Replay: The History of Video Games (45 page)

Tomb Raider
became incredibly popular, but it was on the PlayStation rather than the Saturn that it really found its audience. “Sony came out all guns blasting and ripped Sega apart,” said Heath Smith. “Everyone saw how great
Tomb Raider
was on the Saturn and was waiting for it to come out on the PlayStation. We sold seven or eight million copies on the PlayStation and its hardware sales went through the roof.”

Tomb Raider
’s action heroine also tapped into the buzz about the ‘girl power’ movement that emerged in 1997. Although the phrase was used to help promote the late 1990s pop group the Spice Girls, girl power had its origins in the underground ‘riot grrls’ feminist movement that rejected the collectivism of early feminists in favour of a more individual and assertive vision of feminity that embraced popular culture. Lara Croft’s position as an interloper into the usual male-dominated world of video games made her a natural fit for the movement, despite her origins in male fantasy. “At the time
Tomb Raider
came out, that whole girl power movement was really kicking off,” said Heath Smith. “You’ve got
Tank Girl
, you’ve got movies with girls really taking leading roles. Women were coming far more into the forefront and rightly so. All that was happening when some of the early press appeared in the magazines and they just loved it. They picked up on the whole girl power coming to video gaming angle.”

* * *

Tomb Raider
’s release coincided with an increasing awareness within the game industry that female players were growing in number and becoming more vocal. Until the mid-1990s, few game designers had attempted to appeal beyond the industry’s core audience of young males. “They didn’t care to and just assumed that girls wouldn’t play games because they didn’t play the ones that were out there as much as boys did,” said Brenda Laurel, who in 1996 formed Purple Moon – a publisher dedicated to creating games for girls. “The video game business was totally vertically integrated around a male demographic – from designers and programmers to marketers and distributors to retailers and customers.”

There was also a cultural perception that home consoles and computers were off-limits to women and girls. “Technology has been gendered male for a long time. Girls were trained to believe that they might break something if they touched it without understanding it,” said Laurel. “The fear was not so much of technology as of humiliation or exclusion – the idea that a real woman wouldn’t mess with that stuff. I was the only girl in chemistry class in my high school and it became clear to me that my choice was between having dates and taking the class. I dropped the class. These taboos were common in the ’50s and ’60s and they die hard.”

Video games had fallen into line with such thinking and had become an overwhelmingly male activity. In 1987 just 14 per cent of players were thought to be female. But in the mid-1990s this began to change when a wave of female game designers emerged hoping to address the gender imbalance.

Leading the way was Theresa Duncan and Monica Gesue’s 1995 game
Chop Suey
, a vivid interactive story narrated by novelist David Sedaris that told the story of two teenage girls who pig out on Chinese food before going on a trippy and wistful exploration through a Midwestern town. Described by Duncan as an attempt to capture “the mystery and beauty of just hanging out at the picnic table for an afternoon”,
Chop Suey
’s non-directed play and emphasis on discovering the unusual echoed Cyan’s eclectic interactive children’s book
The Manhole
. While not a sales success,
Chop Suey
was a critical victory that
Entertainment Weekly
named as the best CD-ROM release of 1995.

The sales breakthrough came soon after, when toy company Mattel decided it knew how to make games appeal to girls. “Mattel had been studying girls’ play patterns for many years and understood what would appeal to them. They also understood that their powerful brands could create a huge shift in the market,” said Nancie Martin, director of girls’ software development at Mattel Media. “At that time, games designed to appeal to girls and women didn’t have strong brands behind them and very few of those involved women in the design or production process or took the time to research what might truly be of interest to them.”

Mattel, of course, had no shortage of brands, most famously its iconic Barbie dolls. Mattel Media made Barbie the focus of its attempts to bring video games to girls. One of its first releases was 1996’s
Barbie Fashion Designer.
“Andy Rifkin, who’d been a toy inventor for years and headed development for Mattel Media, had an eight-year-old daughter named E.J. who wanted to be able to design clothes for Barbie on her computer,” said Martin. “He came up with the idea of the fashion show and the printed clothing; my team made the production work in a girl-friendly way.”

Barbie Fashion Designer
allowed players to design new clothes for their Barbie dolls and print them out on specially made fabric paper that they could colour in using marker pens. “While it had several outcomes, including a virtual fashion show and the clothes you could print out for your doll, it was not competitive as traditional games of any kind generally are, but it certainly provided its players with a tremendous sense of accoishment,” said Martin.

Mattel’s game proved to be the breakthrough hit for games aimed at girls. Thanks to the Barbie brand, it encountered little of the retailer scepticism that had made games such as
Chop Suey
hard to find and its play, finely honed through rigorous testing with children, ensured it became a huge seller. “I believe it sold several million copies all told,” said Martin. “I was not at all surprised by
Barbie Fashion Designer
’s success; I’d been saying for years that the reason girls weren’t playing video and computer games was that no one was making games they were likely to find appealing. For many girls it was the first time they’d ever played with anything on a computer.”

Laurel agreed: “It showed games could appeal to girls and still be successful. The problem with it was quite simply that it perpetuated a version of femininity that was fundamentally lame.”

The games produced by Laurel’s company Purple Moon attempted to push the emerging girl game movement further by focusing on relationships between the characters and an underlying goal of trying to get its target market of eight- to 12-year-olds girls using computers. “I was sick of the industry giving nothing to girls in those days,” said Laurel. “Girls were generally afraid of the technology. Boys had the advantage of gaming to get them involved in the world of computing. I wanted to create the same sort of bridge for girls, using forms and content that would engage them and get them over the hump of putting their hands on the computer.”

And, thanks in part to a change in retailer attitudes after the commercial breakthrough of
Barbie Fashion Designer
, Purple Moon’s debut releases
Rockett’s New School
and
Secret Paths in the Forest
both sold well.
Barbie Fashion Designer
’s success also changed game developer and publisher attitudes to female players. The shift could be seen at the 1997 Computer Game Developers’ Conference in Santa Clara, where game industry delegates packed out five sessions on designing games for girls. In one case a group of more than 20 delegates who were refused entry to a packed session forced their way in, desperate to learn how to sell their products to this previously ignored audience.

But it wasn’t just those making the games who were transforming attitudes. Female players of
Doom
death matches were taking girl power into cyberspace with the aid of virtual rocket launchers and shotguns. Many of the women who played
Doom
and similar games online found themselves confronted with rampant sexism from some male players who accused them of being transvestites, claimed that they were inferior players because of their gender or offered comments such as “girls who play online do it because they can’t get a man” or “I’ll give you a rocket to ride”.

Fed up with the abuse, female players retaliated by organising themselves into women-only teams influenced by the riot grrl feminist punk movement of the early 1990s. These all-womeeams embraced a fierce brand of feminism to challenge the chauvinism they encountered, adopting team names such as Clan Psycho Men Slayers and Crack Whores and forming websites such as Grrl Gamer. They set out to counter the sexism in the only way
Doom
allowed – by blasting the chauvinists into a shower of bloody lumps. As one grrl gamer, Street Fightin’ Mona of the Crack Whores, put it: “We take pride in ripping them to sorry little shreds.” “The game grrls really took on sexism and gave it a good punch in the nose in the hardcore gaming community,” said Laurel.

By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the sexism faced by those early clans was on the back foot and later female clans, such as PMS Clan, were becoming more about community than retaliation.
[3]
“The importance of PMS Clan is that it went past t
he ‘grrl movement’ and female teams and into establishing a complete ‘gamer movement’,” said PMS co-founder Amber Dalton, who played under the name Athena Twin. “Back then we needed to do it on our own as females. We needed to prove we could battle against the best of them. The environment was thick with harassment and prejudice for a long time against women players, but we stuck through it all. Now, women are much more normalised in games since our numbers have thankfully grown and some of the players now have wives and daughters that play as well. People realise we have made our home and no matter what they throw at us we are still going to be here, probably long after they are gone. There is still harassment of course, and always will as it is the nature of online spaces, but at least people are used to us now in the gaming world and many show respect and even admiration.”

By 2010 PMS Clan had expanded to include men, who play under the H2O banner, and become one of the best-known gaming clans around with more than 2,000 members of both sexes. “We were one of the first gaming groups ever to get mainstream media with features in outlets like
Entertainment Weekly
,
Forbes
,
ABC News
and
Fox News
,” said Dalton. “That did not just help our organisation, it helped expose competitive gaming to an entire new mainstream audience and grow online gaming.”

The girl games movement led by the grrl gamers, Mattel, Duncan and Laurel, had forced a significant change in attitudes within the video game industry and among players themselves. Ironically, having helped change attitudes the games produced by the Purple Moon and its peers were later regarded as patronising relics. “I get a lot of crap from both women and men who don’t understand the social context in which Purple Moon and its sister companies came to be,” said Laurel. “They don’t remember the time that girls were afraid of computers, boys dominated computer labs in elementary school and girls thought that tech was not gender-appropriate for them. The conditions that we were trying to address when we started Purple Moon no longer exist.”

* * *

Meanwhile,
Tomb Raider
had become an international pop culture phenomenon. Lara Croft had become the face of post-Nintendo gaming, thecially acceptable Mario; a representation of Sony’s desire to present games as cool. Fashion house Gucci gave
Tomb Raider
publisher Eidos $30,000 to have the virtual icon model its clothes. Eidos then hired real-life models, including Nell McAndrew, to become the ‘official’ embodiment of Croft and help publicise the game around the world. Health drink Lucozade used the character on its adverts to reposition itself as an energy drink. In 2001 the game became a blockbuster film,
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
, which earned more than $250 million.

Croft’s success as a pop culture icon helped changed attitudes to video games. “Suddenly video gaming was an acceptable media – it was talked about around dinner tables,” said Heath Smith. “We had got characters like Lara that virtually everybody had heard of, it was talked about and there was no embarrassment about it. There was a massive shift from playing a computer game being deemed as a thing spotty geeky kids did in their bedroom into being a very acceptable part of entertainment.”

The maturation of video games from toys to home entertainment was aided by game developers’ increasing attempts to cater for older teenagers and adults. These attempts were only partially a response to the popularity of the PlayStation. The US age ratings system introduced following the Senate hearings of 1993 had given publishers the confidence to produce games for older players without fear of retribution. And it was Capcom’s 1996 horror game
Resident Evil
that was the most significant of all these adult-orientated games.

Until the early 1990s game developers rarely tried to produce horror games, largely because the limited technology often made the task of scaring players difficult. One of the early attempts was Five Ways Software’s 1985 adaptation of
The Rats
, James Herbert’s gory horror novel where a plague of mutant rats terrorise London. The game used text adventure scenes where players experienced the attacks of rats from the victims’ perspective, but with the twist that these encounters happened in real-time rather than the usual turn-based approach. Five Ways Software’s subversion of the adventure game format, which is ill suited to real-time action, helped create a sense of panic when the rats attacked as players struggled to survive. The game also had images of rats that would ‘burst’ out of the on-screen page obscuring the text to add to panic. It was an interesting experiment in trying to invoke fear in players but it proved to be a one-off.