Women of Early Video Game Development
When you think of the early game developers, bets are that you think of young men operating out of small studios or garages and creating the next big thing. What a lot of people don’t realize is that there were a lot of talented women that spearheaded the frontier of game development.
In this post, I’ll be listing women who have strongly impact the gaming industry. There are numerous women who had a hand in creating the industry, but I’ll only be naming a few. I’ll be primarily looking at women who had a hand in shaping the industry back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Carol Kantor
Carol Kantor was the first user researcher in the video game industry. She got her job at Atari in 1973 by telling Gene Lipkin, VP, she could figure out which game would do better by using market research. She developed an entire research program and used a series of methods to tell what games would succeed. These methods include field observations, focus groups, and surveys. She was a pioneer and established the foundations of user research that developers still use today.
In addition to user research, she coordinated many of the deliverables for the marketing department, including trade shows. She also wrote, designed, and published the Coin Connection newsletters.
In addition to Kantor, Atari also had women in nearly every department. She remarks that they were fortunate to work on a team that valued their knowledge and their accomplishments. The women of Atari continue to have success in their careers and still have reunions to catch up from time to time.
The original Atari research team was recognized in 2014 by the Games User Research Association for their work.
Jennell Jaquays
Jennell Jaquays’ twitter (@JennellAllyn) bio states that she has been “Making games since … forever.” In turns of the short lifespan of the video game industry, that’s pretty much true. Jaquays started her career doing illustrations for small role-playing game publishers in 1975. In 1981, she started full-time at Coleco as a game designer. She assembled, trained, and supervised the game design and art departments. Jacquays’ first electronic game was Pac-Man tabletop arcade.
At Coleco, she also worked on Donkey Kong and WarGames. She freelanced after getting laid off of Coleco and worked on games such as Lord of the Rings, Central Casting, and the cover for Dragon Mountain D&D. After that, she worked on Quake II, Quake III Arena, and Quake III: Team Arena. She worked on numerous other games as well.
In 2003, she collaborated on SMU Guildhall’s art curriculum while working at a studio full-time. Her son attended the school and was in the second-ever graduating class.
Dona Bailey
Dona Bailey was working for General Motors as an assembly language programmer when she played her first video game, Space Invaders. In 1980, she got a job at Atari in the coin-op division and was the only woman in a 30 person department for awhile.
Bailey didn’t find games that focused on sports or war interesting. Reading the brainstorming notebook the department kept, she was inspired by a one-sentence description of a multi-segmented insect. She then began a part of the four-person team that created Centipede.
Centipede was one of the first arcade games to have a large fan base of women gamers. Bailey feels this is credited to the visual appeal and large array of colors, and also because she opted for a trackball instead of buttons which made the game more approachable to first-time gamers.
Muriel Tramis
Muriel Tramis’s first job was programming drones for the French Army, but had a crisis of conscience after about 5 years. She joined Coktel and used her French-Caribbean heritage to inspire her first project, a point and click adventure called Mewilo. This game was one of the first to gain attract from people outside of the gaming industry. Her next game, Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness, centered around a black slave whose goal was to incite a revolt among the slaves and gain freedom. This game included four playable characters, two women and two men, with unique stats.
She also explored the role of women in games, creating three different erotic titles: Emmanuelle: A Game of Eroticism, Geisha, and Fascination.
Tramis developed software to help girls that had trouble with mathematics and the it was so well-received that educational curriculums were rethought all over Europe and North America.
Tramis received the rank of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 2018. This requires at least 20 years of service and is the highest award for military and civilians.
These are only a few of the women that build the world of the video gaming industry. There are many more that deserve recognition for their hard work that we take for granted today.
To learn more, check out Megan Marie’s Women In Gaming: 100 Professional of Play. In this book, Marie goes deep into the past, present, and future of women in gaming.
