he's naked because...

...well, we don't fully know how Nintendo's systems work, so we can only speculate. But let's say that an amiibo card provides the game with a string of numbers — one number says which character it is, what they're wearing, what their name is, and so on. If there's a glitch that gives the number as "000000", then the game finds what is matched to "0" for each case — which would be Bob's model, no name, and no clothes.

Well, either that, or Bob's going through a midlife crisis.

Have you seen Naked Bob in your game? Please call the police if so.

[source reddit.com]