Hot Tubs and Pac-Man: Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s) 9783110668575, 9783110664461

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Anne Ladyem McDivitt Hot Tubs and Pac-Man

Video Games and the Humanities

Edited by Nathalie Aghoro, Iro Filippaki, Chris Kempshall, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jeremiah McCall and Sascha Pöhlmann

Volume 1 Advisory Board Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara Katherine J Lewis, University of Huddersfield Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen Ana Milošević, KU Leuven Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz Holly Nielsen, University of London Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech Martin Picard, Leipzig University Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University

Anne Ladyem McDivitt

Hot Tubs and Pac-Man Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s)

ISBN 978-3-11-066446-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066857-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-066867-4 ISSN 2700-0400 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942035 Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Bally-Midway Mfg Co. Ad. 1982. Courtesy of Arcade Flyer Museum. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

For Dad, Granny, and Pop

Acknowledgements I like to think of the journey of this book project as an RPG—the creation of this book has been my quest, and I could never have completed it without friends, colleagues, archivists, editors, and family in my party. I would have otherwise been stuck probably at level 5 swinging around a keyboard hoping something stuck rather than actually finishing and publishing a complete book. To Dr. Cassanello, you have been such a phenomenal supporter throughout this entire process—from start to finish. I have appreciated all of your feedback, advice, and assistance over the years. You encouraged me to follow paths that I wouldn’t have thought possible, and it led me to where I am today. You have been an amazing mentor, and your advice and friendship are so valuable to me. Julia Novakovic and Tara Winner at the Strong National Museum of Play archives also deserve a massive thank you. I’ve always been told that a great archivist is instrumental to getting a project done, and this was absolutely the case with Julia and Tara. They gave me advice, pointed me in directions I had not thought of, and brought me materials that ended up becoming a major part of the project. The Strong National Museum of Play is a wonderful place, and I am thankful and happy that I was able to visit and research there. It’s probably also the only place on Earth that I would be able to get lost trying to find lunch and end up on Sesame Street. Thank you to everyone at the Strong for all their fantastic work in supporting the history of video games. Thank you to Rabea Rittgerodt, who contacted me about this project and made it into a reality. Rabea has been extremely supportive, and I am so lucky to have been able to work with her. Publishing this book been a fantastic experience, and I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to work with De Gruyter on this project. To Iro Filippaki and Nathalie Aghoro, I appreciate your invaluable feedback on the manuscript to help shape this into the best final version. Sometimes support comes from funny places, like finding people through fan fiction and video game streaming. Eventually, you might even consider those people to be some of your best friends. That’s the case with Staci Mead and Jillian Kaczak. You both are some of the funniest, amazing, and supportive humans I have ever met. It’s been so fantastic to laugh, chat, and nerd out with both of you, and I appreciate all of your edits and encouragement along the way on this. You’re both wonderful. Jared! You’ve been my best friend for several years now, and while sometimes I’m sure it’s felt like a grind for you (to get back to my RPG analogy), you are so appreciated. I’m so glad I have a pal to chat with constantly, play games with, make a fool out of myself sometimes on the podcast, watch Lives https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-001

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with for hours, or whatever shenanigans we decide to get into. You’re extremely supportive and fantastic, and I am really glad we are friends. You have been incredible during the years I’ve known you, and I definitely would not have made it this far without you. Also, thanks for making me watch the best anime ever too —life-changing. Now I know to always do my Rubesty! I also need to make a shout out to The Boys—Loki and Maxwell. They’ve been such good boys, and their cuddles and hijinks have made this an easier process. They have been with me since before I even started graduate school, so they have been through it all with me. I am extremely lucky. Loki and Max, neither of you can read because I am an awful cat mom, but I love you anyway. You guys are great. Last but not least, Keller and Mom. You two are so amazing, and I honestly couldn’t have even begun to do this without you. You both influenced this project, but also provided support that I cannot even begin to thank you for. Keller, you’re one of my best friends, and we’ve had some great moments with video games—whether it is spending a summer trying to beat Link to the Past, letting me crash your room to play Final Fantasy X, camping out in stupidly cold weather for the Wii, or you bringing me DOOM (2016) to try and help me relax before a dissertation defense, we’ve always been able to hang out, chat, and play games. That’s meant the world to me. You’re a fantastic person and brother, and I love you! Keep being rad. Mom, thank you for everything! You’ve supported me, loved me, and helped me to be who I am today. I know I am biased, but I do have the best mom possible. I appreciate that you have always supported both this hobby and this academic endeavor. I’ve dragged you to game stores, concerts, museums, conferences, and all types of things that I’m so glad that I had you along the ride for. You are truly amazing, and I love you so much. Thank you for being you. Thank you for always being such a positive influence on me, for helping me get through several tough spots, and for all the great memories, including some that I still think influenced me to pursue being a historian. You have had an incredible impact on me as a person, and I know that you are proud of who I’ve become and what I’ve done. I hope that I continue to make you proud. To everyone who has been a part of my party at any point in this journey, thank you so much. Completing this project would have truly been impossible if this were a solo run, and all of your help and support is so appreciated. It’s always exciting when you’re able to finally triumph in an RPG, and I’m looking forward to seeing where my quest takes me next!

Contents List of Tables and Figures Introduction

XI

1 “Lusers” and Geek Masculinity 18 Organization of Chapters

11

“Just Way Too Many Guys Crammed Into One Place” The “Bo Derek Scientific Method” 28

20

“What Can You Expect from a Guy in Charge of Joysticks?” “The Thinking Man’s Plaything” 45

35

“A Gentler Touch to the World of Video Games” 58 “Women Kept Calling Us and Saying It was ‘Adorable’” 62 “They Didn’t Quite Know What to Make of Me” “Cutesy” Games and Pac-Man Fever 69 80 Atari Generation “It’s Neither Tremendous Fun nor a Turn-On” “If Atari Isn’t Dead…” 92

80

“Are you Man Enough to Run with Us?” 102 “No Boobs, No Ditsy Behavior, and No Bitchy Attitude” References

Index

122 Archival 122 Sources 122 Gameography

134

132

58

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List of Tables and Figures Table : Demographics information from  Asteroids focus group 40 Table : “Women pick their favorite games” from EGM, May  75 Figure : “Exploit!” From Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October  30 Figure : Amusement Operator’s Expo  Model Ratings. Atari Coin-Op Division Collection. Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York 32 Figure : Bally-Midway Mfg Co. Ad. . Courtesy of Arcade Flyer Museum 38 Figure : Gotcha flyer. Atari. . Courtesy of the Arcade Flyer Archive 44 Figure : Riley Dennis tweets about Ninja. August , . Courtesy of Riley Dennis URL: https://twitter.com/RileyJayDennis/status/?s= [..] 115

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-002

Introduction Leigh Alexander, in her 2014 critique of gaming culture “’Gamers’ Don’t Have to be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over.” says, “by the turn of the millennium those were games’ only main cultural signposts: “Have money. Have women. Get a gun and then a bigger gun. Be an outcast. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. You don’t need cultural references. You don’t need anything but gaming.”¹ While Alexander attributes this gaming ideal to the new millennium, my examination of gender in early videos game culture and the industry in this book indicates that this was not a new mindset in regards to men and video gaming—it just evolved with the technology. Although there have been attempts to incorporate women into development roles and market towards them as players, the creation of video games and the industry began in a world strongly gendered male. The early 1980s saw a blip of hope that the counter-cultural industry focused on fun would begin to include women, but after the crash of 1983, this free-wheeling freedom of the industry ended along with the beginnings of the inclusion of women. Many of the threads that began in the early years continued or have parallels with the modern video game industry. The industry continues to struggle with gender relations in the workplace and with the strongly gendered male demographic that the industry perceives as its main market. In the early 1980s, the video game industry in the United States began to collapse after a lack of quality control by big video game companies and oversaturation of the market led to poor sales. There was also an uptick in X-Rated video games that sometimes incorporated the gamification of gendered violence, which caused controversy that played out in places like video game magazines. By 1984, arcade and home video games were essentially considered dead in the United States. Once the economic viability of video games failed for US companies, Japanese companies filled the void to become the prominent players in the United States and worldwide. The video game industry internationalized, but some of the tropes and concepts remain entrenched from the early period of video games in the United States. So why do I study the history of video games and the early video game industry? I enjoy playing video games, and I have since I was a small kid. Video gaming has been a major part of my life, and they’re something I am very pas-

 Leigh Alexander, “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over.” Gamasutra, August 28, 2014, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_ your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-003

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sionate about. I even co-host a weekly podcast where we discuss them. I believe one of the most important parts of enjoying a medium is to be aware of its shortcomings and to think critically about why things are the way they are. I am also a woman, and this has definitely shaped my relationship with playing games and the culture of gaming. Ultimately, this project combines my love of video gaming while also critically examining the beginnings of the industry to provide insight into how video games changed over time and how, despite a rise in women in gaming in the 1980s, the early industry established gendered threads and norms that continued, and in some cases worsened, into the US video game industry today. While I had always heard about some of what I will discuss in this book, being able to examine it with an academic and gendered lens has helped me further understand and contextualize the industry for myself and others. This book has also allowed me to contribute to the scholarship of the history of the video game industry—from the perspective of a historian, a woman, and also someone who plays video games. Video games are often seen as only popular culture entertainment, but just as an earlier generation asserted the importance of popular fiction and movies, recent scholarship asserts the importance of entertainment as a vector of meaning in cultural history. Video games and the industry that developed them offer a lens to understanding a section of entertainment and business culture in the 1970s and 1980s. They also show the complexities of gender relations in both developers themselves and the products they produced and advertised. The relationship between technology and gender is fluid, and this study will look at the gender coding and social interactions with video games, and how they both reflected and produced a male dominated construction of gender. This book also examines the role of women in the early video game industry, not in the traditional sense of individually looking at each woman developer, but overall how the industry itself treated women who were playing and creating video games and how that treatment lingered. This includes women present in advertisements and as developers and gamers. By understanding the culture of the industry in the early years, we learn about the experience of women who navigated their way through it and their triumphs and struggles. It is significant to mention that while there are many women discussed in this book, many of the women in the 1970s and 1980s involved in the video game industry were white women. While it is a triumph for women to be involved in creating and playing video games, it is not entirely an inclusive one. However, there has recently been an indie game movement which is more inclusive in who

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plays and makes video games, and this progress will be discussed further in the final chapter.² Since I first began my research, I envisioned it being a project examining gender relations in the video game industry. The primary developers of video games in the early years, 1960s through 1980s, were men. They tended to stress themes around sports, space exploration and combat, war, and eventually sex and pornography. During this time, many video game companies were small groups of developers conceptualizing, developing, and advertising for their games. The beginnings of the US video game industry involved a form of a counter-cultural business model, including a leisurely and casual atmosphere focused on fun and creativity. At the same time, these companies fully embraced the traditional patriarchy common in the businesses they despised at the time. There was one game in particular released in 1980 that made video games a huge, profitable industry in the United States. However, as a Japanese game, it was the first sign of the American industry’s eventual decline. Namco’s PacMan was hugely successful, even launching a popular craze including a terrible Billboard Top Ten single, “Pac-Man Fever.”³ The game attracted more women players, which Japanese designer Toru Iwatani explained was his goal. Changing the traditional type of games, he said, “At that time, as you will recall, there were many games associated with killing creatures from outer space. I was interested in developing a game for the female game enthusiast.”⁴ Stan Jarocki of Midway agreed with Iwatani’s assessment of the need to market toward the female gamers. Regarding the development of Ms. Pac-Man, which was released in 1982 to capitalize on “Pac-Man Fever”, he said, “Now we’re producing this

 There have been several recent works on video games and race, gender, and sexuality that deserve to be highlighted: Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard (eds.), Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018); Kishonna L. Gray and Gerald Voorhees (eds.), Feminism in Play (New York City, NY: PalgraveMacmillan, 2018); Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2020); Bonnie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2019); Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).  Harold Goldberg, All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011), 54.  Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: The Story Behind the Craze that Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 141.

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new game, Ms. Pac-Man, as our way of thanking all of those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man.”⁵ The importation of Pac-Man led to huge profits for companies in the United States through distribution licenses, and it began a surge in development in the early 1980s. After Pac-Man, these American corporations sought to recreate their own version of Pac-Man to appeal to a new audience. This was a new genre of games referred to as “cutsey” games, which were designed and encouraged by corporations to potentially attract women by offering bright colors and simplistic gameplay. Japanese companies had an entirely different development style, which was less about macho genres and more story and character driven. This is demonstrated by a focus on games such as Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. However, gender was still very present in their games, which is demonstrated in a quote from Donkey Kong and Super Mario developer, Shigeru Miyamoto. He stated in regards to development, “Well, yeah, back in the days when we made the first Donkey Kong, that was a game we first made for the arcades, the arcades were not places girls went into often. And so we didn’t even consider making a character that would be playable for girls.”⁶ It is undeniable that Japan completely altered the nature of video gaming worldwide, including the United States. With the globalization of gaming, tropes and developmental styles changed along with the industry, but some that were entrenched in the United States during this early period either remain or have current parallels. From this, I developed the driving questions of this study. Who were these early programmers that made up the early industry? How did notions of gender influence the design of the video games created during this period? How were women treated both as developers and consumers, and how did they fit in the larger picture? Why was the video game industry gendered male from the start, and despite efforts to integrate it, why did it never become a more equally gendered industry? How did this era of the video game industry influence the industry beyond the 1980s, if at all? These questions are a significant part of the story of the early industry. Understanding how technology and gender interact with each other allows for a historical analysis of gender and the video game industry, since the industry was inherently shaped by cultural and gender norms of the time and place.  Joyce Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” Electronic Games Magazine 1, no. 3 (May 1982), 32.  Thomas Whitehead, “Shigeru Miyamoto is Open to More Female Heroines When the Gameplay Structure Fits,” http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/06/shigeru_miyamoto_is_open_to_more_female_heroines_when_the_gameplay_structure_fits, last modified June 21, 2013.

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Several works have examined this relationship between gender and technology, including the fluid and performative nature of gender, and these texts shaped my thinking and analysis on the relationship between video games and individuals that interacted with them. Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen Mohun’s Gender and Technology: A Reader explains that gender and technology are tied together, and that both are fluid in their meaning. Scholars in this work argue that technology and gender shape each other—social change creates a new way to interact with tangible elements in society, including technology.⁷ They argue that technology always involves coded social norms. This is also expressed in gender representation, which is the assumption of what a person would like commercially by their gender.⁸ Technology does not exist independent of the gender norms and codes of the society that produces and uses it. The opposite is true in that technology is produced by and interacts with existing social norms. A famous example might be the typewriter, which shifted secretarial jobs from primarily men’s to women’s work.⁹ The author of Making Technology Masculine, historian of technology Ruth Oldenziel, demonstrated the notion of gendered technology in an analysis of a 1983 issue of The New York Times. An article in the issue says, “women and girls use computers; men and boys love them. And that difference appears to be a critical reason that computers in America remain a predominantly male province.”¹⁰ The same article defined women in society as bystanders to technology. Oldenziel argues that when women entered professions as engineers or computer hackers, their presence had to be explained, as their joining of these technical fields made it seem “exotic but more likely an exceptional, strange, and alien event.”¹¹ Oldenziel examines the engineers of America and how the profession began to be a masculine profession. She argues that technology is not inherently masculine, and in much the same way as Gender and Technology, says that technology and gender shaped each other with the need to disassociate certain professions from minorities and women.¹² Due to cultural shifts, the def-

 Technology here is defined as the way people make and do things. Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P Mohun, eds., Gender and Technology: A Reader (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2, 6.  Ibid., 4.  Ibid., 6.  Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America 1870 – 1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 9.  Ibid., 10.  Ibid., 10.

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inition of an engineer was changed to make the career into a more exclusive, masculine, and middle-class one.¹³ One of the most important aspects of both of these works is the argument that gender is not just the study of women—it is the study of genders and their relationship to each other and to technology. This argument is significant in shaping my work on the video game industry. This is not just a study of one gender and their relationship with video games. Rather, this study examines both men and women and their relationship with video games, as well as the industry that created them. A prominent work on gender and technology, Roger Horowitz’s edited volume of presentations from a conference, Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Technology, Class in America, included work by gender historians that looked at the changing relationship with the social construction of masculinity and gender, as well as the different classes. These essays on gender and technology show the application of the historical analysis on gender to technology, which provides a framework for studying gender in relation to these technologies. There is also an emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between social constructs and technology through work, the learning and reconstruction of masculine gender coding, and entertainment. The interrelationship between gender, specifically masculinity, and technology are emphasized within this work. The connection between the reciprocal relationship of gender constructs and technology are important to consider. The video game industry did not form in a bubble, and due to this, it is necessary to consider the cultural context of its beginnings and innovation and how that may have influenced the treatment of women as developers as well as consumers. Judith Butler’s 1988 work on gender “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” argues that gender is performative driven by social expectations.¹⁴ Further, Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity argues that a person’s gender is not their only defining identity and that because gender intersects with race, class, sexual, regional and ethnic identities, it is not consistent in context.¹⁵ Both of these ideas are significant to understanding gender in the early video game industry. Not every woman in the early video game industry had the exact same experience, much like not every man participated in misogynistic behaviors. Gender is also not a binary. That said, the early US video game industry  Ibid., 11.  Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 520.  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 6.

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largely skews middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, and white in the United States, as the industry lacked (and still lacks) great levels of diversity. However, performative gender expectations do play a role when it comes to the concept of nerd or geek masculinity, which will be discussed further in this chapter. There have been several recent academic works on the history of video gaming with regards to gender, and these have shaped my work regarding using gender as a lens for video game history. One is Carly A. Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. Kocurek’s focus is primarily on the history of the video game arcade and masculinity and boyhood through them.¹⁶ In particular, she examines moral panics, regulations, and the heroes of the early arcade. I see this work as complementary to Kocurek’s, giving a different perspective on the same general time period. Kocurek primarily examines boys and the arcade, the image of the gamer through the Twin Galaxies Arcade and Scoreboard, in addition the move of the gamer into the mainstream through movies such as Tron and WarGames. Kocurek writes a fantastic work on the culture of gaming at the time, in particular looking at the masculine elements of the arcade and gaming’s image. She writes, “In this book, rather than study the exclusion of women and girls, I focus on the inclusion of men and boys.”¹⁷ Kocurek’s explanation of technomasculinity particularly helped shape my analysis on the type of masculinity that is present in the early video game industry, which will be discussed further in the chapter. My work completes more of the story by looking at gender in the industry itself and the culture surrounding it, including the treatment of women developers and gamers and how that trend continues even now in the industry. Another recent work is Michael Z. Newman’s Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America. Newman’s focus is tying video games into the middle class, masculinity, and youth. He also takes a dichotomous approach—he argues that the understanding of video games was contradictory in the culture of the time, with video games solidly representing the middle-class despite being in unsavory locations, educational versus entertainment, and family togetherness versus young male escapism.¹⁸ Newman says, “The middle-class status of the new medium developed in tension with a less respectable and less legitimate reputation of public arcades and game rooms… the place of video games in the home was inflected by the idea of domestic space as feminine… the use of computers  Carly A. Kocurek, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).  Ibid., xiii.  Michael Z. Newman, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

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to play games and the status of games as computerized playthings introduced tensions between productive and frivolous uses of advanced electronic technology.”¹⁹ Newman’s approach demonstrates the fluid nature of the relationship between technology, gender, and culture. His argument of the often conflicting nature of video games from a cultural standpoint in this time period shows that there is not a set perspective on gender and video games in the early period, and it can always change based on technological or cultural shifts. Both of these works give a better idea of the nature of arcades and home gaming, while explaining how those came to be seen as gendered masculine. Newman’s approach is wider than Kocurek’s but both are missing a piece of the puzzle regarding the early video game industry—more of the story of those who made them and the women involved. This work will address that missing piece by exploring people who created video games to contribute to a more complete picture of the industry and its impact. The Video Game Explosion: A History from Pong to Playstation and Beyond is a chronological look at video game history with a focus on the games themselves. The book has three distinct areas of chronological focus for its essays, and it also includes two separate sections such as one that defines video games and what makes them unique as well as another that details the development process of creating a video game. It is an expansive book that details important aspects of video game history through looking at the games themselves. The editor, Mark J. P. Wolf, argues, “a broad knowledge of video games’ origins and development, then, is necessary and crucial to the understanding of their current state, and this book hopes to provide that.”²⁰ I agree with Wolf’s assertion on this, but while his focus is on a broad view of video game history, my work has a narrower focus on the early industry and gender in the same hope of understanding the current state of the video game industry. Julie Prescott and Jan Bogg’s Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry argues, “there is a gender divide within computer games in terms of gender representation within the games themselves, to gendered differences in how games are played, motivations for play, space and time to play as well as how games are produced by a predominately male dominated industry producing games for men.”²¹ Their analysis is from a psychosocial disciplinary perspective, as well as a more contemporary one. However, their look into the gendered nature of  Ibid., 5.  Mark J.P. Wolf, ed., The Video Game Explosion: A History from Pong to Playstation and Beyond (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2008), xv.  Julie Prescott and Jan Bogg, Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry (Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global, 2013), 3.

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computer games and technology is significant as it provides a data-based argument regarding the current gendered nature of the computer game industry as well as the relationship between women and technology. It encourages women’s involvement in the industry as both consumers and creators. Soraya Murray’s On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space examines video games as visual culture, and she argues that games as visual culture both create and sustain the value systems and hierarchy of a constituency at the expense of another group.²² Murray’s work is a multilayered analysis of high budget games such as Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation (2012), The Last of Us (2013), Tomb Raider (2013), and Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain (2015) in the context of whiteness, video games in a post-9/11 landscape, and racialized performances. Murray’s concept that video games create but also bolster cultural constructs provides an important scaffolding for this work. I analyze the relationship between developers, the video games they create, their assumptive consumer, and how their rhetorical ideas fed into each other because the developers created games for people like them. Finally, there are a number of popular books on video gaming, which consists of works explaining the evolution of video game developments over time, advertisement image books, and some popular narrative-based hobby books. These works are useful in placing the timelines of game development, viewing advertisements and side art that are not easily accessible, and for gathering information regarding these early developers, their mindsets, and some primary source material. For example, Leonard Herman’s Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Video Games is a year-by-year look at the business side of the video game industry, and Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution provides information on who many of the early hackers were, some of whom would turn into game developers, and the “hacker ethics” that many utilized to create games through the technology available to them. Video games have been a significant hobby, and due to their popularity there have been several published works outlining timelines of development, advertisements, and how the industry has changed since the beginning. None of these books provide any historical analysis about the industry, but they do provide context that will be important for filling in the narrative of the culture around video games in the 1970s and 1980s. Steven L. Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games, Harold Goldberg’s All Your Base Are Belong to Us, and Jeff

 Soraya Murray, “Introduction: Is the ‘Culture’ in Game Culture the ‘Culture’ of Cultural Studies?” in On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 46.

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Ryan’s Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America all provide a base for the timeline, as well as note important events and quotes from the early developers in the industry. The Strong National Museum of Play’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play houses many of the primary sources for this project. Within these archives, I examined two collections of Atari’s corporate and design records, Ralph Baer’s personal papers, Brøderbund Software’s design and corporate records, Penguin Software’s collections, documents from developer Jordan Mechner, Sierra On-Line’s Ken and Roberta Williams’ papers, the electronic and video game trade catalog collection, and the Playthings Magazine collection from the studied time period. These types of sources provide helpful insight into the industry through first person perspectives, financial documents, and advertisements. However, they cannot provide a full picture. While some of the more interesting items such as focus groups exist, they tend to be sparse. I do engage with them when it is possible. In addition, I examined magazines from the time period, including Playboy, Esquire, Video Games Magazine, Videogaming and Computergaming IllustratedJoystik, Video Games Player, Electronic Games Magazine, Rolling Stone, and others to serve as a way to determine the cultural impact gaming had, as well as how video games were viewed throughout the years. They also provide the perspective of gamers through letters to the editor. Many of the video game magazines had relatively short print runs, with most shuttering after 1983 or 1984. In addition, newspapers such as The New York Times ran important interviews and stories with developers and regarding the industry itself. The Warner Annual Shareholder Reports also provide significant insight into the rise and fall of video games at the time. One source that I have not utilized for this book is oral histories recorded by myself. Many developers of the early games industry have given many oral histories, and from these I have been able to extract significant pieces of the story. I have utilized unconventional sources, such as a Reddit Ask Me Anything (commonly known as an AMA) with Centipede designer Dona Bailey, and articles and interviews from gaming websites. These types of sources may seem niche or strange for a historian to utilize, but they allow for important insights into the gaming industry both now and in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the most significant ways that the analysis for this study developed was the evaluation of the video game software, the side art for arcade cabinets, the stories that accompany the games to immerse players, and advertisements to market these to various players. Utilizing image analysis for this project is crucial

“Lusers” and Geek Masculinity

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since so much of the material is visual.²³ Without these pieces, it would not be a complete study, as these are ultimately the completed products of the industry that were available to all players.

“Lusers” and Geek Masculinity Men working with computers at the time and into the years of Atari and the birth and crash of the industry demonstrated a unique form of masculinity that spoke to their strengths, and this form of masculinity is key to understanding gender dynamics in the video game industry. While there are many works written on masculinity, one of the most prominent is R. Connell’s Masculinities where she writes about hegemonic masculinity.²⁴ Hegemonic masculinity is defined by Connell as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.”²⁵ There is another subgenre of masculinity that is important to this study. There is a stereotype of those who both make and play video games, which is that of a geek or nerd, which for this study I tend to use the terms interchangeably. Those that fall into the category of nerd rarely fit into the culturally dominant masculine identity. Articles written about the people who made one of the earliest video games, Spacewar!, demonstrate this. For example, a 1983 Washington Post article called “Vintage Video Whiz” says this about Steve Russell, one of the programmers: Russell seems cut from the classic cloth of creative computing: he’s fascinated by electronics and games (he has two computers in his home, and his favorite game is “Megabug,” a maze exploration program); he has only one other obsession: trains, both model and real; his shirt pocket is stuffed with pens (seven, in four different colors).²⁶

John Markoff from The New York Times wrote about Spacewar!, explaining, “It certainly established at least one stereotype of the high-tech age: a few frenzied geeks in their 20’s [sic] obsessively laboring after-hours in a computer lab on a

 Louise Sandhaus, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design, 1936 – 1986 (New York: Metropolis Books, 2014).  R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).  Ibid., 77.  Tom Zito, “Vintage Video Whiz,” The Washington Post, May 25, 1983.

12

Introduction

creation that combined play and programming.”²⁷ Even Gamasutra, which is a website dedicated to making video games, compares the developers of Spacewar! to the characters in 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds, citing their fascination with computers, gadgets, and science fiction.²⁸ These descriptions are not accidental. The authors of these articles felt that part of the identity of the programmers behind Spacewar! was their status of geek. Understanding the subset of masculinity called geek masculinity is key to framing gender in the early video game industry. In ways similar to these descriptions of early developers, the geek stereotype emerged because early computer engineers and programmers were often seen as brilliant with technology but also loners who were socially inept.²⁹ Due to this stereotype, geek masculinity emerged that relied on technological knowledge and prowess as the formation of their own masculine identity. Lori Kendall explains, “The nerd stereotype includes aspects of both hypermasculinity (intellect, rejection of sartorial display, lack of ‘feminine’ social and relational skills) and perceived feminization (lack of sports ability, small body size, lack of sexual relationships with women).”³⁰ The key to understanding nerd masculinity for this study ties into the intellectual aspect. In discussing the exclusion of women and the overtly sexist rhetoric that was employed at times in the industry, it is important to understand the environment and performing their own form of masculinity—one that in this case was driven by their intellectual prowess with computers and technology or by an interest in science fiction. This form of masculinity falls outside of the hegemonic masculinity, but it stays within the same spaces of it through employing some of the same language and perspectives on those deemed below them, including, in some cases, other men who they felt did not have the same intellectual capacity. Carly Kocurek in Coin-Operated Americans coins this particular brand of masculinity as “technomasculinity,” which she says is the combination of digital technology, masculinity, violence, and youth.³¹ It is important to know that while

 John Markoff, “A Long Time Ago, in a Lab Far Away…” The New York Times, February 28, 2002.  Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice, “The History of Spacewar!: The Best Waste of Time in the History of the Universe,” Gamasutra, June 10, 2009, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/ 4047/the_history_of_spacewar_the_best_.php.  Michael Salter, “From Geek Masculinity to GamerGate: The Technological Rationality of Online Abuse,” Crime Media Culture 14, no. 2 (August 2018): 250.  Lori Kendall, “‘The Nerd Within’: Mass Media and the Negotiation of Identity Among Computer-Using Men,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 7, no. 3 (March 22, 1999).  Kocurek, Coin-Operated Americans, xvii.

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geek masculinity and technomasculinity are related, with technomasculinity deriving aspects from geek masculinity, they are not the exact same. Technomasculinity is instead related primarily to the use of computer technologies, youthfulness, and the willingness to bend the rules.³² This derivative of geek masculinity is of utmost importance to understanding the early video game industry and how developers maneuvered and understood themselves. While the boys who played video games fell into the category of technomasculinity, the developers of video games did as well. They created games that they wanted to play, for those that they considered like them who were interested in the same things. Kocurek’s definition of technomasculinity is quite significant to this study, and the concept of it helps to shape some of the understanding of how the game developers in the early industry differed from hegemonic or hypermasculinity, and instead practiced their own version that continued to share many of the same elements as more traditional masculinity. In addition, Michael Kimmel examines young male masculinity, which he terms “Guyland,” and says, “In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mindset, young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men despite all evidence to the contrary.”³³ The concept of “Guyland” fits quite well with those who were involved in the early video game industry, with the thought that their computer knowledge led to not only fun but also, in some cases, perpetual partying. While Kimmel quotes a modern woman gamer in a New York Times article as stating that frat boys have taken over video games in recent years, the development side of video gaming has always involved a unique type of frat that included the partying generally associated with them, the homosocial atmosphere, but also the feeling of intellectual superiority associated with nerd masculinity. As he puts it, “the gaming world, many gamers believe, is part of Guyland, and for women to enter this virtual men’s locker room is unacceptable.”³⁴ Andrea Braithwaite defines geek masculinity as “a strong interest in technology and playing computer games… these performances of expertise, skill, and knowledge, are not only sources of social connection and pleasure, but also

 Ibid., 141.  Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 4.  Ibid., 155.

14

Introduction

work as important markers of inclusion and exclusion.”³⁵ There is also a concept of marginalization or victimhood with geek masculinity. Braithwaite explains that one of the hallmarks of geek masculinity is marginalization because their hobbies, such as gaming, comics, and sci-fi, have been categorized as outside of the norm for culture at large.³⁶ Salter and Blodgett emphasize that this perceived marginalization is “foundational” to geek masculinity, and hypermasculinity comes in to play when geeks see themselves as both the outsiders and the hero of the story.³⁷ That is, geek masculinity cannot be separated in relation to femininity as well as more traditional forms of masculinity. Further, this brand of masculinity defines itself by accepting and rejecting certain parts of traditional masculinity, such as the rejection of athletic and sport cultures and the acceptance of skillful mastery. In “Toxic Masculinity and Gatekeeping,” Karen Walsh states that video games support hegemonic masculinity, even if the geek men who play and create them do not necessarily fit into it. She argues that the ultimate goal of many video games is to “win,” through whatever means, and this goal reads as masculine.³⁸ While many of these definitions apply to recent video gaming, they are not entirely unlike geek masculinity that existed in the 1980s. In 1984, sociologist Sherry Turkle published The Second Self, which analyzes the social and psychological impacts of computers and technology. Within this work, she was able to speak to several men who played video games. One, a 29-year-old economist named Marty, explains his interest in gaming in distinctly masculine terms. He states that he previously used transcendental meditation for relaxation, but he began playing Asteroids (1979) instead. Marty actually refers to his time playing as “meditation with macho,” and he also states, “It’s the relaxation of forcing you to withdraw from the rat race, yet they give you a score that reassures you that you are a winner.”³⁹ Another player, David who she lists as a lawyer in his mid-thirties, continues the language of winning, being macho, and testing and challenging yourself:

 Andrea Braithwaite, “‘It’s about ethics in game journalism’? GamerGaters and Geek Masculinity,” Social Media + Society special issue: Making Digital Cultures of Gender and Sexuality with Social Media 2, no. 4 (2016): 2.  Ibid., 3.  Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (Gewerbestrasse: Switzerland, 2017), vi.  Karen Walsh, “Toxic Masculinity and Gatekeeping,” in Geek Heroines: An Encyclopedia of Female Heroes in Popular Culture (Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood, 2019), 41.  Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 85.

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It has to do with testing yourself; it has to do with the idea that basic training will make a man out of you, with the idea that you never lived unless you’ve lived close to the edge. The games are that simple, “close to the edge,” but they are not threatening. Do you understand? It’s a particular sort of feeling.⁴⁰

This sense of masculine competition between yourself and the machine, as well as the relative safety of it, were important to these men playing video games in the 1980s. This mindset extended to those making games and programming as well, with the sense of competition with yourself to create the best code you can.⁴¹ Turkle’s view of geek masculinity is defined by three elements: individualism, mastery over technology, and a lack of sensuality. Turkle explored the nature of computer science students and self-described hackers, their interests, their relationships with computers, and their isolation from culture at large. Her observations of these individuals were that many accepted the notion that they were nerds, even to the point of referring to users on a computer at MIT as “lusers.”⁴² The MIT students she spoke to explained that they had difficulties with people, enjoyed science fiction for what they saw as disciplinary writing, and also had intense relationships with computers and technology. The conquering of the technical, as well as the control that they had over computers, related to a form of pleasure for the computer science students she spoke to. Their pleasure was from mastery. In one instance, a student, in this case named Burt, made a direct comparison in his struggles with personal relationships and his love for computers. While explaining that he preferred computers, math, and science because he felt he knew what to expect from them, he stated: I stay away from the flesh things. I think this makes me sort of a nonperson. I often don’t feel like a flesh thing myself. I hang around with machines, but I hate myself a lot of the time. In a way, it’s like masturbating. You can always satisfy yourself to perfection. With another person, who knows what might happen? You might get rejected. You might do it wrong. Too much risk.⁴³

This rejection of interpersonal relationships, while also making a direct comparison between mastering computers and mastering your own sexual self-indulgence, is unique to geek masculinity. While there is an acknowledgment by

 Ibid., 91.  Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly, 2010), 32.  Turkle, The Second Self, 200.  Ibid., 198.

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Introduction

one of the hackers that many of the others he knew felt that having a significant other would make their lives better, he also states that control or lack thereof drives many away from these personal relationships.⁴⁴ In fact, several hackers in Levy’s work echo the same rhetoric of controllability of computers versus relationships with people. This includes one who stated in the original publishing in 1984 that, “Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable. How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?”⁴⁵ Computer science students, game developers, and hackers acknowledging this in the early 1980s demonstrates that this trait in geek masculinity is not new, and it continues even as they get older. There is also a level of individualism that is at play in the version of masculinity that those men involved in early video game development and computer engineering performed. Turkle refers to this as “radical individualism”, and the hackers she spoke to make a point that difference is key to their identity, and they utilize this sense of difference to make themselves stand out, especially in the world of hacking. By allowing themselves to stand out, they showcase their talents with computers, but they also divide themselves from the rest of society to avoid “drowning in the sea of humanity.”⁴⁶ In contrast, femininity in the geek world is harder to define. In an analysis of adult women comic book readers, Stephanie Orme examines how women engage in a coded-masculine (and typically geek masculine) culture. She argues that there is often a stigma involved with women’s interests in hobbies such as comics, and one is that they faced a dual stigma from both those who read comics and those that she refers to as the “normals.” Natalia, a participant in the study, says, “I think it’s because we don’t think of women as typically being into [comic book culture]. And if you are, you’re this anomaly or something.”⁴⁷ There is a dichotomy present in women’s participation in geek culture, and Orme explains that Natalia’s friends would not suspect that she is into comic books, which they consider a masculine hobby, due to the fact that she engages in cultural norms they associate with femininity, such as the way she dresses or her interest in styling her hair. She is not their stereotype, and thus she does not fit into their view of what a comic book fan is. Orme argues further that women in larger geek culture often have to negotiate their position between those considered “normal” who may have a negative stereotype of nerd culture and those  Ibid., 218.  Steven Levy, Hackers, 72.  Turkle, The Second Self, 215 – 216.  Stephanie Orme, “Femininity and Fandom: The Dual-Stigmatisation of Female Comic Book Fans,” Journal of Graphic Novel and Comics 7, no. 4 (2016): 408.

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that already participate in nerd culture unwilling to welcome them in to that culture due to their gender.⁴⁸ While Orme’s work is specifically about comic book readers, a similar negotiation of identity can be applicable in video game culture as well. Similarly, Valerie Walkerdine studied young girls, femininity, and video games and argues that young girls who play video games also negotiate an identity that requires both perceived traditional masculine and feminine traits.⁴⁹ Mary Bucholtz in “Geek Feminism” sought to demonstrate that being both a woman and a geek were not incompatible states. Neither, she argues, are feminism and being a geek. She states the cyberfeminism of female hackers advocates neither the erasure of gender espoused by postmodern cyberfeminists nor the gender separatism of radical cyberfeminists. Neither of these versions of feminism adequately captures the realities of the female geek experience. On the one hand, as participants in the overwhelmingly male domain of hacking, most female geeks cannot afford and do not want to separate themselves entirely from their male colleagues as some radical cyberfeminists urge. On the other hand, the challenges they face as female hackers, as well as their pride in bucking the gender odds and succeeding in the world of computers and technology, have made them skeptical of the postmodern cyberfeminist ideal of gender fluidity, an ideal that in any case is not attainable for most female geeks in their professional lives. Yet geek feminism is not liberal feminism: female geeks may be highly critical of normative gender arrangements and male hegemony both onand offline, and their goal is not simply to fit into a male milieu.”⁵⁰

This balance is what women who work in and play in the video game industry have to negotiate, both in the past and the present—a form of femininity that is neither separating itself from the masculine geek counterpart nor approving of it. Further, an important point Bucholtz makes is that geek women do not all feel uncomfortable or out of place in male-dominated tech worlds. While the culture may be male-dominated and misogynistic overall, it is not a universal experience for every woman who works or plays in these environments. In this book, I discuss the experiences of some of the women and girls who did navigate this environment, but not all of them would or do classify the behaviors they encountered as misogynistic or sexist in their eyes. With this analysis, I acknowledge that there will always be those that do not feel that their experience fits with evidence utilized in this book.  Stephanie Orme, “Femininity and Fandom,” 413.  Valerie Walkerdine, “Playing the Game: Young Girls Performing Femininity in Video Game Play,” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 4 (2006): 520.  Mary Bucholtz, “Geek Feminism,” in Gendered Practices in Language, ed. Sarah Benor et al. (Stanford, California: CSLI Publications, 2002), 281– 282.

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Introduction

All of these elements together form the conglomerate understanding of geek or nerd masculinity, and in contrast what femininity in nerd culture looks like, that is important to the story of the early video game industry and the threads that continued on into the modern industry. Mostly men made up the early video game industry, and their interests, mindsets, and their methodology of utilizing their own form of masculinity led to a unique culture of the games industry, some of which still remains today. I am both a woman nerd with many positive and negative interactions with the video game industry in my lifetime and a historian. I too navigate both my identities to analyze the culture of the video game industry in my efforts to demonstrate how these threads of gender and the video game industry have been intertwined from the beginning and the larger impact that had on the industry as a whole.

Organization of Chapters This book will be divided into five chapters examining different aspects of the early video game industry and how the threads continued into the modern era of gaming. The first chapter looks at who the early industries’ developers were and their personalities, the freewheeling, counter-cultural environment of the video game industry in the early years, as well as the youthful nature of many of the video game companies at the time. This chapter also demonstrates examples of blatant sexism and sexist behavior during the 1970s and early 1980s. The second chapter examines media and the early video game industry. Advertisements, including box art, side art, interviews, and both print and video ads, demonstrate how the game was meant to be perceived and who they felt their audience would be. There was also a rise in the media coverage of video gaming, and the ways in which media examined video games varied from optimism of the medium to moral panics. These are significant in demonstrating the growth of the industry from a hobby of developers into a marketable business, but it also shows how the perceived audience of gaming reflected some of the values of the creators. The third chapter is primarily focused on women’s roles within the industry, as both developers and consumers. After the 1980 release of Pac-Man, the industry took notice of women as consumers and developers of video games. There were a small number of women in development, and this chapter examines the role of these women, their influence on the games, and their overall treatment in the industry. In addition, I examine the push in the early 1980s to make games that women would enjoy playing, while balancing them to maintain the mostly male audience. Finally, discussions existed at the time about the lack

Organization of Chapters

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of women making and playing video games and how to encourage more women to engage with the industry, and these are significant in understanding the contemporary thoughts on women and video games from both an insider and outsider perspective from the industry. The next chapter looks at the rising notoriety of the industry leading up to the crash of the video game industry. I analyze some of the controversial pornographic games created in the early 1980s, including the gamification of gendered violence present in some of those games. This is an analysis of the games themselves, the advertisements, and the reactions to both. This chapter will also give a brief look into what eventually led to the industry crash of 1983, and what that meant for the nature of the industry at the time. The final chapter examines the more modern video game industry. This chapter demonstrates connections between the US industry of the 1970s and the 1980s with the industry leading up to the 2010s. This includes how many of the same tensions, rhetoric, and issues that plagued the industry then continue to be relevant between 30 and 40 years later, but also some of the changes that have had a more positive impact on the industry.⁵¹

 Chapters 4 and 5 have content that may be challenging to some individuals. Content warning: rape, gendered violence, and harassment.

“Just Way Too Many Guys Crammed Into One Place” Few would think that the origins of commercial video games would be an abandoned roller rink. However, by the 1970s, a trajectory had been set of a countercultural style of business with a focus on fun. It would also be a distinctly male and often sexist culture, and the corporate lifestyle and words of the men working in the early video game industry in the United States demonstrate this clearly. It was, according to Dona Bailey, initially “just way too many guys crammed into one place.”¹ The atmosphere of Atari in the 1970s certainly reflects the youthful nature of the company, as well as the emphasis on play in the beginnings of the video game industry. It also reflects the prevailing culture of recreational drug use. The development side of Atari primarily was a homosocial world of male programmers, and a t-shirt emblazoned with “I love to fuck” allegedly worn by Nolan Bushnell at the office is indicative of an environment that promoted a sense of immaturity and focus on pleasure and sexuality.² Further, this sense of play involved reducing relationships with women to a physical act: Bushnell’s alleged t-shirt forced awareness of his sexual desire onto the onlooker and shifted the terms of any relationships he might have with women in the company. It shows that Atari as a company was run and comprised of youthful and brash employees who separated themselves from a traditional corporate atmosphere that many saw as creatively stifling with their behaviors and attitudes.³ It reveals the degree to which creative freedom and sexist assumptions about women were intertwined in the industry. It was estimated that at the peak of the United States’ dominance in video games in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were 100 video game designers. Of this 100 during the time period, anywhere between four and 15 women devel-

 David Koon, “Centipede Creator Teaches at UALR,” Arkansas Times, November 19, 2015, https://arktimes.com/entertainment/ae-feature/2015/11/19/centipede-creator-teaches-at-ualr? oid=4175309.  There is debate on whether or not Nolan Bushnell wore the shirt, if it was someone else, or if the shirt existed at all. However, it is a very distinct phrase that one would not see often in a work environment, so it is hard to imagine that Ray Kassar lied about seeing the phrase on a t-shirt at Atari.  Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985), 194. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-004

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oped video games.⁴ This overview of the early developers demonstrates a young, largely male beginning of the industry. Partying was in the atmosphere, and the emphasis on play led to a boom of interest in video games. It was a form of a counter cultural business model based on casualness and fun with many young employees. Ken Williams described the makeup of the young Sierra On-Line company: Our first employees were, like me, very young. You have to remember that no one serious about a career in computers would go to work for a game company. It wasn’t considered a profession in 1980. Most of our employees were 18 years old, with no formal training in software development. Very few of our artists had any art training. Keep in mind that graphic resolution was so low that most of the characters in our games only spanned 20 or 30 pixels of width, and were limited to six colors. No serious artist would WANT to work for us. Obviously that changed with time. Over the 18 years I ran Sierra we went from hiring smart kids to professionals from Hollywood. Candidly, I’m not completely certain it was a huge step forward. Our games look pretty bad by today’s standards, but viewed from a historical perspective, they were really great. We understood how to entertain and surprise the player.⁵

Another significant aspect of the early video game producers was that most were college educated, and they typically held degrees in some form of engineering or computer-related area.⁶ As California was the hub for game development, many producers held degrees from universities such as University of California Berkeley or California Institute of Technology.⁷ While this may seem obvious, it is significant in understanding who these developers were. It also can easily be tied back to the conversations around class which surrounded video gaming, which is detailed later. Due to the fact that these developers were attending universities for engineering and computer degrees, they solidly fit within a middleclass structure which would influence their mindsets and output. This contributed to the rhetoric of classand video gaming, such as Nolan’s comparison of how his friends in technology enjoyed Computer Space, whereas the typical bar goer did not.⁸

 Leslie Haddon, “Electronic and Computer Games: The History of an Interactive Medium,” Screen, Spring 1988, 64; Anne Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” Video Games Magazine, March 1983, 51.  Philip Jong, “Ken Williams Interview,” March 28, 2006, http://www.adventureclassicgaming. com/index.php/site/interviews/197/.  David Rolfe, Nolan Bushnell, Janice Hendricks, and John Newcomer are examples.  Eugene Jarvis came from Berkeley.  Aaron Latham, “Video Games Star War,” New York Times, October 25, 1981.

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“Just Way Too Many Guys Crammed Into One Place”

When one typically thinks of early video games, usually two words come to mind—Atari and PONG. Less widely known is the name of Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari and one half of the brains behind PONG. He received his degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah College of Engineering in 1968 and worked in the midway arcade section of a California theme park during his high school and college years. Bushnell’s history in the midway arcade and his education directly influenced his future as the pioneer of the early arcade years in the United States. He went on to co-establish with Ted Dabney one of the most successful and well-known video game companies of the 1970s and early 1980s—Atari. His interest in video games stemmed from playing Spacewar during his time as an engineering student, which he decided would be profitable if it were converted into a coin-operated machine. However, the price and size of computers during the mid-1960s was an immense hurdle. Bushnell stated, “With the million-dollar computers of the time, it wouldn’t work.”⁹ The price of computers would eventually drop, which allowed for more accessibility. Bushnell’s middle-class background, engineering education, and geek masculine nature directly influenced the early video games he had an interest in creating. In the early 1970s, Bushnell was able to create a coin-operated system that could run his version of Spacewar!. He began working for Nutting Associates in 1971, and they published Bushnell’s game entitled Computer Space. Bushnell found that while Computer Space was quite popular in student bars, the units that were installed in working men’s bars made next to no money. Due to this, Bushnell incorrectly surmised that the game must have been too complex in its game play and too sci-fi driven in its content for the working-class clientele.¹⁰ In a New York Times article in 1981, Bushnell explained, “It was a great game. All my friends loved it. But all of my friends were engineers. The beer drinkers in the bars were baffled by it. I decided what was needed was a simpler game,” alluding to the later development of PONG. ¹¹ Bushnell argued from a middle class and elitist computer engineer point-of-view regarding this, but also one that considered men the target audience of Computer Space. Instead of considering why his game was unsuccessful, whether it was the control scheme or the presentation of the game, he chose to blame its failure on working-class men. Bushnell and the engineers who played and enjoyed Com Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (East Sussex, England: Yellow Ant, 2010), 17.  Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson, High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (Berkeley, California: McGraw-Hill, 2002),16.  Aaron Latham, “Video Games Star War,” New York Times, October 25, 1981.

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puter Space can be situated into the category of white, middle class, and male. With the release of a game that Bushnell seemed to indicate appealed more to an intellectual crowd, he consciously separated himself and his peers from “working men.”¹² This distinction was made by Bushnell himself, and it is worth noting that the game that he and Al Alcorn eventually made, PONG, was essentially video game tennis. Tennis was not traditionally tied to a working-class clientele either. Bushnell may have correctly surmised that the controls of PONG made it easier to play, but his conclusions of why it was more popular than Computer Space were entirely elitist, class-based, and exclusionary based on gender. In his early years as a game developer, Bushnell attended a marketing tour that Magnavox and Sanders Associates embarked upon to demonstrate the Magnavox Odyssey, including early video games for the Odyssey such as a table tennis game.¹³ Bushnell used Ralph Baer’s more simplistic concept of table tennis to make his own version of the game that he felt would make money.¹⁴ This game was PONG. PONG had a marketing technique that allowed for a very basic narrative in a sports video game—simple instructions on the front of the arcade cabinet that said “avoid missing ball for high score.”¹⁵ Bushnell said, “We designed PONG, our first game, with enough depth in terms of challenge and reward to appeal to several I.Q. levels… You can play up to your own level; depending on skill, social background, and education.”¹⁶ After the initial failure of Computer Space to reach a broad audience, Bushnell sought to create something that had a wider appeal with PONG. Much like with Computer Space, Bushnell again spoke from an extremely elitist point-of-view as to what made this game successful with a variety of people. The game did not track high scores like later arcade games, but it did track the score of the current game. This led to an interest in competition due to the new scoring system. Bushnell promoted the game as accessible to women. In a New York Times article in 1974, it is stated, “games are also a great equalizer; after a little experience and concentration, women can play them as well as men.”¹⁷ Bushnell, in a slightly patronizing manner, even stated in the article, “my secretary beats me every time we play.” Bushnell’s condescending attitude toward women and working-class men may be indicative of who he felt the au-

 Ibid.  Leonard Herman, Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Video Games (Union, New Jersey: Rolenta Press, 1994), 12.  DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!,16.  PONG (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1972).  Range, “The Space Age Pinball Machine.”  Ibid.

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dience was meant to be for his video games. PONG was the attempt to create an easy game that anybody could play, in comparison to his failure with his original pet project of Computer Space. It is important to note that Bushnell stated that PONG was designed to be an equalizer, but he still relied on the same narrative of elitism and his accusatory nature of “working class” men in bars. His argument about different IQ levels indicates that he felt that the “intellectual engineers” he designed Computer Space for could still get enjoyment out of a game that Bushnell considered easier. With the success of PONG, Atari’s rise was meteoric. Bushnell felt pressure to keep changing the industry, and in 1974 he argued that video games have, “a built-in obsolescence factor. Not in the machine itself, but in the player’s mind. It’s a lot like the movie industry: ‘Cleopatra’ was great, but nobody goes to see it 10 years later. You’ve got to have something new every year.”¹⁸ Bushnell’s perspective on this “obsolescence factor” led to Atari growing to accommodate demand for new games. By 1981, Atari made $33 million with both home and coin-operated games. The year before, they made $2.4 million, which demonstrates how huge Atari’s growth was.¹⁹ Because of this growth, a new culture developed within Atari. According to developers who worked at Atari in the 1970s and 1980s, a significant party environment emerged as the company became more successful. In the documentary Once Upon Atari, game developer Rob Fulop (Night Driver, Missile Command) explained that because there was little discipline of the company and video games everywhere, working at Atari blurred the lines of work and play.²⁰ Bushnell sought to create a self-described egalitarian business based on fun and creativity with Atari.²¹ Around 1975, Bushnell drafted a corporate manifesto to create the identity of Atari. Bushnell consciously went against the typical corporate structure, which tied into previous intellectual fears about the workplace which included, “huge organizations administered by distant impersonal authorities” and that the employee was unable to “control by his own individual effort anything necessary to his life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.”²² In direct comparison, Bushnell’s manifesto purposefully defied that perception for his new company. Some of the major points included, “provide a work atmosphere in which a person can maintain his dignity and identity,” “maintain

 Ibid.  Aljean Harmetz, “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?” New York Times, July 6, 1981.  Howard Scott Warshaw, Once Upon Atari (2003).  Donovan, Replay, 30.  Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 191.

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a social atmosphere where we can be friends and comrades apart from the organizational hierarchy,” and to “bring together people who enjoy what they do and are willing to strive to build a strong and innovative corporation…”²³ Historian Richard Pells summarized an argument about the workplace by Daniel Bell, a sociologist and leading intellectual in the post-war era, saying, “Bell’s gravest complaint about the debilitating nature of modern work, however, was its inherent inability to offer satisfaction to the employee,” as well as, “individuals had no interest in their jobs… because the tasks they were called on to perform required little intelligence or creativity and promised no inner gratification.”²⁴ Bushnell’s manifesto attempted to avoid this by promising an alternative to a traditional business hierarchy, along with a fun and creative environment in which people could be satisfied with the products they took part in creating. He also explained that discrimination was not to be tolerated at Atari: Judge all people on the basis of their skills and contribution and not tolerate discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, national origin, sex, appearance or personal life. At Atari, discrimination of the whites against blacks or blacks against whites; of the short hairs against the long hairs or the long hairs against the short hairs; the trained against the untrained; the experience against the unexperienced, will not be tolerated.²⁵

Bushnell later explained, “this is slightly after the days of Aquarius and the hippy revolution and we all wanted to create this wonderful, idealistic meritocracy.”²⁶ Employees often dressed casually and, famously, Atari staff asked Steve Jobs to wear shoes while at work to prevent injury from the assembly lines.²⁷ The atmosphere of Atari meant fun. This led to employees playing in the workplace with model airplanes, a pool table in the break room, and skateboarding through the factory on their free time.²⁸ But not all the “fun” at the company was with video games and toys. Howard Scott Warshaw (Yar’s Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.) said that while the official slogan of Atari was “we take fun seriously,” Atari employees liked to joke that they in fact “took fun intrave-

 A full reprinting of Bushnell’s Atari Manifesto is available in DeMaria and Wilson, High Score! (2002), 17.  Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, 194.  DeMaria and Wilson, High Score! (2002), 17.  Donovan, Replay, 30.  Zak Penn, Atari: Game Over (2014).  Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel, Atari Inc.: Business is Fun (Carmel, NY: Syzygy Company Press, 2012), 101.

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nously.”²⁹ Bushnell explained, “there was absolutely no drug use in the factory, but we did have parties and, along with beer, some people preferred marijuana, and we closed our eyes to it. It was pretty wild.”³⁰ Steve Bristow, a developer at Atari in the 1970s, said, “this was California in the 1970s. It wasn’t company policy or anything, but at company parties one could detect certain odors and some people had sniffles.”³¹ Jeff Bell of Atari Coin-Op described the culture as “a bunch of free thinking, dope smoking, fun loving people. We sailed boats, flew airplanes, smoked pot, and played video games.”³² There were often large kegger parties held on Friday afternoons to encourage this atmosphere of play or celebrate accomplishments, even though not all developers attended these parties.³³ Bushnell explained that Atari used these parties as an effective recruitment tool for new programmers. He argued that typical employees were “nerds,” and that throwing a party with women who spoke with them was good in the minds of the programmer being recruited, which is performative misogynyin itself to utilize women as a recruitment strategy but also played into the stereotype of the nerd who programmed being socially inept.³⁴ Bushnell said, we were all very young. The management team were in their late 20s to early 30s and most of the employees were in the early 20s. With that kind of demographic, a corporate culture of fun naturally evolves. Then we found out or employees would respond to having a party for hitting quotas as much as having a bonus. We became known as a party company because we’d have a keg on the back lot all the time because we were hitting quotas all the time.³⁵

Bushnell also famously kept a large stuffed bear and bar with beer on tap in his office at Atari.³⁶ Dona Bailey said, “I always say this is the closest to working in a frat that I’m ever gonna get to.”³⁷ This atmosphere was not unique to only Atari. Given the age and mindset of the new developers from the various companies, they involved themselves in a va Zak Penn, Atari: Game Over (2014).  Donovan, Replay, 30.  Ibid., 30.  Goldberg and Vendel, Atari Inc., 102.  Warshaw, Once Upon Atari.  Penn, Atari: Game Over.  Donovan, Replay, 30.  John Hubner and William F. Kistner Jr., “What Went Wrong at Atari?” InfoWorld 5, no. 48 (November 28, 1983), 157.  “The Unsung Female Programmer Behind Atari’s Centipede,” Vice Video, https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/hello-world-dona-bailey/55e0d8e8def5f894792e5d8d.

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riety of fun hobbies—some of which influenced the games that they created. The Brøderbund Crown, the in-house newsletter of Brøderbund Software, also included information such as questionnaires on the employees and upcoming events. Most of the producers interviewed in the Brøderbund newsletter played video games, and they had several favorites, including Star Blazer, David’s Midnight Magic, and Choplifter, which are unsurprisingly games published by Brøderbund in 1982.³⁸ Other interests included popular music, such as the band Pink Floyd, being outdoors, “escaping reality,” comic books, and magician work.³⁹ One lists his interests as “erotic photography.”⁴⁰ Atari 81, an in-house newsletter for Atari, shows that Brad Stewart, a VCS programmer, enjoyed radio in his spare time, and he planned to create an amateur radio club at Atari.⁴¹ Douglas Carlston of Brøderbund enjoyed sci-fi, which led to his first game, Galactic Empire. He also spoke of Ken and Roberta Williams of Sierra enjoying rafting, water-skiing, boating, racquetball, playing arcadegames, and partying.⁴² Chuck Benton spoke about the culture of Sierra On-Line in an interview, and he stated that their culture was “work hard, play hard.”⁴³ He continued by saying that he attended some of the best parties of his life when he visited Sierra On-Line. Even as Atari headed in a more corporate direction in the late 1970s, Ray Kassar, who eventually replaced Bushnell as CEO after the Warner, Inc. purchase, recalled: The company had no infrastructure. There was no chief financial officer; there was no manufacturing person, no human resources. There was nothing. The company was totally dysfunctional… To give you an example, when I arrived there on the first day, I was dressed in a business suit and a tie and I met Nolan Bushnell. He had a T-shirt on. The T-shirt said: “I love to fuck.” That was my introduction to Atari.⁴⁴

Kassar further explained that Bushnell offered him a marijuana joint during a corporate meeting, and that dealing with the problem of marijuana and drug use at Atari was an “ongoing challenge,” especially considering they had 12,000 employees at one point. Fulop said there was commonly marijuana smoke coming from

 “Questionnaires,” Brøderbund Crown, 1983, Brøderbund Collection Box 9, Folder 2, Strong Museum Archives.  Ibid.  Ibid.  Atari 81, 1981, Trade Catalog Collection, Strong Museum Archives.  Carlston, Software People, 3, 168.  Sierra Chest, “Chuck Benton Interview on Softporn Adventure,” May 26, 2006, https://youtu.be/yldz3aPhiRU.  Donovan, “The Replay Interviews: Ray Kassar.”

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offices at Atari, and George Kiss joked that he would walk in the mornings and check for any dead bodies or if anyone was incarcerated.⁴⁵ Kassar once said that the programmers could do whatever they wanted as long as they produced, including setting their own working hours.⁴⁶ Kassar’s relationship with the programmers at Atari was strained, and he once referred to them as “high-strung prima donnas” in an interview. In response, employees of Atari started wearing shirts to work that said “I’m another high-strung prima donna from Atari.”⁴⁷ This demonstrated the attitudes of developers as well. The comparison to rock stardom made in the chapter title is not coincidental. There was a thought that game developers should receive the type of credit that artists in the music industry did. Four former Atari employees—David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan—quit and started a competing company. They founded Activision in October 1979 as the direct result of the lack of credit Atari gave its game designers and developers. Before they quit Atari, they met with the president and CEO, Ray Kassar, in an attempt to negotiate credit for their work. The meeting was described as follows: The designers found Kassar at his desk, wearing a well-tailored suit. They were, as usual, in jeans. The four had a lot on their minds. They wanted Atari to treat them the way Warner treats recording artists. They felt their games had played a large role in the company’s success and they asked Kassar for royalties on them. They wanted recognition, too. Musicians got their names and pictures on record albums; why couldn’t theirs be put on game cartridges?⁴⁸

Some of these engineers considered themselves equivalent to rock stars because of their work on video games, and they wanted recognition for that work.

The “Bo Derek Scientific Method” Despite Bushnell and Atari’s commitment to creating a company of liberal identity focused on equality, as well as a workplace that would differ from the traditional models with a focus on fun and satisfaction, the company still regularly engaged in a sexist culture that marginalized women at best and at worst reduced them down to only their bodies. Not every person in the industry engaged in the performative sexist actions and rhetoric, but enough did that this still marginalized women as developers and consumers.    

Warshaw, Once Upon Atari. Donovan, “The Replay Interviews: Ray Kassar.” Hubner and Kistner Jr., “What Went Wrong at Atari?,” 159. Ibid., 159.

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Trade shows were also a prominent place where masculinity was highlighted. Video game magazines covered these trade shows, and many of these shows promoted the masculine nature of gaming. While writing on the Amusement Operators Expo, journalist Scott Phillips stated that many of the big arcade operators had “bleached blondes passing out brochures” by their machines as promotion.⁴⁹ In an article covering the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show, Video Games magazine features a Penthouse Pet, along with multiple pictures of women in very short shorts, including one captioned, “VG’s leggie lovelies take a break by the booth.”⁵⁰ Although this practice was common, it also emphasized the masculine culture that had women subordinate to men, rather than as active participants. John Holmstrom’s article from a March 1983 issue of Video Games Magazine, “Three Days in Heaven,” also commented on this marketing technique.⁵¹ This source demonstrates a perspective in which a gaming-oriented magazine wanted their readers to see—one that gives an inside look into a video gaming conference. Holmstrom chose to use cartoons to reflect his experience. One cartoon had a woman wearing a small bathing suit standing with an arcade cabinet, and the caption says, “‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ Most of the game manufacturers hire beautiful models to show off the games—but they were so sexy it was hard to keep your mind on the machines.”⁵² Tim Moriarty, who was the executive editor at Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated in 1983, also pointed out the fact that scantily-dressed women were used for marketing in his 1983 article “Uncensored Videogames: Are Adults Ruining It for the Rest of Us?” He showed multiple images of women in bathing suits and shorts, including one where the picture is mostly a woman’s butt, and said, spokesmen for the videogame and computer industry are quick to wax sanctimonious at the mention of X-Rated videogames. Yet, at the Consumer Electronics Shows, comely and underdressed women are inevitably hired to attract people to the display booths. We at VCI [Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated] are shocked at such behavior and are only too glad, as members of this industry, to expose this exploitation and hypocrisy as graphically as possible.⁵³

 Scott Phillips, “Video Debut: Report on the Amusement Operators Exposition,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 1 (September 1982), 30.  “CES,” Video Games, April 1983, 39 – 46.  John Holmstrom, “Three Days in Heaven,” Video Games Magazine, March 1983, 65.  Ibid.  Tim Moriarty, “Are Adults Ruining It for the Rest of Us?” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983, 62.

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Figure 1: “Exploit!” From Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983.

There is a section in this article that he entitled “Exploit!” Given that Moriarity said he wanted to expose it “as graphically as possible,” and included closeup shots of women and their clothing, it seems that it was more an excuse to show the women at the show floor and an attempt at sarcasm with the title. The page included just an ending paragraph from the main article, the words

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above, and five large photographs of these women, which would indicate that the pictures of the women are the focal point of this page.⁵⁴ These articles demonstrate that the industry chose to utilize women as accessories and sex symbols rather than gamers themselves. This strategy of using sexy models, known as “booth babes,” to sell games at conventions consistently served as a way of marketing for video games until the recent pushback against the practice as sexist.⁵⁵ Within the Atari Coin-Op archive at the Strong Museum, there is an unauthored 1983 trade show model rating chart nestled within business documents detailing competitor information from the Amusement Operator’s Expo. This document sheds important light on workplace culture at Atari, and often this type of material is lost or destroyed. It is useful for interpretation of what the people of Atari were like at the time. For the Amusement Operator’s Expo in 1983, Atari began using models to sell units to “sex-crazed attendees and other sleazy characters.”⁵⁶ Some employees rated the models based on the “Bo Derek Scientific Method where a 10=excellent, 5=mediocre, and 1=back to the kennel.”⁵⁷ They gave a best in show rating to one model which says, “everyone forgot the name of the company that had her… but not their booth number location” as well as “could make a GREAT home game,” in a reference that he would like to take her home and comparing her to an object.⁵⁸ Underneath the rating chart, there is writing in blue ink that has been scratched out, and it says, “only if interactive game play is available!” in response to the section regarding her as a “great home game.” They also refer to a Wonder Woman model as “so tall and intimidating that she would probably scare Atilla the Hun, Bill Walton, or even Dan Van.” The chart says the Williams Electronics models were “the sleaziest things to come out of Chicago since Al Capone.” They even criticized their own models by stating, “Atari’s own INTERNAL developments who worked booth duty were much nicer looking than this group of licensed Bowsers. These girls all looked like clones (dark hair, big noses, etc.) but did seem to enjoy throwing Charlie Chuck’s bananas around. Their black fishnet stockings

 Ibid.  “Booth Babe Policies,” http://west.paxsite.com/safety-and-security.  Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection 1972– 1999, Box 56, Folder 37, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.  Ibid.  Ibid.

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Figure 2: Amusement Operator’s Expo 1983 Model Ratings. Atari Coin-Op Division Collection. Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York.

were nice, but maybe not up to Atari’s ‘Family’ oriented positioning…”⁵⁹ This meant that they felt that Atari’s general employees who worked the booth were more attractive than their hired models, and it can be surmised based on the context of the document that the fruit choice was not accidental. Immediately after, the report says, “product reviews and sell sheets for some of the major new products shown follow.” This demonstrates that someone at Atari felt that this information was important enough to include before the reviews of competitor games and product sell sheets. In documentation from 1983, the records lamented the loss of the booth models as “a reflection of our industries[sic] rough times” at the Amusement and Music Operators Association (AMOA) in reference to the financial difficulties which led to the video game crash.⁶⁰ The memo said, “most sex crazed attend “Charlie Chuck’s bananas” is a reference to Atari, Inc.’s Food Fight (1983). The player character is named Charley Chuck, and the player can throw various food items at chefs, such as tomatoes and bananas. The name Charley is misspelled on the document in the archive.  Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection 1972– 1999, Box 56, Folder 39, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.

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ees were forced to stagger across Bourbon Street in their search of oysters, hurricanes… and lust.”⁶¹ It is worth noting that the top of the memo warned, “contents of this page may be offensive and irrelevant to non-engineers or adults in general.” Through this joke, the memo acknowledged this sexualized behavior as primarily engineering or programming’s domain, as well as the fact that it was immature. Notably through this document, as well as in the culture of Atari, it seemed that the creators knew that the types of things which they were saying were inappropriate and sexist, especially given that this was a world not too far removed from second wave feminism. They often acknowledged that it should not be said or that it was immature. Despite this, they continued to say and do inappropriate and sexist things at an attempt at humor and irony. They were fully aware of the critiques of sexist culture and knew that it was wrong, but they continued to reconstruct a form of sexist culture through the guise of humor. The concept of sex combined with gaming was not new to Atari. In fact, the company sometimes named their projects after women. One of the most infamous examples is “Darlene,” which later became the home version of PONG. ⁶² According to Nolan Bushnell in a Playboy article, Darlene was a popular employee of Atari, and she “was stacked and had the tiniest waist.”⁶³ Bushnell and others were also no strangers to having corporate meetings for Atari comfortably seated within hot tubs.⁶⁴ Utilizing women’s anatomy and sex became a norm for the corporate culture of Atari in the early years of the industry. All of this demonstrates this homosocial, sexist culture of the early years of the industry, with Atari leading the charge. While on paper the environment was welcoming to all, the reality was that women were equated to objects at Atari, in addition to being rated by their attractiveness while doing their jobs. This was the men of Atari and the games industry participating in sexist language consistent with hegemonic masculinity, even if they themselves did not fit perfectly with the image of masculinity in the US.⁶⁵ With relatively few women in the industry at all, this culture did not promote a sense of welcoming for them and later led to several leaving the industry altogether. Dona Bailey, a developer at Atari, once said, “It was interesting to see how a male society functioned. It

 Ibid.  David Kushner, “Sex, Drugs, & Video Games: The Rise and Fall of Atari,” Playboy, July 30, 2012, https://www.playboy.com/articles/sex-drugs-video-games.  Kushner, “Sex, Drugs, & Video Games.”  Ibid.  Lori Kendall, “‘Oh No! I’m a Nerd!’ Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum,” Gender and Society (April 2000): 271.

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was kind of rough sometimes, too. It was a culture that I don’t think they were thinking ‘there is one woman, we should modify our behavior for her sake’. I grew a thicker skin.”⁶⁶

 Kellie Foxx-Gonzalez, “Meet Dona Bailey, The Woman Behind Atari’s Centipede, The Mary Sue, July 10, 2012, https://www.themarysue.com/donna-bailey-centipede/.

“What Can You Expect from a Guy in Charge of Joysticks?” This workplace culture also had an imagined audience of video game players who shared many of the same values, and the types of advertisements and games pushed toward that clientele. With the attitudes of the developers within the games they produced, as well as in their in-house advertisements, a new culture of video gaming emerged. This culture also influenced the video game players and the type of rhetoric which they would use. One of the most visible places that masculinity was present in the video gaming culture was advertisements. Through commercials, print advertisements, and artwork for video games, the video game industry demonstrated this culture. Although this was not typically the case, the coin-operated division of Atari developers, rather than a marketing company, created several advertisements for the company in-house. This was common amongst game companies in the 1970s and early 1980s, and it only began to change once many of these companies became more corporatized and aware of their image. This makes early advertising a good lens to examine the video game industry’s culture, as this is how companies and people viewed themselves and their products, rather than as an outside advertisement company. In a never-released skit created by the Atari coin-operated division, a young couple happily played 1978’s Atari Football. As the skit continued, it was clear that the man lost the game, but he was not upset about his loss. When the camera zoomed out, it showed the topless woman playing Atari Football, and this type of skit indicates that utilizing her bare breasts was her method of winning the game.¹ This skit represented the masculine culture reflected through electronic video gaming in the 1970s and early 1980s. The types of magazines that covered the industry, advertisements, arcade environments, the language used by developers, and the styles of video games developed reflected it. A distinction can be made, however, in that video game coverage occurred in more technological magazines, such as Popular Mechanics, due to the nature of the product. The Atari Football skit mentioned earlier is a great example of the developers creating supplemental materials for their video games that presented a gendered representation of the games. Advertising demonstrated that men were considered the dominant gamer in terms of skills, and that the only way that a woman could win was through diversion, in this case, baring her breasts.

 Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 134. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-005

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The advertisements from the industry represented the product. Many of the early Atari coin-operated print advertisements embodied this culture. A good example is the print ad for the infamous Atari game, Gotcha. The ad showed visible controllers that resemble breasts, a young woman in skimpy clothing, as well as a young man who pursued her to demonstrate the maze gameplay. It emphasized the man as the dominant gamer, and it introduced the new control scheme. The early Atari print ads typically showed both a young man and a young woman, which could potentially show that video gaming would be a good way to meet the opposite sex.² However, while the men in the ads were fully dressed, or even dressed in a costume that represented the game, the women wore outfits that were short or revealing.³ The men were playing the game, while the women looked on or posed next to the cabinet. The portrayal of the women in the advertisements is in a subordinate position to the men, and it showed that the perceived roles of the men were to act as the dominant player. This type of advertisement demonstrated the masculine nature of the industry as a whole. It showed the man as the person acting, while the woman was either being acted upon, such as Gotcha, or was portrayed as an accessory to the action, such as in the advertisement for Gran Trak 10. ⁴ The woman in many of the print adverts was never shown playing the game. Atari’s Space Race advertisement, released in 1973, showed a woman posing next to the cabinet in a short skirt. She was not playing the game, and the arcade cabinet was not even turned on.⁵ However, this trend was not exclusive to Atari. When Bally/Midway created its own version of PONG in 1973, entitled Winner, the accompanying advertisement followed the same pattern as the early Atari games, even though it was an illustrated advertisement, rather than a photograph. The advertisement showed a man wearing a suit and playing Winner while a woman looked on admiringly (Figure 3).⁶ A Midway ad from 1982 entitled “When they come to shop, they’ll stay to play” featured three cabinets—Bosconian, Galaga, and Ms. PacMan. ⁷ There were four people in the advertisement, with a businessman in a

 DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!, 24.  These early arcade advertisements are all available in print in Van Burnham, Supercade: A Visual History of the Video Game Age 1971 – 1984 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 93 – 101.  This advertisement shows a man in a full racing uniform and helmet as a woman in a short skirt watches him play.  Burnham, Supercade, 96.  Ibid., 97.  “When they come to shop, they’ll stay to play,” Flyer, Midway Manufacturing Company, 1982, https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=2060&image=1.

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suit and a briefcase at Bosconian, a man hunched over Galaga, and a young woman with her mother looking on at the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet. There was also a bag of groceries nearby, but it was unclear who that belonged to. This was supposed to show a spectrum of customers for video games to entice stores to buy machines, but the arrangement was key to this flyer. While the men were on their own and clearly adults, the young woman was with her mother and seemed to be a teenager. Her placement at Ms. Pac-Man was also purposeful. She and her mother were not encroaching on the men in the space, and Ms. Pac-Man made it an acceptable place for her to be. However, it was significant that the teenage girl was actively playing the game, and the advertisement’s image of an arcade was more family friendly. In these advertisements, there was an established hierarchy which placed men at the top, since they were able to demonstrate great skill at these games. The woman was attracted to the man due to his skill at the game in these print advertisements or she was relegated to the games that were “acceptable” for her to play. These types of advertisement were common, and they showed that women were not always active players of video games. Men were the active party within the ads, and they were portrayed as the skilled gender. In almost all of these advertisements, women were shown as accessories or sex symbols rather than active gamers. Sexuality and women’s bodies are rooted into the marking of video games, and the industry began with that tonality in the 1970s. It promoted the concept of gaming as a masculine leisure activity. Dona Bailey said of Atari and their perceived audience, “‘a football game is good enough. All the guys at the bar are going to love a football game.’ But I was always like,’ What if movies had been like that? What if movies had only been for men?”⁸ Gaming, they felt, was for men, even when a woman was making it. Atari had a specific plan for marketing by November 1978. In the St. PONG Newsletter, they laid out the new marketing plan. By this time, they were a part of Warner, and it is unclear if these ads were developed via an agency or in-house through the documentation. Entitled “The Six Million Dollar Advertising Campaign Theme: Don’t Watch T.V. Tonight, Play it,” this issue explained where and when Atari planned to market its games and systems. They launched the campaign during the September 15 Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks World Heavyweight Championship fight.⁹ These ads were 30 second commercials  David Koon, “Centipede Creator Teaches at UALR,” Arkansas Times, November 19, 2015, https://arktimes.com/entertainment/ae-feature/2015/11/19/centipede-creator-teaches-at-ualr? oid=4175309.  “The Six-Million Dollar Advertising Campaign Theme: Don’t Watch T.V. Tonight, Play It,” St. Pong Newsletter, November 1978, The Strong Museum Trade Catalogue Collection.

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Figure 3: Bally-Midway Mfg Co. Ad. 1982. Courtesy of Arcade Flyer Museum.

with athletes Pete Rose, Billie Jean King, Pelé, Bobby Riggs, and Kareem AbdulJabbar, in addition to famous personalities Carol Channing, Jack Palance, and Gene Raybum. Atari paid for featured advertising during NFL Monday Night Football, NCAA Football, Sunday Big Event, Battlestar: Galactica, as well as primetime movie slots. For the most part, these television programs are heavily mas-

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culine-coded. The print aspect of this campaign featured the Atari Video Computer System and its games, and People, Playboy, T.V Guide, US, Sport, and Penthouse all featured ads. In the same way, several of these print magazines are masculine-coded or pornographic, with the exceptions of People, US, and T.V Guide. For example, Popular Electronics, Esquire, Newsweek, and Businessweek published articles within their pages about video games.¹⁰ Playboy advertised video games as a luxury, masculine item, and they promoted Atari, Intellivision, and the Odyssey 2.¹¹ The articles focused on topics such as examining the past and future of video games, making your own hack of Spacewar!, an analysis on the popularity of Asteroids, and the economics of video gaming.¹² The publication of these articles and advertisements for video games in magazines that had a large male readership also acknowledged that the imagined audience of video gaming was primarily middle class and male. For a 1979 Atari focus group for Asteroids, the documentation made note of the games people played, whether they were male or female, and their age range. This demonstrated a need to understand the audience of their games in 1979, and the information was skewed heavily male in the age range of 13 – 30. The focus group used four different space-themed games, and they examined who played them by gender and age, which has been recreated below.¹³

 Jerry and Eric Eimbinder, “Electronic Games: Space-Age Leisure Activity,” Popular Electronics, October 1980, 53 – 59; Joseph A. Weisbecker, “Build Space-War Game,” Popular Electronics, April 1976, 41– 45; David Owen, “Invasion of the Asteroids,” Esquire, February 1981, 58 – 63; “The Hot Market in Electronic Toys,” Businessweek, December 17, 1979, 108 – 110.  Playboy Magazine, January 1979, Feburary 1981, November 1981, December 1981, January 1982, and April 1982.  Eimbinder, “Electronic Games: Space-Age Leisure Activity 53 – 59; Weisbecker, “Build SpaceWar Game,” 41– 45; Owen, “Invasion of the Asteroids,” 58 – 63; “The Hot Market in Electronic Toys,” 108 – 110.  “Comprehensive Evaluation,” 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 9, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.

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Table 1: Demographics information from 1979 Asteroids focus group. Demographics

Asteroids

Lunar Lander

Starship

Space Wars

Male









Female









 – 









 – 









 – 









 – 









Over 







–

This type of information would influence who the perceived audience of video gaming was, and based on the summary of the focus group, Atari used the information gained from this focus group to look to the future of their development beyond 1979.¹⁴ In an issue of a later Atari publication called Atari 81, Atari published another article regarding advertising the company’s products. When discussing the best commercial time, they said, we look for programs that have good ratings and that appeal to the family… these usually fall into prime time or late fringe (after 11p.m.). Shows like Magnum, P.I. or Monday Night Football—we’re into heavy sports programming. We want to reach adolescents and teenagers, too, so we buy early fringe (late afternoon) and prime time shows, like Dukes of Hazzard, which is where we pick up the younger audience.¹⁵

Further, Atari continued to bring in famous sports faces to advertise. They used Billy Martin in a television commercial for Atari RealSports Baseball in 1982, where he asks, “Who are you going to listen to, that other guy who just talks baseball or a nice guy like me who lives it?”¹⁶ The importance of advertising on MTV after its launch was explained, as it said that the viewers were between the ages of 12 and 34, who made up 88 % of MTV’s audience. The types of advertisements produced and the location of these ads said a lot about the intended audience. It demonstrated that the target audience of video gaming was men and  Ibid.  “Atari Advertising,” Atari 81 Newsletter 1, no. 5 (1981), The Strong Museum Trade Catalogue Collection.  “The Hits of Atari Commercials: Past and Present,” Atari Life 2, no. 12 (1983), The Strong Museum Trade Catalogue Collection.

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boys at this time. However, by this time, it is clear that Warner’s influence changed the type of marketing done for Atari products. Advertising on family shows is a far cry from the topless Atari Football ad created by developers in the coin-operated division. It also seems that at this point, Atari’s advertising attempted a focus at a younger audience than previous advertising campaigns. This shift demonstrated a different imagined audience, albeit still quite male-oriented. Aljean Harmetz’s “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?,” a representative of Gottlieb, best known for its game Q*Bert, stated, “Even though the games require hand eye coordination, not strength… my ten-year-old daughter plays them half-heartedly when there’s nothing else to do. My nine-year-old son is a master. Once we learn how to appeal to women, we can double our business.”¹⁷ Harmetz also identified that in an arcade Captain Video’s in West Los Angeles, out of 30 teenagers playing during the time of writing, 22 were boys.¹⁸ Harmetz said within her article that the industry identified their target audience in 1981 as males between the ages of 13 and 30. The acknowledgement that businessmen and young men were the primary audience of video gaming throughout the article showed that The New York Times believed that gamers of the time were primarily men and boys, as they thought women and girls were not as interested in the long-term. The imagined audience, which was supported by advertisements from the industry and outside media, was a primarily male one. The video games created reflected the culture of gaming itself, which was masculine, immature, focused on fun, and also sexist. In addition to the sports, space, and combat-based video games, there were other types of games developed in the United States that were also heavily influenced by masculinity, violence, and sexuality. Two video games that demonstrated this culture best were Exidy’s Death Race (1976) and Atari’s Gotcha (1973). A common theme in video games was aggression and violence. Michael Kimmel examined masculine aggression in the Cold War United States in Manhood in America, and Bushnell argued that including aggression in video games actually reduced the rate of fighting.¹⁹ In a column on game developers in Joystik Magazine, Eugene Jarvis, developer of Defender, discussed aggression in video games

 Aljean Harmetz, “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?” New York Times, July 6, 1981.  Ibid.  Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History 3rd Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151; Judy Klemserud, “Bang! Boing! Ping! It’s King Pong,” New York Times, April 24, 1978.

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as well. Jarvis noted about the aggressive behavior found in his games: “I’m an action player. I like to be aggressive. I don’t like to be on the run. I like to feel like I have the fates in my hands and that through my skill or lack thereof I control my fate.”²⁰ Developers mostly created video games that would support that feeling of control, as they engaged in many aggressive themes, such as the shoot‘em-up games and combat games. One of the first controversial video games was developed and released in 1976. In Death Race, the goal was to run over gremlins while dodging the crosses that appeared after the player killed a gremlin.²¹ The game portrayed violence, and the advertisement claimed, “it’s fascinating!”²² Due to what many considered excessive violence, groups, such as the National Safety Council, pushed back, claiming that the game promoted this violence and allowed players to become “an actor in the process” rather than passive viewers.²³ However, in part because of the controversy, Death Race went on to bring in $2.5 – 3 million in revenue.²⁴ Death Race was the first electronic video game targeted by protestors specifically for its violence. At its core, Death Race is a video game based on skill as an “expert driver,” or the user who achieved the highest kill count while dodging the crosses. This is also tied to the aggression and violence that Kimmel argued was dominant in white, middle class masculinity of the postWorld War II era.²⁵ The fact that one is rewarded for murdering large amounts of gremlins that are humanoid in shape allows violence to be at the forefront of the game, much like war games. The game rewards the player for acting extremely violent. Another game that demonstrated the culture of gaming during the 1970s was also one of the earliest games that toyed with the idea of sexuality—Atari’s Gotcha, released in 1973. Al Alcorn, who helped Nolan Bushnell create the first PONG prototype, developed Gotcha. Gotcha had simple gameplay, where a player controlled the symbol +, while the other controlled the symbol ÿ. These shapes had to navigate a maze to catch the other.²⁶ Gotcha did not stand out for its gameplay; it stood out for its controllers on the arcade cabinet. Most arcade games in the 1970s and early 1980s utilized a joystick, which was adapted

 “Innerview,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 1 (September 1982), 7.  Death Race (Coin-Operated), Exidy (Exidy, 1976).  Burnham, Supercade, 138.  Ralph Blumenthal, “‘Death Race’ Game Gains Favor, but Not With the Safety Council,” New York Times, December 28, 1976, 12.  Ibid.  Kimmel, Manhood in America, 151.  Gotcha (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1973).

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for use for video games from aircraft.²⁷ Gotcha, on the other hand, had two pink domes which the player manipulated and squeezed to control the individual characters, rather than the traditional joysticks. The controller was designed to resemble female breasts, as the Atari team joked that the joysticks were phallic and their name was sexual.²⁸ This included one published in the Atari internal newsletter, “The Gospel According to St. PONG.” This joke referenced the first baby bonus check, a check for employees who were expecting children, going to Roger Thoman of the Joystick department. Bushnell joked, “What can you expect from a guy in charge of joysticks?”, in obvious reference to the phallic nature of the joysticks utilized in games at the time.²⁹ An article on women in gaming from 1982 described arcade machines as “throbbing, pulsating,” which was odd phrasing for machinery, but with the context of game interfaces being jokingly referred to as phallic, it was phrasing that was significant in and of itself.³⁰ As for the Gotcha controllers, Atari designer George Faraco explained, “they didn’t have bumps on them or anything, but the way they were the size of grapefruits next to each other, you got the picture of what they were supposed to be.”³¹ Due to the nature of the controllers, Gotcha was commonly referred to as “the boob game,” and the advertisements for the game showed a conservatively dressed young man grabbing the waist of a young woman who was wearing a short, low-cut dress with the arcade cabinet in the background displaying the new controllers.³² Although the new controllers initially gained popularity, especially in singles’ bars, Gotcha was not a big hit. Eventually, Atari preemptively removed the pink dome controllers and replaced them with traditional joysticks to avoid controversy, rather than risk being offensive. Typical arcade owners were not as pleased with the controllers than at the bars.³³ What was significant about Gotcha was a complete flip of the nature of video gaming in arcades. Players used joysticks, which Atari felt were phallic, up until the release of Gotcha. ³⁴ When considering the typical interface of a video game of the time, the use of the joystick was to control the “other” within the game,  Tom Zeller, Jr., “A Great Idea That’s All in the Wrist,” New York Times, June 5, 2005.  Brenda Brathwaite, Sex in Video Games (Boston, MA: Charles River Media: 2007), 27.  “The Gospel According to St. Pong,” July 25, 1973, http://www.digitpress.com/library/newsletters/stpong/st_pong_v1n2.pdf.  Joyce Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” Electronic Games Magazine 1, no. 3 (May 1982), 31.  Goldberg and Vendel, Atari Inc., 99.  Burnham, Supercade, 93.  Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 62.  Brathwaite, Sex in Video Games, 27; “The Gospel According to St. Pong,” July 25, 1973, http:// www.digitpress.com/library/newsletters/stpong/st_pong_v1n2.pdf.

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“What Can You Expect from a Guy in Charge of Joysticks?”

Figure 4: Gotcha flyer. Atari. 1973. Courtesy of the Arcade Flyer Archive.

such as a character, a ball, or a spaceship. Gotcha flipped this interface, as its control scheme was no longer a manipulation of the “other” through an extension of self. Instead, Gotcha’s interface was an extension of the “other” into a manipulation of the “other.” Considering the flip in the interface, this discomfort may explain why Gotcha was not successful.

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Video gaming can also be interpreted as a disembodied experience due to controlling an avatar on a video game in fantastical situations. Warren Robinett, developer of Adventure, argued “players identify themselves with the shape they move around on the video screen. When they say, ‘I ran into a wall,’ they mean the shape they moved ran into a wall; they are that shape.”³⁵ As mentioned, Gotcha threw the formula off in the sense that it is a manipulation of the “other” in the form of blatant controls that resembled female breasts in order to control the in-game avatar. It is unsurprising that this control scheme did not become popular, and most games returned to the standard joystick. It is important to note that other video games changed the control scheme, such as a trackball with Centipede, with very few complaints or issues. This makes the Gotcha controls unique in the sense that they specifically tried something new that threw off the comfort of a traditional gaming experience, and this method of controlling the game was not popular and had to be replaced.

“The Thinking Man’s Plaything” Before video games became a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, they were preceded by pinball. Pinball had similar mechanics, gender coding, and trajectory as video games. In 1980, video games overtook pinball as the largest segment of the coin-operated machine market for the first time.³⁶ Because video games finally surpassed the earnings of pinball, many arcade locations which mostly had pinball machines began replacing them with video games. The Warner annual shareholder reports concluded, “it is unlikely that pinballs will recapture these locations.”³⁷ However, it is important to examine pinball and its trajectory to understand the precedent which existed before video games became an entertainment powerhouse in its own right. Many of the same issues that arose with the creation of video games and its industry also affected pinball. Despite this, there are unique differences that video games eventually encountered that pinball did not. Pinball had two golden ages—one from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, and another from the late 1960s through the 1970s. The first ended in the 1950s as the

 Warren Robinett, “Adventure as a Video Game: Adventure for the Atari2600,” in The Game Designer Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, ed. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), 697.  “Consumer Electronics and Toys,” Warner Communications Annual Report, 1980, ProQuest Historical Annual Reports.  Ibid.

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post-war demand died down, and several pinball manufacturers moved on to other coin-operated amusement games.³⁸ The latter golden age is significant for this study on video game history. For one, coin-operated amusements, which include pinball, are inherently tied to arcade video games. Nolan Bushnell cites his time working at an amusement park and watching pinball and other coin-operated games as inspiration for his understanding of the games business.³⁹ Arcades themselves housed all coin-operated machines, which eventually led to them becoming synonymous with first pinball and then video games.⁴⁰ Arcades became synonymous with something else as well—youth.⁴¹ Early into the lifespan of pinball, cities pushed back against the game, claiming it was a gambling device. One of the most famous examples of this crackdown occurred in New York in 1942. On January 22, 1942, a city-wide seizure of pinball machines began by police after a court ruled that pinball machines were gambling devices.⁴² By the next day, police had seized 2,325 pinball machines.⁴³ In October 1957, Better Homes and Gardens ran an article entitled “The Pinball Business Isn’t Child’s Play,” warning mothers that pinball was not an innocent game.⁴⁴ It said, “Act now to keep your child from being victimized,” as well as warning that children might turn to crime in order to fund their game time.⁴⁵ It later encouraged mothers to join PTAs to combat pinball, as well as protest the placement of machines in places near children.⁴⁶ The question of whether pinball was an acceptable hobby for children, as well as the idea that children would become delinquents to fund their gaming habits, also carried over into the era of video gaming.⁴⁷ This image of pinball eventually lessened by the late 1970s, as the New York City Council removed a ban on pinball in April 1976 after the famous removal of

 Anonymous, “Slot Machines and Pinball Games,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 269 (May 1950): 69.  “The Great Videogame Swindle?” Next Generation 2, no, 23 (November 1996), 213.  Laura June, “For Amusement Only: The Life and Death of the American Arcade,” January 16, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-arcadefor-amusement-only.  Ibid.  “Police Open Raids on Pin Ball Games,” The New York Times, January 22, 1942, 19 – 23.  “Pinball Seizures Pushed by Police,” The New York Times, January 23, 1942.  George Weinstein, “The Pinball Business Isn’t Child’s Play,” Better Homes and Gardens, October 1957, 6, 139 – 140, 142.  Ibid., 139.  Ibid., 142.  Ellen Mitchell, “Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns,” The New York Times, December 13, 1981.

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the New York pinball machines by Mayor La Guardia in 1942.⁴⁸ At this point, the council decided that pinball games indeed were for amusement only. After studies established that crime did not rise in areas with pinball machines, the city chose to allow pinball machines into the city again. The idea of protecting children, gambling, and addiction reemerged with video games in the 1970s and 1980s. Peter Ross Range argued in “The Space Age Pinball Machine” that video games are “maddening appealing and addiction is not uncommon.”⁴⁹ The fear of addiction seemed to be a common theme in the early years of gaming, even leading to some towns targeting video games. Many towns across the United States banned arcades, and this culminated in the Supreme Court case of City of Mesquite v Aladdin’s Castle, Inc. in 1982.⁵⁰ The city of Mesquite, Texas banned children under the age of 17 from entering arcades unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. Ultimately, the ruling said that the city ordinance was unconstitutional, as it violated the 14th amendment due process clause.⁵¹ In another instance of fearing addiction and criminal activity, Barbara Weiss of the Middle Island, New York P.T.A council stated, “We must take a stand to protect our children. These games are addictive; you can get hooked on Atari.”⁵² Further, it was argued that gaming encouraged aggression, anti-social behaviors, and even gambling. This is reminiscent of the same arguments utilized against pinball when it became popular. Much like video games, studies in the 1970s also found that pinballtended to be male-dominated and middle class.⁵³ While pinball itself had a counter cultural image during the two golden ages of pinball, it differed from video gaming in that the creators did not consider themselves counter cultural. Playing pinball served as a form of rebellion, but many players of the game behaved and dressed normally.⁵⁴ What is most worth noting in one study on pinball is that pinball players self-reported that 87 % of them considered the game as a coded masculine activity.⁵⁵ The one girl in the study, who they explained was brought along by her boyfriend who commonly played, stated that pinball was too masculine

 “City Flashing Signs of Rehabilitating Pinball Machines,” The New York Times, April 3, 1976.  Range, “The Space Age Pinball Machine”.  Peter Applebome, “Mesquite, Tex. VS. ‘Evil Empire’,” New York Times, January 23, 1982.  City of Mesquite v Aladdin’s Castle, Inc., 455 U.S. 283 (1982).  Mitchell, “Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns.”  Peter K. Manning and Bonnie Campbell, “Pinball as Game, Fad, and Synecdoche,” Youth and Society 4, no. 3 (1973): 338 – 339.  Edward Trapunski, Special When Lit: A Visual and Anecdotal History of Pinball (Garden City, New York: Dolphin Books, 1979), 117.  Manning and Campbell, “Pinball as Game, Fad, and Synecdoche,” 344.

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and most girls do not like it. The study gave several reasons why players felt pinball was masculine. One was the location where most machines were found—taverns and bars. The respondents said that women did not attend those locations alone. However, most of the men participating in the study felt that women lacked the motor skills, reflexes, and hand-eye coordination, and they would quickly bore of the activity. Further, several of the participants said that women would not be willing to spend the money to become “good” at pinball. The male players also insisted that women concerned themselves too much with their appearances, and this time spent on fashion, makeup, and hair was time men spent on pinball. Thus, the study argued that pinball is “an aggressive game, one in which control, manipulation, reflex, calmness, and risk are involved.”⁵⁶ Because of the gendered nature of pinball, the study argued that one reason for the negative image of pinball in the 1970s was this intense gendering of the game. One element that did not help the image of gendered pinball was the overt sexualization of the artwork on the back glass of many machines. Early pinball manufacturers noticed a burlesque dancer, Sally Rand, during the 1933 World’s Fair, and it became popular to include a scantily clad woman on the back glass.⁵⁷ The sexy woman on the back glass represented desire and leisure, and she became a popular way to sell pinball games. A pinball back glass artist, Dave Christiensen, lamented that popularization and the move to more respectable locations for pinball meant sexy art had to be toned down. He explained, “a lot of the shopping malls are putting in the machines and you have to tone them down. In the olden days they were mainly in bars. You know it seems to me if you look at the stuff going out now, there’s a lot of circus stuff, animal stuff. What this country needs is another great pornographic artist like [Leroy] Parker and I’m trying to fill his boots.”⁵⁸ Leroy Parker was well known in the 1950s for his art of women in bikinis on pinball machines. This art contributed to the gendered perspective of pinball machines, as the woman on the back glass served as a masculine fantasy. There is also a sense of sexuality in playing the game itself, which eventually carried over into video gaming. In an article on Pinball in December 1972’s Playboy, Marshall Frady explained that playing pinball served as “the first smoldering premonitions of the heft and play of pleasuring a woman… some veterans of the machines allege that no one who has arrived at a deft rapport with pinball

 Ibid., 344.  Trapunski, Special When Lit, 83.  Ibid., 91.

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has ever wound up dull in the leg clasp of a woman.”⁵⁹ Edward Trapunski quoted a female pinball enthusiast as saying, “It’s the element of fantasy. Each machine has a theme and a story. This whole trip syndrome is combined with an atmosphere of subtle sexuality. Watch a pinballer. Watch how his body moves and you can see how you can really get it on with a good machine.”⁶⁰ He quoted a male player who said,” If I could win on every try there’d be no fun to this game. Losing every time would make me quit too. It’s like chasing a woman. There’s always the chance you’ll catch her. But if you knew for certain, the chase would be hardly worth it.” Much like the concept of technomasculinity, this is a fascinating form of technosexuality in that it’s the player dominating the machine rather than a person. It’s talked about in the same terminology, and it’s still considered a masculine activity. Early electronic gaming, including pinball, typically occurred in traditionally masculine spaces, such as bars and arcades. However, during the 1970s and 1980s, arcades placed in shopping malls became more popular, and with this move, more women began to play pinball. However, there was a pushback against women playing pinball, since the old guard of men players said it was “undignified” for women to play, especially since “you have to shake and carry on and they’d be embarrassed when their skirts would lift and their legs would show.”⁶¹ This flipping of the image of sexuality while playing the game indicated a fear of changing the status quo, as well as an uncomfortableness of women becoming both skilled at the game and taking charge in a sexualized situation. Men talked about the sexual nature of playing, whereas they argued that it was “undignified” for a woman to do the same thing. In a Newsweek article from 1981, the author compared the new gamers of the early 1980s to “pinball wizards and pool sharks before them” while acknowledging that the vast majority of the players were either teenage boys or “pinstriped elders.”⁶² The article also described competition amongst players and themselves, where one player said, “it’s a challenge to myself, when I get a high score, I feel happy,” while another stated, “when you start to think you’re a loser, you come here and get four thousand at Space Invaders, and you ain’t a loser anymore.”⁶³ Pinball and video games have several similarities, as well as a lot of common roots. It is important to note that video games did not appear from nowhere with     

Marshall Frady, “Pin-ball”, Playboy, December 1972, 164. Trapunski, Special When Lit, 121. Ibid., 147. Lynn Langway, “Invasion of the Video Creatures,” Newsweek, November 16, 1981, 90. Ibid., 90.

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no historical grounding, and there was already a cultural establishment of arcades, masculinity in gaming, and a lot of the same rhetoric behind protecting children from gambling and protecting women from seedy locations. These connections are important, but they also help demonstrate how video gaming is distinct from prior arcade gaming. Video gaming continued the notion of gaming in masculine spaces as well. Some gamers, meanwhile, encouraged the idea that video gaming was a masculine hobby, and some players let their feelings on this be known through the media. Starting in the early 1970s, video gaming took place in primarily “masculine” spaces, such as the bars where skill gaming and pinball machines existed. Much of the testing of the early arcade cabinets in the 1970s, including Computer Space and PONG, took place in bars. Nolan Bushnell explained the importance of these locations as a way to reach the target audience: Computer Space did very well on college campuses and in places where the education level was higher. However, there weren’t any arcades as such back then. You had to put your machines in bowling alleys and beer bars. That was the market. If you couldn’t do well in Joe’s Bar and Grill, you had no chance.⁶⁴

These locations that Bushnell mentions housed other types of arcade games, such as pinball, non-electronic shooting gallery games, and other such skillbased games, which traditionally were masculine leisure activities. Companies placed electronic video games with these skill-based games in bars and other venues, and they especially proved popular with men in bars near college campuses. An internal memo in 1979 explained that there were two dozen pinball machines and a dozen video games in the University of California student union. It also argued that the location was well-suited for challenging games, but that “poor games” did not perform well.⁶⁵ Atari’s newsletter Coin Connection encouraged the placement of cabinets in student unions, fraternity and sorority houses, and dormitories in 1980.⁶⁶ In addition to the locations, the primary audience of electronic video gaming also shaped the masculine culture surrounding gaming. Mark Stephen Pierce, an Atari employee, explained that the arcades were “home of our target demographic, fourteen-year-old boys. The second ring of the bull’s-eye includes males, ages

 DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!, 16.  “Trip to ACA in Oakland,” November 26, 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 8, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.  Atari’s Coin Connection 4, no. 4 (April 1980), The Strong Museum Trade Catalogue Collection.

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twelve to twenty-two; currently, nobody else matters.”⁶⁷ Eugene Jarvis, developer of Defender, said, “right now, everything in the arcades seems to be directed to the young male adolescent who wants to have fun, so there’s a lot of violence and a lot of action.”⁶⁸ Early advertisements for arcade cabinets from the early-to mid-1970s state that they were ideal for bars, as well as cocktail lounges, which would indicate an older clientele. Despite that initial push for coin-operated games in bars and lounges, arcades in the late 1970s and early 1980s appealed to mostly young, school-age boys and also professional white, middle classmen. Stories of men in three-piece suits at arcades during their lunch breaks were not rare.⁶⁹ Despite this, it seems that most people who played video games were boys of high school age.⁷⁰ Atari published an internal memo in 1984 entitled “Video Game Market,” and claimed that teens were the primary audience of coin-operated video games.⁷¹ The memo said that 51 % of all males between the ages of 13 – 17 and 30 % of all females in the same age group play coin-operated video games at least once a week by 1984. In 1983, an internal Atari newsletter Atari Life surveyed to find the “average video game player.” In their three categories— heavy, medium, and light players—they found that heavy players who played once a week were mostly teenage males, medium players who played one to three times a month were both sexes, and light players who played less than once a month were mostly women.⁷² It is also telling that Atari’s focus group in 1979 for Asteroids only included males in the 25 – 30 age group and a second group of 15 – 17-year-olds.⁷³ Unfortunately, the Atari records do not contain many  Mark Stephen Pierce, “Coin-Op: The Life (Arcade Videogames)” in Digital Illusion: Entertaining the Future with High Technology, ed. Clark Dodsworth, Jr. (New York, NY: ACM Press, 1998), 447.  Richard Meyers, “The Perils of Pixel-ated Paulines,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983, 27.  Owen, “Invasion of the Asteroids,” Esquire, February 1981, 58; Lynn Langway, “Invasion of the Video Creatures,” Newsweek, November 16, 1981, 90; Aljean Harmetz, “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?” New York Times, July 6, 1981.  Paul L. Montgomery, “For Fans of Video Games, Fast Fingers Are Big Help,” New York Times, October 11, 1981, 45; Aaron Latham, “Video Games Star War,” New York Times, October 25, 1981; Harmetz, “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?”  Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection 1972– 1999, Box 51, Folder 9, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.  “Portrait of an Average Video Game Player,” Atari Life 2, no. 7 (1983), The Strong Museum Trade Catalogue Collection.  “Focus Group Summary–Asteroids,” June 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 9, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.

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more focus groups, but this particular one demonstrates Atari’s perceived audience since they only used men for the play tests. The attitudes of the gamers themselves is somewhat difficult to discern; however, I found that one of the best places to locate thoughts of video game players at the time is from letters to game magazines. Players themselves perpetuated the idea that video gaming was a hobby meant for men. A gamer, William Pobedinsky, wrote a letter to the editor of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated to complain about a 1983 article examining women’s roles in gaming. He insisted that the magazine was “supposed to report on video cartridges and arcade games, not the selling of sex or the feminist outlook on the industry.”⁷⁴ He continued, “I don’t want a magazine that supplies minority views, but a video magazine. And how could women be a minority anyway?” Another letter to the editor section complained that game reviewer E.C. Meade did not finish the games that she played, and that she should be expected to have knowledge of every game reviewed. Kenneth H. Rickert wrote, “it seems to me it’s her professional responsibility to me and every other reader to gain a thorough knowledge of each game before she hits her typewriter and gives it a hatchet job. If I ever told my boss that I was too bored to do a complete and thorough job he’d hang me out to dry.”⁷⁵ This occurs in other issues as well, such as a gamer complaining, “If she took the time out to play any game at all, she would have known that it is not a paddle or any other control at all.”⁷⁶ In another issue of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, Douglas S. Raeburn complained in the letters to the editor that E.C. Meadewas out of touch with the video game industry, and he accused her of having an anti-Coleco bias.⁷⁷ In November 1983, Robin Gray flatly stated, “As for Mme. Meade, maybe a lady’s place is not reviewing cartridges. (Oops! I don’t think I should have said that!)”⁷⁸ This kind of rhetoric is reminiscent of the developers themselves—acknowledging that saying sexist things is wrong but continuing to say it anyway in an attempt at ironic humor. Developers tended to feel they were developing for people like themselves, and this type of language indicates that there indeed was a commonality between the audience and the developers. One example of this was in Dragon’s Lair (1983). A December 1983 article in Video Games magazine explained the perspectives of both the gamer and the creator, Don Bluth. In regards to a particular player:     

“Input,” Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated, January 1984, 53. Ibid., 54. “Input,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983, 53. “Input,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, July 1983, 50. “Input,” Videogaming and Comptergaming Illustrated, November 1983, 36.

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As Princess Daphne seductively urged the player to save her, he dropped to the ground, did a 360-degree Michael Jackson-style spin, jumped up and waved his arms like a magician before hitting the game button. ‘Look at that chick,’ he yelled as the audience clapped in approval.⁷⁹

While the author Blakeman stated that Bluth gained some “flak about the sexist nature of video games,” Bluth too played it off as if it was meant to be a joke. Bluth knew that the character is sexist, but he stated that her presentation is for comedy. Some of the players accepted the art as a positive. Further, Bluth stated that he may have less sexist female characters in the future, but he offered “no promises.” In October 1983, Space Ace released, and the character Kimberly was once again sexualized like Princess Daphne. In contrast to E.C. Meade’s treatment, the male reviewer for Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, Jim Clark, has his taste in games questioned when he gives a game a good review, without his integrity or perspective of the industry questioned. In fact, the only complaint directed toward him was in a single issue. In the same letter that Kenneth H. Rickert wrote accusing Meade of “hatchet job” reviews, his other criticism was “Meade and Clark should be reviewing, not editorializing.”⁸⁰ Meade is included in this criticism, but it is overall extremely mild compared to the letters written about Meade’s performance. The letters directed at E.C. Meade, the only woman who reviewed games for Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, suggest that she did not play the games that she reviewed.⁸¹ This realm of gaming was perceived to be exclusively for white, middle class men and boys, and women who entered this sphere created disorder, which some male gamers resisted. The players and the gaming places were part of the gendered sphere of video gaming. The types of early video game players, the locations where gaming took place, and the reactions of male gamers perpetuated the masculine culture surrounding video gaming in the 1970s and early 1980s. Pieces of this culture were holdovers from the previous arcades and skill-gaming cultures, like pinball. A 29-year-old economist named Marty discussed how he replaced transcendental meditation with video games, and he even gendered games for relaxation by describing it as “meditation with macho.”⁸² While he had previously played pinball, he argued that there was enough rest that the mind could continue to

 Mary Claire Blakeman, “The Laserdisc Age Begins,” Video Games (December 1983), 34.  “Input,” Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated, January 1984, 54.  “Input,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983, 53; “Input,” Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated, January 1984, 54.  Turkle, The Second Self, 85.

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think about elements beyond the game. With video games and the macho relaxation, Marty felt that he could withdraw from his stressors, but the scoring factor of video games gave him reassurance that he was still a winner. The idea here that video games allowed him to relax but in a way that he considered masculine is important. He was still able to dominate and win through scoring in the game, and his sense of control over the game is what allowed him to relax. A mid-30s lawyer named David echoed some of the same sentiments about gaming as relaxation and control. He said: It has to do with testing yourself; it has to do with the idea that basic training will make a man out of you, with the idea that you have never lived unless you’ve lived close to the edge. The games are that simple, ‘close to the edge’, but they are not threatening. Do you understand? It’s a particular sort of feeling.⁸³

Both of these career men sought control through video games, and both referred to that control in gendered terminology—winning, control, and a lack of anxiety which make you feel masculine and give a rush that daily life does not offer. Magazines dedicated to electronic video games reached newsstands for the first time in the early 1980s. Newspapers, such as The New York Times, began covering the industry as electronic video gaming became more popular in the United States. There were also articles published in other popular magazines, especially those that appealed to men. These types of journalism embraced the masculine nature of video gaming, and journalists wrote on both the industry and the players. These video game magazines tailored their writing to a primarily male audience, with very few examples of articles directed at or which appealed to women readers. The newspaper articles typically highlighted boys and men, especially when writing articles about who played video games and why. Very few articles highlighted the women who were working in the industry, as well as women who played video games, while they featured male developers and gamers many times. These magazines provided gamers with information on arcade games releases, home games and consoles, and articles about the industry itself. However, the magazines reflected the masculine types of video games released, as well as highlighting male developers and publishing cartoons that indicated that women were not playing video games, but cleaning houses instead.⁸⁴ One comic in Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated demonstrated that women were supposedly busy cleaning rather than playing video games, it showed the recurring idea that women’s housework is often not appreciated  Ibid., 91.  “Computer Eyes,” Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated, January 1984, 57.

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or considered work.⁸⁵ The cartoon is sexist in and of itself, and it was meant to be humorous for the readers of Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated, with the audience presumed to be men.⁸⁶ This again goes back to the idea of knowing that sexism is wrong in a post-second wave feminism world but continuing to use sexism for ironic humor amongst the culture of video gaming. Many of the video games magazines, but especially Joystik Magazine, included monthly articles regarding the nationwide high scores for popular games. These articles were quite revealing, as the majority of the gamers were men.⁸⁷ Although this was more indicative of who the players were, the magazine also highlighted specific players to gain insights on arcade gaming. During the entire run of Joystik Magazine, only one issue highlighted women in this section.⁸⁸ However, this was only because of a request for a feature on women in the letters to the editor section. Women were indeed interested in gaming, as proven by the existence of this article. However, the magazines were written for a primarily male audience, as these were the predominant players of video games as well. Joystik Magazine ran an “Arcade Beauty Pageant” that included a graphic with every winning game with bare legs and high heels.⁸⁹ The games themselves in these articles are also feminized objects, which men could exert control over. It demonstrates that although some women were entering the arcades, gaming was still considered a hobby for men. It also indicated that there was a disconnect between the magazine publishers and a portion of the readership. There were also many articles published in popular newspapers around the country, such as in the New York Times regarding video games and the industry. One of these articles written by Peter Ross Range examined the new trend of “space age pinball machines,” or the new arcade games in 1974.⁹⁰ In this article, arcade games were called “the thinking man’s plaything, his intellectual equivalent to the truck driver’s pinballs.” Range explained, “Today there are almost 100,000 coin‐operated video games in the land, cropping up mostly in bars but also in airports, Dairy Queens, the new shopping‐center game arcades and Hugh Hefner’s famous game room in his mansion in Chicago.” It is intriguing

 This is quite reminiscent of Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, New York: Basic Books, 1985).  “Can You Get the Phone, Honey? We’re Occupied,” Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated, January 1984, 57.  Joystik Magazine, September 1982-December 1983.  “Joystik Charts,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 5 (April 1983), 63.  “Arcade Beauty Pageant,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 5 (April 1983), 6 – 11.  Range, “The Space Age Pinball Machine.”

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that he would specifically mention Hugh Hefner’s infatuation with coin-operated video games in conjunction with mundane locations. Not only does it demonstrate a sense of otherness, but it shows a more masculine edge to the games themselves. Range engaged in an overview of the state of the industry, including classand image issues of typical places where coin-operated games resided, in his efforts to understand the phenomenon of “quarter operated gismos in the bars.” He lamented that the death of “the age of conversation” in favor of bars “dominated by television sets suspended above the bar, flashing us a mock nirvana of unreality.” Significantly, Range also addressed the poor image of the coin-operated industry of pinball and jukeboxes, and he engaged with the issue of classbased entertainment. Howard Robinson, a man introduced as being in the games business, stated, “For years, our games—pinballs, shuffle alley, pool, appealed mainly to, you know, the laboring class. Now with video games, you have a broader patronage. I mean, a lot of lounges will take video game[sic] that never would have let a pinball machine in the door.”⁹¹ Another machine operator explained, “They [video games] appeal to different social levels… At Oliver’s Place, I have a bunch of bikers in there every day playing the pins. In the evening, you’ll see a more sophisticated-type playing the video games.” It is telling that the concept of class and video games continues to pop up, whether it is from Nolan Bushnell describing the difference in success for his video games or here in this article. There is a distinct class divide continually mentioned from various people inside and outside the industry. The article continued to explain that whereas pinball is partially luck-based, playing video games relied on skill and competition with another human being which appealed to men and boys, creating “five o’clock widows.” It does not seem that it is necessary to separate pinball and video games into categories of skill and luck. Both pinball and video games involve luck and skill. However, it seems that with the continuous mentions of class, this might be a reading by Range that puts video gaming at a higher intellectual level than something like pinball. This article also perpetuates the concept of masculine gaming, as women were the “widows” of the men and boys who were out playing the video games. The sense of competition drives the popularity of video games, according to Harmetz. She writes, “The challenge is always against one’s own previous high score and against others who have tried their luck the same day at the same machine,” while also arguing that the top ten scores on arcade machines perpetu-

 Ibid.

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ates this drive to compete.⁹² The article ends with Nolan Bushnell stating, “a video game allows a nine-year-old boy to compete with his father as an equal and beat him fair and square.” Gaming became a hobby where competition amongst men and boys thrived. Through the types of video games and advertisements made for these games, the industry reflected a masculine culture—one inflected by the libertine aspects of the 1960s and 1970s. These games displayed masculine escape fantasies, men’s activities, violence, and overt sexuality, which promoted a male sphere within video gaming and allowed it to become a hobby that was acceptable primarily for men to enjoy. The nature of the industry itself and the people who made video games was freewheeling, counter-cultural, but also blatantly sexist at times. Within this extremely male industry, however, there was an unexpected opportunity beginning in 1980 for women to make headway into video gaming.

 Harmetz, “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?”

“A Gentler Touch to the World of Video Games” Despite the masculine culture reflected through video games in the 1970s and early 1980s, women began to be more involved in the U.S. industry from 1980 until 1984. They began to play both home consoles and arcades, and had an economic and creative impact on the types of video games created. The turning point that allowed for this shift was one video game and its influence on the video game industry and culture in the United States—the Japanese-developed game Pac-Man. From its release in 1980 until the market crash of the video game industry in the United States in 1983, Pac-Man created a shift away from primarily marketing to men and boys, while also inspiring creativity and innovation in video games. While this is not due to a difference in gender relations in Japanese culture, it is because Pac-Man was explicitly created to appeal to women, and following its success meant widening the market.¹ Around the same time, more women began to play in the arcades and develop video games. Male developers also began to create games that they felt would relate and appeal to the female audience, which would then raise profits for the company. An Atari competition memo noted in May of 1981 that competitors’ games lacked women players, and asked if this was due to a general design towards men.² However, the creation and success of games developed to appeal to a broader audience led to greater inclusion of women in the industry, and more women and girls playing video games created some pushback from men and boys, especially regarding the skill levels and rumors of promiscuity of women who played certain types of games. Despite the pushback, these new “cutesy” games were very popular with both men and women. Dona Bailey, a co-developer for Centipede, said, “I never heard any complaints from men about Centipede, except from a lot of guys at Atari.”³

“Women Kept Calling Us and Saying It was ‘Adorable’” “It’s a cute creature with cute features… I don’t think the novelty is going to wear off,” said the vice president of marketing at Bally-Midway while talking about

 For a study about Japanese women in technology, please see Motoko Kuwahara, “Japanese Women in Science and Technology”, Minerva 39, no. 2 (2001): 203 – 216.  May 17, 1981, Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collections, Box 56, Folder 39, The Strong National Museum of Play.  Krueger “Welcome to the Club,” 53. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-006

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the runaway success of the arcade game Pac-Man. ⁴ It was a colorful game in which the player leads a yellow character through a maze while avoiding ghosts that pursue the titular character. Pac-Man is a Japanese game, but it was released in the United States in 1980, where it became a huge success.⁵ Pac-Man’s developer Toru Iwatani has since explained his purpose in creating the game. He said, Around the time that we launched Pac-Man, video arcades were filled with games where you shoot aliens. It seemed very dark. It was for men, it wasn’t fashionable at all. When women would go out, they’d go out in a group of friends or with a boyfriend as a couple. And I realized that if women and couples were going to come to game centers, they had to be cheerful places. When you think about things women like, you think about fashion, or fortune-telling, or food or dating boyfriends. So I decided to theme the game around “eating” – after eating dinner, women like to have dessert.⁶

Iwatani also explicitly felt that the design was important to the success of the game with women. He explained that Pac-Man as a character was significant, since he and the ghosts had a sense of personality, which had been lacking with games before.⁷ Iwatani said that animation inspired him in creating his game. He based the ghosts off of Casper, and he created a power-up for PacMan in the same vein as Popeye’s spinach. More specifically regarding the ghosts, Iwatani explained that Japanese consumers liked characters that do not actually exist, since they enjoyed Japanese fairy tales. Iwatani succeeded in attracting women players, but he also explained, “On the other hand, the core gamers, the men, were not necessarily very excited about it. But it was for people who didn’t play games on a daily basis – women, children, the elderly.”⁸ He also argues, My opinion is that Pac-Man became popular with everyone, from youngsters to elders to men and women because of our original idea to make a game that spoke to both female customers and couples. Empowering Pac-Man to chase the ghosts gives players a refreshed perspective on the game’s core gameplay, and I think this idea also appeals to a new gen-

 “Pac-Man Sublicenses Extend Bally’s Profits,” New York Times, February 16, 1982.  Tad Perry, “Pac-Man,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 6 (July 1983), 16.  Chris Kohler, “Q&A: Pac-Man Creator Reflects on 30 Years of Dot-Eating,” Wired, May 21, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/05/pac-man-30-years/.  Ibid.  Ibid.

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eration of female players who have grown up empowered and want to be the pursuer rather than being the pursued.⁹

However, he was afraid that the game would not appeal as much in the West because it was not a fast-paced action game, so he adjusted the speed and difficulty before localization. In comparison, Atari discovered in 1981 with the release of Centipede that Japanese gamers, especially women, did not like Atari games. They considered the controls too “masculine,” and overall that the games were “too macho and did not have enough appeal to the female players, who constitute a large percentage of game players in [Japan].”¹⁰ It is worth mentioning that these interviews took place 30 years after the release of Pac-Man, and it is possible that Iwatani’s perspective of what he created in 1980 changed after release. What is significant about these interviews, however, is that Iwatani felt it necessary to emphasize his interest in appealing to women specifically, as well as how women felt about gaming, even if this was not his initial intent in creating Pac-Man. Iwatani’s video game had an enormous impact on the international games industry, and whether purposeful or coincidental, his efforts encouraged more women to play and create video games. Pac-Man became influential in the video game industry in the United States, as it changed how some women viewed video games, which led to more women taking up the hobby. It also changed how video game developers and the industry viewed women as video game consumers. Midway’s Director of Sales, Larry Berke, explained “We only became aware of [Pac-Man’s appeal to women] when women kept calling us and saying it was ’adorable.’”¹¹ Edrick Haggens of Data East said, “I don’t see why it would make any difference to male players one way or the other, but it might make female players more inclined to try the game. My feeling is that we’re losing a lot of the market by ignoring the needs of the female players.”¹² Eugene Jarvis explained, more women are coming into the arcades and into the industry. So many more, in fact, that we’re toying with the idea of a button that will picture the players as a boy or a girl, depending on what they choose. I think that the role of women in videogames will mirror the roles of women in society. Already in books and the mass media, women are changing

 Matt Peckham, “This is What Pac-Man’s Creator Thinks 35 Years Later,” Time, May 22, 2015, http://time.com/3892662/pac-mans-35-years/.  “Centipede Critique,” September 2, 1981, Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collections, Box 1, Folder 23, The Strong National Museum of Play.  Harmetz, “Is Electronic-Games Boom Hurting the Movies?”  Meyers, “The Perils of Pixel-ated Paulines,” 27.

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from helpless victim to heroes who can kick the bad guys in the nuts. It’s evolution. And whatever the public responds to is what we’ll be designing. It’s big business.¹³

It is significant that Jarvis argued that the roles of women in media elsewhere changed, and by extension the video game industry would need to do the same. It demonstrates that video games existed in the larger cultural context, rather than an anomaly, and cultural media played off of each other.¹⁴ Finally, Pac-Man inspired video game designers, including women developers, to create new types of video games, such as puzzle and platforming games, that would have a broader appeal.¹⁵ According to Anne Krueger in Video Games Magazine, Pac-Man appealed to women for various reasons. One of the reasons was because Pac-Man had a personality, due to the colors, characters, and side art on the arcade cabinet. The characters also all had names, including the enemy ghosts, and they interacted in intermissions between levels. This, she states, was quite different from the previous types of games that forced the player “to shoot up unidentifiable flying objects in space.” In particular, she contrasts her experience with Space Invaders, explaining that she was one of the few women who actually played it at her local bar. Other women felt it was a “boy’s toy.”¹⁶ Lastly, one of the most popular reasons that Pac-Man was well-liked among women was that the rules of the game, as well as the presence of only one joystick and no buttons, simplified the learning curve for those with little to no prior experience. This was important, as it allowed women who were relatively new to video games to play Pac-Man. However, it also led to some men criticizing women who played it, as they argued that women were only capable of playing the easier game. Susan Forner from Nutting Associates, in response to this criticism, said, “women are meticulous and can handle the most complex set of controls”.¹⁷ The success of the game is estimated in multiple ways, such as arcade attendance and profits. Bally-Midway, the North American publisher for PacMan, estimated that of the people who played arcade video games, eight percent were women before the game’s release.¹⁸ In comparison, after the 1980 release of

 Meyers, “The Perils of Pixel-ated Paulines,” 27.  For examples of video games influencing films, see “Play Saves the Day: Tron, WarGames, and the Gamer as Protagonist,” in Kocurek, Coin-Operated Americans, 115 – 149.  A platforming game is one that involves a character exploring a world through jumping. The most famous example of a platforming game is Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. (1986).  Krueger “Welcome to the Club,” 51.  Ibid., 53.  Ibid., 51.

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Pac-Man, an estimated 30 percent of arcade gamers were women. Regardless of the gender of the person playing, Pac-Man was a massive success. In 1981, BallyMidway sold 96,000 Pac-Man arcade cabinets, and the total revenue from the arcade version of the game was $200 million in the same year.¹⁹ In total, the game took in an estimated $1 billion.²⁰ The success of Pac-Man inspired innovation amongst the developers: it showed that new types of games had real potential of success. This included games that were “cute” and could appeal to women and younger audiences. Many felt that the industry was shifting from an emphasis of “get tough” to “get cute.”²¹ Another innovation of Pac-Man that many other games began to duplicate was the concept of personalities for the individualized characters, as well as providing more narrative through the gameplay or through intermissions.²² As mentioned in How to Win Video Games in 1982, “all of this for a game that was originally considered ‘too cute’.”²³

“They Didn’t Quite Know What to Make of Me” Several companies produced internal newsletters, and these provide a look into the demographics of early game developers, such as Atari and Brøderbund. For example, Atari ran “Atarians of the Month” in Atari 81, which featured four different Atari employees.²⁴ Of those featured, one was a male programmer named Brad Stewart. The other three were in Coin-Op Final Assembly, Accounts Payable with expense reports, and Consumer Customer Service in the shipping department. They were women. While Stewart’s profile talked about his hobbies and that he liked the “creativeness and sense of humor” of people at Atari, the women had very different profiles. Betty Grey’s focused on her perfect attendance record as a shipping department employee, Shirley Houston’s explained that while it was not her primary job, she became the de facto information center for phone calls directed at Atari, and Chita Alexander’s focused more on her taking time off to take care of her husband and how her supervisors supported

 “Pac-Man Sublicenses Extend Bally’s Profits,” New York Times, February 16, 1982.  Mark J.P. Wolf, “Video Game Stars: Pac-Man,” in The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 73.  Steve Sanders, “The Arctic Antics of Pengo,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 5 (April 1983), 46.  This concept became quite popular, and another famous Japanese game, Donkey Kong, used a similar tactic. Wolf, “Video Game Stars: Pac-Man,” in The Video Game Explosion, 73.  How to Win Video Games (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), 49.  Atari 81, 1981, Trade Catalog Collection, Strong Museum Archives.

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this.²⁵ These focused more on their nurturing sides and work performances rather than who they were. The Atari Newspaper from 1982 also featured a piece entitled “The People Who Make Games People Play,” which introduced the assembly team of Atari when they were building the game Gravitar—most of whom were minorities and women.²⁶ These were the people who constructed the game cabinets in an assembly line manner, but were not the programmers or developers of these games. That is not to downplay their involvement in the creation of video games, but to demonstrate that while Atari did have diversity in their staffing elsewhere, the development side did not have the same level of diversity. It is sincerely my hope that either myself or another video game historian examines the work of these employees further, much as Laine Nooney and Carly Kocurek have done for other less well-known video game industry employees.²⁷ These people are just as important to the story of video game history, even if they are not the focus of the study at hand. Brøderbund, founded in 1980, also produced a newsletter, Brøderbund Crown, which printed the company statistics in 1984.²⁸ A look at who made up Brøderbund may be surprising. According to these statistics, their company shifted from 43 % female, 68 % single, and 83 % under the age of 36 in December of 1983 to 51 % female, 70 % single, and 78 % under the age of 36 in May 1984. It is worth noting that the company downsized from 76 employees to 69 in that time period. They again visited the statistics in October 1984, showing that the employees had grown back to 78 people, while they were 51 % female, 72 % single, and 78 % under the age of 36 at Brøderbund.²⁹ However, the extended profiles of the employees in the questionnaires revealed that none of the designers or programmers at Brøderbund at this time were women, which demonstrates that the video game production at this company continued to be male dominated despite the percentage of women working with them.³⁰

 Atari 81, 1981, Trade Catalog Collection, Strong Museum Archives.  Atari Newspaper, 1982, Atari Coin Op Collection, Strong Museum Archives, 3.  Laine Nooney, “The Uncredited: Work, Women, and the Making of the U.S. Computer Game Industry,” Feminist Media Histories 6, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 119 – 146; Carly Kocurek, “Ronnie, Millie, Lila—Women’s History for Games: A Manifesto and a Way Forward,” American Journal of Play 10, no.1 (Fall 2017): 52– 70.  “Vital Signs,” Brøderbund Crown 2, no. 2 (May/June 1984), Jordan Mencher Collection Box 2, Folder 3, Strong Museum Archives.  “Personnel”, Brøderbund Crown, October 1984, Brøderbund Collection Box 9, Folder 3, Strong Museum Archives.  “Questionnaires,” Brøderbund Crown, 1983, Brøderbund Collection Box 9, Folder 2, Strong Museum Archives.

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Despite the male-dominated industry, several women did create video games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1983, Anne Krueger searched for women involved in video game production, but not within roles such as promotion, publicity, and advertising. She found 15 women developing video games.³¹ In the game magazines I examined, there were less than five articles that focused on women in gaming.³² Although there were still very few women in the field who worked as part of the design and development teams, the women employed in the creative side of the industry were able to exert their influence over games during the early 1980s.³³ Dave Nutting, owner of Nutting Associates, felt that his company had an edge by having women developers. He stated, “Women are better at creating the patterns, imagery, and atmosphere for games. They have more of a sense of feeling and color than men do. Games done by men work fine, but usually will look a bit stiff.”³⁴ This demonstrates that Nutting felt that women had a distinct role to play in video game development, and this role was to influence the visuals of the game. Both Susan Forner from Nutting Associates and Janice Hendricks from Williams Electronics had backgrounds in art before they entered the gaming industry. Forner said, “it’s getting to the point where it doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman, but how many programming languages you know.” Linda Averett, who worked on K.C. Munchkin, explained, “we knew [K.C. Munchkin] was a game women would definitely like. Women are more analytical. I think that’s why they don’t like shoot-’em-ups.”³⁵ Although there were not many women in the industry, the few who were actively influenced the games that their employers published. An influential woman in the video game industry was Roberta Williams, the co-founder of Sierra On-Lineand the designer behind many of their successful games, such as Mystery House (1980) and Wizard and the Princess (1980). Roberta Williams became enthralled with adventure games after her husband, Ken,

 Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” 51.  For the articles referencing women in the industry see Anne Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” Video Games Magazine, March 1983; Joyce Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” Electronic Games Magazine 1, no. 3, May 1982; June Davis, “Videogaming Illustrated Profile,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983; June Davis, “An Editorial,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983.  Of the estimates regarding developers in the industry in the U.S., only four or five women were actively creating video games during the 1970s and early 1980s at one time. Leslie Haddon, “Electronic and Computer Games: The History of an Interactive Medium,” Screen, Spring 1988, 56.  Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” 52.  Ibid., 52, 54.

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brought home a personal computer for his programming work. When she exhausted the games she liked, she decided to make her own games. Roberta Williams wrote and illustrated her games, while her husband Ken Williams programmed and developed them with a team. Williams created these games because she was interested in making games that she would want to play.³⁶ In an interview, Williams explained that the transition in the 1980s to more innovative games inspired gamers to rely on “creativity, logic, and wit required to get to the end of the story” instead of “speed and reaction time.”³⁷ Roberta also described her process for creating games: Once I had figured out the ’framework’ (now thought of in terms of the ’game engine’) that I wanted for the game, the programmers came into the picture. Normally, they would essentially build the game engine around the type of game that I wanted it to be. They would do their best to fulfill my vision of the game. So, in those days, the game engine was built around my ideas, not the other way around, as, it seems in today’s world, so many games are.³⁸

She also argued that the industry would have actively marketed toward women if more of them had taken an interest in video gaming, which was evident with the release of Ms. Pac-Man. ³⁹ It is worth noting that Roberta Williams wrote King’s Quest IV in 1988, which is one of the first games to feature a female protagonist, and this did not come without controversy. Amiga Action reviewed the game in 1990, and there were several mentions of “grizzled adventurers” having a hard time fitting into “Rosella’s dainty shoes,” and for “macho adventurers” to remove their “smelly boots” to step into Rosella’s place.⁴⁰ While not all reviews of the game used quite as gendered language, the fact that this one felt the need to mention it twice seems significant. What’s most important is that Roberta Williams felt that King’s Quest IV was a pivotal game that brought more women into gaming.⁴¹ Roberta did speak on the gendered nature of the early video game industry: I really think that the idea that women are somehow ’punished’ or ’resented’ in the computer industry is overblown. I never experienced any resentments or maltreatment by any-

 Levy, Hackers, 297.  June Davis, “Keyboard,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983, 4.  Philip Jong, “Roberta Williams Interview,” July 1, 2006, http://www.adventureclassicgaming. com/index.php/site/interviews/198/.  Davis, “Keyboard,” 4.  Alex Simmons, Andy Mitchell, and Steve Kennedy, “King’s Quest IV Review,” Amiga Action 12 (September 1990), 70 – 71.  Jong, “Roberta Williams Interview.”

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body in the computer industry about my gender. Never. In fact, it was the opposite; I always felt that the ’men’ in the computer industry were happy to have me around. I never felt that it was a gender thing. I think that, perhaps, why you don’t see a lot of women in the computer game industry (I don’t know; maybe it’s different today and there a lot of them) is because, at least in the old days, computer games and computers just weren’t the focus of the average woman or girl. In other words, the women/girls themselves just weren’t that interested. Now, you could say that that was because the games weren’t designed with females in mind (which was probably true because the ’boys’ were designing them… for themselves!), but, computers just weren’t something that, at least in those days, the average woman was interested in.⁴²

Her insights into the gaming industry demonstrate that she did not personally feel she faced any discrimination, but her words reflect the standard view that women just were not really involved in the industry because they were not interested in computers.⁴³ She also explained that she felt that it is true that men created games for themselves, which limited the appeal of games towards women. She also said, “I prefer being thought of as a computer game designer rather than a woman computer game designer; I don’t put myself into gender mode when designing a game.”⁴⁴ Dona Bailey was the only woman working in Atari’s coin-operated division, and she co-developed Centipede (1981) with Ed Logg. Logg mentioned that the game was created to appeal to women in arcades, and he felt “that without Dona’s viewpoint it would have never made it there.”⁴⁵ One of Bailey’s most influential design choices was her decision to implement pastel colors into the game. Bailey said, “I really like pastels, which is why there are so many pinks and greens and violets in Centipede. I really wanted it to look different, to be visually arresting. I think that’s a new emphasis in games.”⁴⁶ The game involved a player defending against an invading centipede that moves down the screen through a maze of mushrooms. In a survey of women who played arcade video games, Centipede was ranked as the third favorite game in 1982.⁴⁷ However, in all the focus group tests of Centipede, only two mentioned that women test-

 Ibid.  It is worth mentioning that Roberta co-founded Sierra On-Line, so she held a position of authority with the company.  Andy Bellatti, “Roberta Williams- Sierra On-Line Interview,” October 25, 1999, http://www. adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/127/.  Davis, “Keyboard,” 4.  Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” 51– 52.  The top two games were Pac-Man and Carnival. Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” 32.

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ed the game.⁴⁸ It was one of the most prominent games that was influenced by the Pac-Man shift in 1980. Microsoft Arcade eventually republished Centipede in 1993, and Atari provided a history of the creation of the game. Within its official history, Atari erased Dona Bailey’s name, and she is now referred to as “a young game programmer who was credited with bringing a gentler touch to the world of video games with the enchanted mushroom patch.”⁴⁹ Although Dona Bailey created a very popular video game, she eventually left Atari. She explained that being the only woman in the coin-operated division was tiresome: “it was like being on another planet. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy being the only woman at times, but it was certainly bizarre. After a while, I just wasn’t comfortable, and I think it reflected in my work, or lack of.” She said she suffered from “fraternity burnout.”⁵⁰ In a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) from 2017, Bailey responded to my question about how her experience differed if at all from her male colleagues’ at Atari. Her response was, Yes, my background was really different from that of my male colleagues and my goals were informed by my background. My primary goal was to make a game that would be visually appealing to me. I wanted to make a game that was beautiful. My male colleagues were much more capable of programming good games, but I was more able to create something visually and topically different.⁵¹

Further, Bailey felt that the other employees at Atari focused only on games featuring sports or war, and she “had zip interest in any of that.”⁵² Another instance of the “othering” of Bailey was another company-made skit created by the Atari coin-operated division. In this skit, the male developers from Atari entered a brothel called “Club Atari”, where they encountered many women dressed in lingerie. One of these women was the only woman who worked in the Atari coin-operated division, Dona Bailey. Although women surrounded the developers, the men directed their attention to an Asteroids Deluxe

 “Centipede Focus Group Summary,” February 17, 1981, Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collections, Box 1, Folder 23, The Strong National Museum of Play.  “History of the Game: Centipede,” Trade Catalog Collection, Strong Museum Archives.  Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” 54, 81.  Dona Bailey, “I Am Dona Bailey, Former Atari Programmer of Arcade Centipede, Unix Programmer, Linux Teacher, Adobe CS Teacher, Rhetoric and Writing University Professor, Lifelong Learner, Big Reader. I’m Here to Answer Any Questions. AMA!”, February 16, 2017, https:// www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5ugvqv/i_am_dona_bailey_former_atari_programmer_of/.  David Koon, “Centipede Creator Teaches at UALR,” Arkansas Times, November 19, 2015, https://arktimes.com/entertainment/ae-feature/2015/11/19/centipede-creator-teaches-at-ualr? oid=4175309.

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arcade cabinet instead. The gamers ignored the women.⁵³ It is important to note that in this skit, Bailey was portrayed as a prostitute rather than one of the fellow developers with interest in the game. It suggests that Bailey, although she was part of the team, was primarily categorized by her gender rather than her skills as a developer. Carol Shaw, who also worked at Atari, said that while she did not experience any sexism from other game developers, Ray Kassar, who was President of Atari at the time, said, “Oh, at last! We have a female game designer. She can do cosmetics color matching and interior decorating cartridges!”⁵⁴ She eventually left Atari, and went to Tandem Computers, then Activision. Another developer, Janice Hendricks (Joust), explained, “I was one of the first full-time women in video graphics and programming at Nutting [Associates]. They didn’t quite know what to make of me.”⁵⁵ This shows that although there were women in the industry, it was still primarily a masculine industry that was exclusionary of the women who were there and made for an uncomfortable working atmosphere. Bailey said, Atari was always saying they were trying to hire women, but they said that the percentage of women applying was low. I don’t really know why there aren’t any more female programmers in the business. Maybe women are discouraged by the male domination in the business.⁵⁶

Brenda Romero (previously Brathwaite) worked on games such as the Wizardry series, starting with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Sir-Tech Software, Inc., 1981). Romero is unique in that she potentially is one of the longest continuously working women in the video game industry, as she still works on video games as of this writing. In an interview in 2010, Romero said, “Last week, I went to lunch with 20 women who work in games. 20! Consider that this is 4x more than all the female game devs [sic] I was aware of when I first started in the industry in 1981.”⁵⁷ It’s not surprising that women were a minority industry at the time, but the few that were there had a significant impact on the industry and products.

 Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 134.  Benj Edwards, “VC&G Interview: Carol Shaw, Atari’s First Female Video Game Developer,” Vintage Computing and Gaming, October 12, 2011, http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/800/vcg-interview-carol-shaw-female-video-game-pioneer-2.  Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” 52.  Ibid., 81.  SOE, “G.I.R.L. Talk with Brenda Brathwaite,” May 19, 2010, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20100522035535/http://stationblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/g-i-r-l-talkwith-brenda-brathwaite/.

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“Cutesy” Games and Pac-Man Fever After the great financial success of Pac-Man in 1980, the video game industry began to rethink some of the development of some games. Although most games stuck to the traditional genres, there was experimentation with colors, gameplay, and characters to try to make video games more broadly appealing. Pac-Man spawned a new category of video games, called “cute” or “cutesy” games throughout the medium.⁵⁸ Other popular “cutesy” games saw their release during this time. Some of these games include Centipede (1981), Ms. PacMan (1981), Mr. Do! (1982), and Q*Bert (1982). These games followed the successful debut of Pac-Man in the United States. These new types of games were popular with both men and women, and they also were innovative video games that were highly influential to the future of the industry. The appeal of these new types of games was broader than the previous genres, but the Pac-Man effect did not last very long. After the market crash of 1983, this type of innovation in the US was lost due to a change in the nature of the industry as a whole. One of the most popular games of the new “cutesy game” genre was Ms. PacMan. Namco was not involved in the production of Ms. Pac-Man, nor was the original creator, Iwatani. This game did not originally begin as a Pac-Man game, nor was there a gendered branding to it at all. The game started out as an “enhancement kit” of Pac-Man that a group of MIT students, dropouts, and friends that formed the General Computer Corporation created to fix what they saw as flaws in the original game which allowed people to play for an extended period of time on only one quarter. After their successful “enhancement kit” to Missile Command, Super Missile Attack took off, the group felt that they could hack Pac-Man to reduce its flaws as well.⁵⁹ The game was originally called Crazy Otto, and it had different mazes, a new character design, and collectible pretzels. After a lawsuit with Atari over Super Missile Attack and speaking with Midway about their Crazy Otto creation, Midwaychose to instead use the game as a sequel to Pac-Man. After Midway had Ms. Pac-Man, they stated that

 “Pac-Man Sublicenses Extend Bally’s Profits,” New York Times, February 16, 1982, D1; Krueger, “Welcome to the Club,” 53; David Stuart, “Future Waves,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 1 (September 1982), 4.  Benj Edwards, “The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man: a 35th Anniversary Oral History,” Fast Company, February 3, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropoutswho-created-ms-pac-man-a-35th-anniversary-oral-history.

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the game served as a “thank you” video game for women who had played PacMan. ⁶⁰ The way that Ms. Pac-Man as a character is depicted demonstrates that while the game was to be marketed toward women, their creation of the character still stuck to sexist stereotypes and tropes. Her appearance on the advertising and the cabinet itself are significant. Ms. Pac-Man is dressed like a Hollywood starlet— she is heavily made up, she has on pearls, a fur coat, elbow length gloves, and high heels, in addition to her iconic red bow. She has a driver behind her that presumably drove her to this debut. The ad even calls her the “new femme fatale of the game world,” even if there is no evidence that she would ever fit that archetype, unless one could consider Pac-Man’s “doom” as having a Pac-baby. On the cabinet itself, Ms. Pac-Man is sitting as seductively as a yellow dot with legs can on both the front top and front bottom of the cabinet. It is fascinating that the cabinet presents a sexualized version of a yellow dot in pin-up style poses, especially if Midway was considering this game as a thank you to women who played Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man ad’s depiction of the main character also contrasts with Pac-Man’s simple yellow blob appearance on the cabinet, and his more standard appearance on the ads. Patrick Goldstein in a 1982 article compared the two: To woo the potential female video addict, Ms. Pac-Man is outfitted with more fashion wrinkles than a new Halston. Pac-Man is a homely little yellow critter on a screen, but his female video counterpart is resplendent in red lips and eyelashes, with a bow above her brow.⁶¹

Goldstein further compared Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to famous couples, such as Adam and Eve and Antony and Cleopatra. In his book How to Talk about Videogames (2015), Ian Bogost actually made the Adam and Eve connection as well, stating that Ms. Pac-Man was created from the metaphorical rib, in this case the board, of Pac-Man. ⁶² These comparisons think about Ms. Pac-Man as an extension of Pac-Man, and one that is safely feminine with her interest in fashion, makeup, and her bow. The assertion that the feminine traits of the character

 Joyce Worley. “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” Electronic Games Magazine 1, no. 3 (May 1982), 32.  Patrick Goldstein, “Why is Pac-Man Grinning? He’s Sharing His Quarters,” The Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1982, 109.  Ian Bogost, “Can a Gobbler Have It All?” in How to Talk about Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Kindle eBook LOC 753.

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Ms. Pac-Man would entice lady gamers, whereas the “homely” Pac-Man already succeeded at that endeavor, is reliant on sexist notions that imply women are only interested in media that is overtly feminine. Pac-Man demonstrated previously that this is not the case, and it was also not the only game that women played. One of the arcade flyers for Ms. Pac-Man describes what happens when she is caught by the ghosts—“she dramatically swoons and falls.”⁶³ In comparison, a 1980 Pac-Man ad presented the player getting caught as the ghosts were “trying to capture and deflate him.”⁶⁴ Finally, the title Ms. Pac-Man was even disputed when the concept was originally pitched. According to one of the developers, the original title was Pac-Woman, which was changed to Miss. Pac-Man because it was easier to say. However, since the game showed a stork leaving Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man a baby, it was deemed inappropriate to have her unwed. The title ended up being Ms. Pac-Man to avoid controversy of a Pac-baby born out of wedlock.⁶⁵ The game was considered to be more challenging than the original, as there were four different types of mazes within the game and the ghosts no longer followed set patterns.⁶⁶ Pac-Man had been a big hit with both men and women, and Stan Jarocki, a Bally-Midway spokesperson, explained, Pac-Man was the first commercial videogame to involve large numbers of women as players. It expanded our customer base and made Pac-Man a hit. Now we’re producing this new game, Ms. Pac-Man, as our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man. ⁶⁷

Because of the influx of women who began to play, the video game industry took note and realized that they could include women and expand its profits through games that appealed to both sexes. Ms. Pac-Man, which men developed, was clearly a reaction to the success of Pac-Man and the phenomenon of “PacMan Fever,” which was a term used to explain the popularity of the game and the character.⁶⁸

 “Ms. Pac-Man,” Flyer, Midway Manufacturing Company, 1981, https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=thumbs&db=videodb&id=707.  “Pac-Man,” Flyer, Midway Manufacturing Company, 1980, https://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=thumbs&db=videodb&id=765.  Edwards, “The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man.”  Tad Perry, “Ms. Pac-Man,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 6 (July 1983), 17.  Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” 31.  “Pac-Man Sublicenses Extend Bally’s Profits,” New York Times, February 16, 1982.

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Universal’s Mr. Do! (1982) was another game released to appeal to both sexes. In the game, the player controlled a clown who dug tunnels through the ground to collect cherries while pursued by monsters.⁶⁹ This game, much like the others mentioned, had very bright colors and did not have many controls. Mr. Do! was less successful compared to Pac-Man, as only 30,000 arcade cabinets were sold in 1982.⁷⁰ Desiree McCrorey, who received an arcade spotlight in Joystik Magazine, explained that Mr. Do! was “one of those cutesy games for relaxing… It’s not as complex in strategy—not so demanding.”⁷¹ Atari used the phrase “cutsie [sic] type of game” in their 1982 Japanese competitor reports. During their examination of Nichibutsu’s games, they talked of the new game Wiping (1982). In Wiping, you control a vacuum, and the goal is to clean the floor completely. However, in their 1982 report, they explained that it “didn’t generate much excitement at the show.”⁷² They used the same language in reference to Konami’s Pooyan as well as Taito’s Frogs and Spiders, Crazy Balloon, and Jolly Jogger. ⁷³ One of the most innovative games of this period was Gottlieb’s puzzle game, Q*Bert (1982). In Q*Bert, the player had to navigate a pyramid of cubes while avoiding enemies, balls, and the edge of the pyramid.⁷⁴ The goal was to change all cubes of the pyramid to the same color. This game was originally developed as a shooter game, much like Asteroids or Space Invaders. However, Warren Davis, one of the game’s developers, changed the format to a puzzle game with a prominent main character because of the proposed art style.⁷⁵ This game sold 25,000 arcade cabinets and had a marketing campaign similar to Pac-Man’s; lunchboxes, cartoons, and board games were all created after the success of the arcade and home video game.⁷⁶ Q*Bert was seen as the American answer to Pac-Man’s model of success, due to its “story lines and absence of violence.”⁷⁷ Neil Tessler of Video Games Magazine argued in 1983 that “emphasis on strategy, storytelling, and personality and a de-emphasis on violence are all

 Mr. Do! (Coin-Operated), Universal (Taito, 1982).  Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 352.  “Joystik Charts,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 5 (April 1983), 63.  Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection 1972– 1999, Box 56, Folder 37, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.  Ibid.  Q*Bert (Coin-Operated), Gottleib (Gottleib, 1982).  Warren Davis, “The Creation of Q*Bert.”  Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 224.  Neil Tesser, “The Life and Times of Q*Bert and Joust,” Video Games Magazine, April 1983, 26.

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keys to the Japanese game vault,” and that Q*Bert followed that recipe, despite being from an American company.⁷⁸ Due to the influence of Pac-Man, the industry could no longer ignore women as gamers, and game developers began to adapt to accommodate this new audience. Although most video games released after 1980 still primarily fit into the dominant categories of sports, space-based, or combat, there was more innovation and an expansion of the types of video games released, such as the puzzle or platforming genre.⁷⁹ Although the elements of video gaming that had long reflected masculine ideals did not go away in the 1980s, this shift into creating new games for new audiences meant that the exclusivity of men and boys was no longer there, and women and girls were more likely to play, particularly in arcade settings. The influence of women developers within the industry, development of games that appealed to a broader audience, and the changes in arcade demographics and atmosphere led to a change in the culture of video gaming in the United States from 1980 until 1984. Because of the new types of video games released, as well as a new image for arcades themselves, women were beginning to enter the arcades more often than they had previously. Before this, locations for video gaming were considered primarily for men. An article by Joyce Worley in Electronic Games magazine explained that many of the locations where early video gaming occurred were considered unsafe for women to enter. She says, When a woman did actually show up, she could usually be found hanging timidly at the fringes of the action, watching her date prove his masculinity by bashing a poor defenseless pinball machine into submission. They rarely actually played the machines, and so didn’t perform very well on those infrequent occasions when they did stick a coin in the slot.⁸⁰

The early arcades, which Worley considered “seedy,” “shabby,” and “dirty,” were primarily considered masculine spaces that were associated with gambling.⁸¹ The men considered the women who attended as accessories to the masculine-based action, as they were either the girlfriends or wives of men who played video games, similar to how pinball was viewed.

 Ibid., 30.  The best-known puzzle game from this period is Pac-Man (1980). The success of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong (1981) and Super Mario Bros (1986) led to more platforming games in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” 31.  Ibid., 31; Mitchell, “Video Game Rooms Targeted by Towns.”

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A 1982 book called How to Win Video Games contains tips and strategies for certain arcade games, but it also has a small section that features content from some of the games that includes information such as popularity, approachability, “sex” and age appeal, skill versus strategy, and the pros and cons of the games.⁸² This information is useful for a popular understanding of the demographics of players for these popular games. They list several games as 50/50 on gender appeal, such as Tempest, Qix, Phoenix, Donkey Kong, and Centipede. There is only one game on the list that has a higher percentage of women playing it than men—Pac-Man—with 60 % women and 40 % men players. Meanwhile, games such as Omega Race and Defender have an extremely skewed representation of gamers, with 90 % men and 10 % women for Omega Race and 95 % men and 5 % women on Defender. On some of these, the book includes quotes to go along with the percentages or explanations for these games. These include that Asteroids is “stereotypically a male game,” that Defender’s gender percentages were “like our space program,” and that Omega Race’s skew towards men was common “as in most shoot-em-up space-war games.” Pac-Man received two quotes to explain the gender and age ranges, such as the game’s “strong appeal to women accredited to its non-violent theme” and that “cuteness appeals to the young and the young at heart.”⁸³ Several magazine articles were written regarding the entrance of women into the arcades in the early 1980s. These articles examined the women in the arcades, the types of games that they played, and why there were more women playing video games after 1980. There were also articles discussing the perspectives from the industry, including popular feminist opinions regarding the video game business. These articles showed that the entrance of women into video gaming, even in small amounts, was a newsworthy event. Although men still made up the majority of gamers, the influx of some women into arcades did not go unnoticed. It is important to understand that although these women were coming into arcades due to the revamped image of arcades and the new types of games, they did not exclude themselves from the traditional genres of video games released in arcades at the time. “Women Join the Arcade Revolution” from Electronic Games examined the move toward women playing arcadegames, rather than being there “just for decoration.”⁸⁴ As previously mentioned, the arcades in the 1980s began to change their image which in turn brought in more women players, and the article argued  While the book refers to the ratios as “sex” appeal, I will hereafter refer to it as gender appeal.  How to Win Video Games (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), 87.  Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” 31.

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that women were able to match men in video gaming skills since they did not have to rely on physical strength to win. This article credited Pac-Man with the influx of women, and it also stated that women liked games, such as Asteroids and Space Invaders, which they “weren’t supposed to like.” This also demonstrated that the efforts to create “cute” games to appeal to women were not entirely necessary, as women already played games that were not specifically meant to appeal to them. This article brought women into the forefront, allowing gamers to see that women were beginning to enter the culture. It featured a woman playing Centipede on the cover of Electronic Games and on the first page of the article. Unfortunately, the woman was striking painful-looking poses while in high heels as she played. Joystik Magazine published a section in its top arcade players article in April 1983 that highlighted two prominent women gamers and their preferences. The article stated that their goal was to prove that women weren’t “just interested in ‘cutesy’ games.”⁸⁵ They asked both women for their top five games, their high scores, and their reasons for playing these games. While the women admitted to liking the cutesy games, such as Ms. Pac-Man, Centipede, and Mr. Do!, they also played some of the traditional “shoot-‘em-up” arcade video games.⁸⁶ This information is consistent with survey information asking women for their game preferences from the Worley article from Electronic Games Magazine. ⁸⁷ Table 2: “Women pick their favorite games” from EGM, May 1982.     

Asteroids Space Invaders Quest for the Rings Missile Command Video Pinball Favorite Coin-Op Games

    

Pac-Man Carnival Centipede Space Invaders Berserk

 “Joystik Charts,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 5, April 1983, 63.  Ibid., 63.  Worley, “Women Join the Arcade Revolution,” 31– 32.

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There were also readers writing letters to magazines regarding women as gamers. A reader and video game player named Melanie Jean Mayfield wrote in to Joystik Magazine in 1983 saying, “I’d like to request a feature on women champs for a change… Anyway, how ‘bout giving the ladies a little recognition in the world of video? Some of us happen to be ACES!”⁸⁸ She hoped that women who played video games could get recognition in the magazine for their contributions and high scores. Despite the strides made, many questioned why more progress had not been made involving women in video games. The feminist viewpoint regarding women and video games was also explored in an article in Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated in October 1983. They interviewed two prominent feminists, Lindsy Van Gelder and Gloria Steinem, about the state of the industry and why women were hesitant to become more involved with video games and computers. Steinem explained the hesitancy of women to get involved with video gaming and the problem of the culture in the article. She said, “I think the problem with these games… is that they are presented as a high-tech activity which enters the culture in a masculine way. They appeared either through the math department in school or through the entertainment arcade in a section of town which is thought of as men’s turf.”⁸⁹ She continued, stating that women were not raised to believe that they must prove their masculinity, and thus they were less willing to involve themselves with the industry. Steinem also argued that women were not culturally trained to compete, and that this lack of competitive nature led to less women interested in gaming, while Van Gelder said men have more cultural pressure to engage in competition. When asked about Pac-Man and its influence, Steinem explained, “At least Pac-Man gets away from the militaristic theme, and the player isn’t killing people.” In regards to the movement towards “cutesy” games for women, Steinem said that women are not intrinsically more inclined toward cute graphics, but that they do not enjoy “bombs exploding.” This coincides with Bailey’s thoughts on making Centipede. She stated that in a notebook filled with ideas for games at Atari, she chose Centipede specifically to avoid the violent themes. She said, “A multi-segmented insect crawls onto the screen and is shot by the player. It didn’t seem bad to shoot a bug, so that was the one I picked.”⁹⁰ As more women began to develop games in the early 1980s, Van Gelder addressed the change saying, “There are lots of women in the field, but it is a male  “Letters,” Joystik Magazine 1, no. 5 (April 1983), 5.  June Davis, “Videogaming Illustrated Profile,” Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated, October 1983, 23.  “The Unsung Female Programmer Behind Atari’s Centipede,” Vice Video.

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industry, and the female designer is constrained by the audience. She is writing mostly for men.” She also argued that the marketing influenced the sense of exclusion of those who were not white boys, and that this led to a sense of not belonging for anyone else. Steinem said, “most games are designed and marketed by men who are experienced in technology which is still perceived as being a male field. Not only do most women not know about technology, but if they become involved, women devalue it for men.”⁹¹ They provided the feminist viewpoint on why the industry was still emphasized by men and masculinity, despite the fact that women were becoming more involved with video gaming. These prominent women felt that women were conditioned to not enjoy these types of technologies, but that providing them with games that were enjoyable and less overtly masculine allowed women to feel more welcome in arcades. Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated also ran an editorial in their October 1983 issue questioning why women were not as involved in video games as men. Regarding the lack of women in the industry, writer June Davis explained that socialization of men and women influenced their interests, and that video games grew out of “male strongholds of mathematics and technology.” She argued that because men created video games which were marketed toward other men, they reflected the masculine culture of competition, violence, aim, winning, speed, and aggression.⁹² She quoted Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line as saying, “we have a marketing problem. Nobody wants to discriminate against women. But we’re faced with a situation where 90 % of our market are men from ages 12– 34. If a company ignores those statistics, it will not be in business very long. The fact is you don’t see many women in computer stores. When you do, I think this will change.” The editorial ended with a call from Roberta Williams encouraging women to just get involved in computers and video games—that they would like it if they tried it, which she felt would encourage a market towards them in the game industry. While it is clear that more women as gamers and developers did in fact shift to some games and marketing toward them, it shifts the blame for the lack of diversity in the industry onto women rather than addressing the problem of the industry itself and its practices. In 2011, Carol Shaw also talked about the gender disparity in game development and her thoughts on it as someone who was one of the earliest women game developers. She mentioned that the fear of being perceived as a nerd may have limited the amount of women who entered the field, but also states

 Davis, “Videogaming Illustrated Profile,” 23.  Davis, “An Editorial,” 4.

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that she was unsure if there was an actual difference in how brains develop that caused women to not want to become engineers or game developers.⁹³ Her interest in “women’s lib” gave her the push she needed to be what she wanted. While she still expressed that she wanted more women in game development, it was telling that even in 2011 she would question the brain development of men and women and if that influenced women not entering the field at the same rates as men. She credited second-wave feminism for her freedom of choice in career, which supported that the larger cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s had an influence on the industry, who entered it, and their attitudes. However, due to the influx of some women into arcades, myths regarding skill levels and other reasons to delegitimize women who played began to emerge, emphasizing the backlash to the female invasion of the masculine culture in video gaming. Some of these myths claimed that “good girls” did not play video games, or that women were only allowed to play “cutesy” games if they wished to be considered a “good girl” rather than games in the traditional genres.⁹⁴ Gloria Steinem also argued, “women are punished for winning. It’s not supposed to be feminine to win.”⁹⁵ The myth that women only played video games with simple control schemes also existed. Janice Hendricks, a developer for Williams, argued that women were initially drawn into arcades by simple games, much like Pac-Man, because they were beginners; she goes on to say that as women became more skilled with the simple games, they began to play more complicated games, as well.⁹⁶ Lastly, one argument was that women only played arcade games because the colors attracted them. Dona Bailey said that the colors were popular with both men and women, and Tim Skelly, another game developer, explained that colors were just as important to men as they were to women. These myths were a method of exclusion used against women who were visiting the arcades, as they made the female interest in gaming seem less legitimate than the traditional male gamers. Because more women were beginning to enjoy video games, there was a risk of “devaluing” the technology and hobby for men, so these myths allowed men to maintain video gaming as a masculine activity.⁹⁷

 Benj Edwards, “VC&G Interview: Carol Shaw, Atari’s First Female Video Game Developer,” Vintage Computing and Gaming, October 12, 2011.  Krueger “Welcome to the Club,” 53.  Davis, “Videogaming Illustrated Profile,” 24.  Krueger “Welcome to the Club,” 53.  Davis, “Videogaming Illustrated Profile,” 23.

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Although more women were beginning to enjoy and develop video games in the early 1980s, the video game industry and culture was still primarily a masculine one. However, this shift was significant, as it demonstrated that the industry noticed that women were potentially interested in playing video games as well. Dona Bailey explained, “Over and over, women told me, ‘it’s the only game I’ll play. When I go with my boyfriend to the arcade I used to stand around, but now I like to play your game.”⁹⁸ The potential for more revenue existed if video games were created that appealed to both men and women, and more developers began to make video games that could potentially have a broader audience. Pac-Man through its huge financial success, became a turning point for the video game industry in the United States, as it promoted more innovation and catapulted video gaming into the public eye through marketing techniques.⁹⁹ However, the industry in the United States would not be able to capitalize on this new shift for very long, as financial difficulties of U.S. companies and the emergence of a video game giant left the industry in shambles from 1983 until 1986. This flash point of an opportunity for the involvement of women existed at a time where the industry was both laidback and extremely masculine due to the establishment of the industry and the people who created it. However, a shift in cultural ideals in the industry as well as a lack of quality control led to the industry crash, and thus killed any further opportunities that had been created in the early 1980s.

 David Koon, “Centipede Creator Teaches at UALR,” Arkansas Times, November 19, 2015, https://arktimes.com/entertainment/ae-feature/2015/11/19/centipede-creator-teaches-at-ualr? oid=4175309.  “Pac-Man Sublicenses Extend Bally’s Profits,” New York Times, February 16, 1982.

Atari Generation One of the most famous stories surrounding the early video game industry is the burying of Atari video games, often cited as a dumping of E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982), in a New Mexico landfill. This was a dramatic story of the downfall of the video game industry demonstrated by the desperation of burying unsold video games and peripherals in concrete so no one could scavenge them. Urban legends began, and the New Mexico landfill became a symbol of the death of the video game industry in the United States, which has since been called “the crash.” A fantastic story of success and American entrepreneurship quickly became one of failure and a loss of prominence of the video game companies located in the United States. The developers and companies from the United States had their greatest success in the video game industry in the 1970s and early 1980s; however, the industry collapsed upon itself due to the influx of many poor quality video games that were released and the financial difficulties of the business.¹ While the story of the landfill is a dramatic example of the crash, it is ultimately a small part of the industry crash in 1982. This chapter is not just a retelling of the story of the crash, although it is briefly discussed. It also examines an important aspect of the industry leading up to the crash that is significantly gendered and even sometimes included gender violence—X-Rated video games. There was an influx of X-Rated video games and their advertisements that caused a backlash against video games. In 1982 and 1983, the video game industry began to struggle financially, despite the release of several hit games, such as Q*Bert and Dragon’s Lair. This struggle would not change until the emergence of a new home product from a Japanese company, Nintendo, which would alter the face of gaming entirely.

“It’s Neither Tremendous Fun nor a Turn-On” Although they are not as famous as a game like E.T: The Extraterrestrial Extraterrestrial, a lack of quality control and ability to lock down development on video game systems led to an influx of pornographic video games starting in 1982. One of the most prominent publishers of adult games was Mystique, a subsidiary of Caballero Control Corporation going by the name American Multiple Industries,  N.R. Kleinfield, “Video Games Industry Comes Down to Earth,” New York Times, October 17, 1983, A1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-007

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which made pornographic films. These games varied in their play styles, which included text-based computer games and visual video games for home consoles, such as the Atari 2600. Many of these games added sexual intercourse or rape into the regular gameplay that was typical with non-sexual games. To win, the avatar had to have sexual intercourse through conquest. Whether through rhetoric or actions, the crime of rape is depicted in multiple adult games in this time period. Although several of these games saw a commercial release, many for the Atari 2600 game system, the most contentious was Mystique’s Custer’s Revenge (1982). Custer’s Revenge’s gameplay involved maneuvering the infamous George Custer, who is naked beyond cowboy boots and a hat. The player moves him through a hail of arrows with an erect penis to reach and rape an Indian woman for a high score.² Whether the intercourse was consensual was up for debate. Joel Miller, who developed the game, argued that Custer seduced the woman, and she willingly participated in the intercourse.³ Protestors such as Virginia Cornue, the executive director of the New York National Organization of Women, argued, “it’s racist and it’s vulgar. It says it’s OK to rape some women. It says it’s OK to rape Indian women.”⁴ Nevertheless, the game caused quite a controversy with feminist groups, the American Indian Community House of New York City, other Native American groups, and the general public.⁵ The game’s title is especially significant, as it evokes the idea that George Custer gets his revenge for the Battle of Little Bighorn through either raping a Native woman or through sexual intercourse while other natives try and defend her. Atari fought the release of this game, and it publicly denounced the release. Meanwhile, the president of American Multiple Industries, Stuart Kesten, argued “our object is not to arouse, our object is to entertain… when people play our games, we want them smiling, we want them laughing.”⁶ He argued that he did not see that adults wanted to play space games any longer, so he was trying to introduce a new type of game to adult gamers. Toru Iwatani created his Pac-Man concept as moving away from space games as well, and yet these two genres of games are completely different. However, while Iwatani found an untapped audience in women with Pac-Man,

 Custer’s Revenge (Atari 2600), Mystique (Mystique, 1982).  “Atari Trying to Halt X-Rated Video Games,” Ocala Star-Banner, October 17, 1982.  Deborah Wise, “Video-pornography Games Cause Protest,” InfoWorld, November 8, 1982, 1.  “The Brouhaha Over X-Rated Games,” New York Times, October 24, 1982, 145; Jas, “New Videogames Degrade,” Off Our Backs 12 (1982), 12; Jas, “‘Custer’s Revenge’ Removed: X-Rated Video Games Multiply,” Off Our Backs 13 (1983), 27.  “Atari Trying to Halt X-Rated Video Games,” Ocala Star-Banner, October 17, 1982.

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women who play tested Custer’s Revenge were disgusted and negatively viewed the game.⁷ Despite the negative pushback against Custer’s Revenge, Mystique and other companies continued to release pornographic video games for the Atari 2600. Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em (1982) is another pornographic game from Mystique. It features a man on top of a building who masturbates as the first part of the gameplay. Once you press the button on the Atari controller to get him started, he begins ejaculating onto the street below. The player then controls two identical naked women who stand on the street with their mouths open to “catch” the ejaculate. If the player is successful in “catching” everything, the women then face forward and lick their lips. Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em is a knock-off game in the style of Kaboom (1981), an Activision developed video game that has the player catch bombs in a basket from a man throwing them down. Mystique’s last game was Bachelor Party (1982). Bachelor Party involved a man who sleeps with a room of naked women on the night of his Bachelor Party. It is a Breakout (1976) clone, and the “bricks” are naked women, while the “ball” is a naked man. The paddle on the left of the game field serves as an aphrodisiac for the man to continue engaging in intercourse until he clears the room of women. Hustler magazine reviewed Bachelor Party in their April 1984 issue. The article explains, “Unfortunately, the visuals are so crude and the sex action so abstract, it’s neither tremendous fun nor a turn-on.”⁸ When Hustler rejects the quality of content in these types of games, it does beg the question of who these actually appealed to as consumers or who the target audience was, but it might have just been a case of the game itself being poor quality. Mystique received intense blowback from their poor quality games, and the public and pornographic industry alike criticized the company. For example, Eugene Finkei from Multivision Ltd said, “in my opinion the whole thing was designed as a scam. The games must have been designed very hastily. They were crude. Interaction between player and game was minimal. Action was minimal. They’re just lousy games. The distributors and the public are wary of the product as a result of AMI’s Mystique games.”⁹ After the controversy with these games and a potential lawsuit from Atari, Mystique stopped creating pornographic games, and all of their properties were sold to Playaround games. After the purchase of the pornographic games

 Wise, “Video-pornography Games Cause Protest,” 7.  Kent Smith, “Video Games for Smut Lovers,” Hustler, April 1984, 37.  Moriarty, “Are Adults Ruining It for the Rest of Us?” 20.

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license, Playaround began making their own X-Rated video games. They created a series of two-in-one games, which would include two different games. Knight on the Town (1982) was one of these games. This game featured a knight who builds a bridge to reach a disproportionate woman while dodging dragons, alligators, and gremlins. If the knight is caught by one of these, he is emasculated. If the knight reaches her, they engage in intercourse, and then the game resets. There is a woman side of the game called Lady in Wading (1982), which switches the gender roles of the game. Despite the negative press of these games, another X-Rated game, X-Man, followed in 1983. Universal Game-X took advantage of the popularity of mazestyle games after the success of Pac-Man, and the programmer created a maze game where the player controls a naked man who has to avoid scissors, teeth, and crabs while making his way to the center of the maze.¹⁰ If the player reaches the center of the maze, they play a new game where the player has to perform sexual intercourse, but they must keep a rhythm by moving the joystick back and forth to succeed.¹¹ One of the developers, Alan Roberts, formerly worked in the pornographic film industry. Roberts said, “the response from players has been enthusiastic—women and men. We were anticipating terrific business, but it has been hindered as a result of the Mystique line and the bad press that came from it,” referring to the controversy behind Custer’s Revenge. ¹² He continues, “we have not had the full support of the major wholesalers in the U.S… They have designed corporate policies in many cases in reaction to the bad publicity of the Mystique games. They have decided that all videogames are naughty.” After the release of X-Man, Roberts closed Universal Game-X, and he returned to his career as a pornography director. Previously, he had mentioned that he was interested in creating “regular” games, but he felt that since his experience had been of a pornographic nature, he would excel more in that genre. It is worth considering that many of these games have a similar theme— emasculation or, in a less extreme manner, the loss of an erection—if the player fails. In Custer’s Revenge, the titular character loses his erection if he is hit by an arrow, rather than a more dramatic and realistic failure such as death. “Taps” is played if the erection is lost. X-Man and Knight on the Town feature various creatures removing the character’s genitalia in the result of a failure. If we consider playing video games, especially due to the control scheme of the joystick being  Damon Brown, Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008), 32.  X-Man (Atari 2600), Alan Roberts & H.K. Poon, Universal Game-X, 1983.  Moriarty, “Are Adults Ruining It for the Rest of Us?”, 20.

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highly gendered in nature due to phallic comparisons, it would make sense that the ultimate failure would be losing your figurative manhood within the game. It is also important that the double-ended cartridge of Knight on the Town, which is entitled Lady in Wading and features gender swapped roles, does not involve the removing of genitalia, but rather the main character’s posterior and nipples. Softporn Adventure, published by Sierra On-Line in 1981, also emphasized sexual themes in its gameplay. Sierra On-Line was primarily known for its adventure and puzzle games in the early 1980s, and Softporn Adventure continued in the same vein as the previous games, since it was an adventure game.¹³ However, it differed from the others because of its overt sexual themes and gameplay. At the time, some programmers used sex to make things such as databases interesting, and this included programs that would tell sex jokes or programs that would allow printouts of naked women. Chuck Benton, the developer of Softporn Adventure, created the game in an effort to teach himself how to program on an Apple II. He said that he made the game when he was a single guy in his twenties, and he wanted to have a mentally stimulating game.¹⁴ He also makes clear that he wrote the game in a way that he felt was amusing to himself but also hopefully his friends. The goal of Softporn Adventure was to engage in sexual activity with three women while avoiding venereal diseases, gambling, and evading being tied to a bed. It’s a text-based video game, and you type commands to continue through the narrative. The dialogue and events in the game escalate from childish to genuinely disturbing as you play through it. At first, the game has juvenile sexual humor such as, “I’d like to nibble HER floppies!” and “Computer freaks peek before they poke” in a decrepit restroom. There are also jokes about sex and science fiction, as a there is a television channel in the game that describes a captain interrupting someone named Scotty in his room with a woman, and the text ends with “and the starship thrusts forward… penetrating deeper into space!” in a reference to Star Trek. It is also worth mentioning that every woman you meet in the game is referred to as “girl,” which equates them to children rather than adult women, as we assume them to be. The term “girl” makes it difficult to discern the age of the women the character pursues in the game. These immature jokes eventually give way to events with a darker tone to them. Another TV segment has a clown-like figure asking a girl named Susie  Laine Nooney wrote an informative and important piece on the history of Softporn Adventure in 2014. Laine Nooney, “The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Games,” The Atlantic, December 2, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-odd-history-of-thefirst-erotic-computer-game/383114.  Chest, “Chuck Benton Interview on Softporn Adventure.”

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to stick a lollipop in her mouth, and the pedophilic innuendo continues with him saying, “That’s right! That’s a nice lollipop! Nice and hard, right?” Again, the phrasing of “girl” could potentially mean that this character is actually an adult woman, but the fact that it is framed as a children’s show and with candy either infantilizes an adult woman or has insidious pedophilic tones. Regardless of intent, it is a disturbing scenario. Another channel talks about computers as sexual partners, once again channeling technosexuality, but it also claims that rapes are on the rise by “computerized banking machines” and home computers. Later at a casino when the main character sees a blonde woman who you are required to give pills to in order to progress, the game states that her nipples become erect upon taking a pill. The playable character says, “Wow!! She’s breathing heavily… I hope she rapes me!!” The usage of rape as a joke twice within the game is beyond childish innuendo jokes—it takes on a tone that is more dangerous and misogynistic than the earlier ones in the game. While a lot of this can be written off as Benton making juvenile jokes, ultimately the game including dialogue that makes light of or actively encourages rape, in addition to a potentially insidious situation including a girl and the lollipop, makes the game cross a line of acceptability. However, the team at Sierra On-Line felt this humor was not only okay, but that it was marketable to others similar to themselves. Bentonsays that he considered it comedy rather than erotica, and he argued that it was a “tongue-in-cheek fictional treatment of what it was like to be in your twenties guy in America.”¹⁵ By October 1981, Softporn Adventure had sold 4,000 copies, and it was featured in Time magazine in the economy and business section. In addition, two magazines, A.N.A.L.O.G and Softline, reviewed Softporn Adventure in 1982. A.N.A.L.O.G’s review in Issue 6 begins, “What red-blooded American computer freak would not jump at a chance to go to ‘Lost Vague-ness’ with the sole purpose of seducing three girls?” It later refers to the game as the “delightful fantasy,” and it claims that it is funny, entertaining and suitable for a party environment. The Softline review in their January 1982 issue calls Softporn Adventure a “refreshing change of pace” compared to other games out at the time. While this review does say the game is imaginative and funny, it also does say a major flaw of the game is the sexism it portrays. It is worth noting that this review also emphasizes that the game does not recognize the word “woman,” but rather it always uses “girl,” which was mentioned earlier. While the reviewer is not mentioned, it is detailed that there was interest by the reviewer in the ability

 Ibid.

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to choose whether you pursue women or men in the game. Significantly, the reviewer writes, The chauvinism in this program is unfortunate; it reinforces the notion that all computer freaks are emotionally underdeveloped high school and college boys who get their jollies reading the letters column in Penthouse… There’s no reason a program can’t be erotic, humorous, and intelligent.”¹⁶

The reviewer does state that the game is addicting for them, and that Softporn Adventure deserves credit for being the first adult game commercially available. The reviewer hoped that there would eventually be imitations of the game that featured “classier” writing and spelling. The advertisement for the game featured three topless women in a hot tub, while a waiter with wine and an Apple II computer sat next to the women. One of the women in the advertisement was Roberta Williams, a developer who created some of Sierra’s most popular video games, such as Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess, and co-owner of Sierra On-Line with her husband Ken. The other two women are employees of On-Line as well, one working as a production manager and the other as the company’s bookkeeper. Ken said, “We released Softporn, complete with Roberta’s racy picture on the cover, without ever thinking about issues like branding or appropriateness. At the time, I don’t think we had much more strategy than just to have fun.”¹⁷ Chuck Benton said his target audience for this game was young men, and he said that they bought the game in a similar manner to a Playboy or a Penthouse—they would sandwich it between several normal pieces of software.¹⁸ The back of the packaging for Softporn Adventure mentions their target audience. It says, “The subject matter is such that adult males should find this game quite interesting. Others may too—but be forewarned!!!” There was a controversy about the Softporn Adventure advertisement in the Apple II-focused magazine Softalk after it initially ran in September 1981.¹⁹ In the section called “Open Discussion” that includes letters from readers, the November 1981 issue included two letters responding to the ad. The first, written by Richard, feared that including ads like Softporn Adventure’s would turn the maga-

 “Softporn Adventure,” Softline, January 1982, 33.  Philip Jong, “Ken Williams Interview”, March 28, 2006, http://www.adventureclassicgaming. com/index.php/site/interviews/197/.  Sierra Chest, “Chuck Benton Interview on Softporn Adventure.”  The entire run of Softalk can be found digitally on the Internet Archive, which includes the issues in this section, https://archive.org/details/softalkapple.

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zine into “cheesecake.” While he did also argue that the ad was not appropriate for children to see, what made this letter significant was that he referred to a computer as “an essentially sexless tool.”²⁰ While computers were and are certainly gendered, this letter argued that the inclusion of naked women and sex was inappropriate because the computer itself was not associated with sex or sexuality. Another letter in the same issue, written by Mary who teaches computer literacy classes, stated that if ads like Softporn Adventure continued to run “women will never get out of the bedroom.”²¹ It can be inferred by this statement that she feared that the continued sexualization of women would set back progress women made during the 1960s and 1970s. This controversy continued into 1982, and it began to include other advertisements, such as Street Life, a multiplayer computer game where players control prostitutes doing their work. In January 1982, Softalk published two more letters regarding the ads, but they also included an editorial response to them this time. One stated that people have the freedom to play sex-based games, but that including “filth” in the magazine was detrimental to the image of the industry as a whole.²² Another writer stated that he would subscribe to Playboy if he wanted to see such material.²³ The editorial response stated that Softalk had more supportive responses regarding the ads than negative ones, and that nothing can be separated from the culture in which it functions within. In this, the response argued for the accurate assertion that even computers are not immune from cultural and societal influences. In addition, they argued that there was no morally correct position, but that Softalk followed the Supreme Court ruling on what constitutes pornography. They stated that the games with sexual content that they advertise always had some “socially redeeming value.”²⁴ By March 1982, a letter written by a man named Daniel questioned the magazine’s decision to print more letters condemning the advertisements if indeed there was more support for them than against. This letter stated, “the letters you have published seem to show your readers to be of a puritanical morality, rather than of the forward-thinking type that I would expect most computer users to be.”²⁵ While there is a middle ground between being puritanical and using women as objects

  22.    

Richard Gillett, “A Letter to On-Line,” Softalk, November 1981, 22. Mary Miller Smith, “Vacuous Sex Symbol Misrepresents Women,” Softalk, November 1981, Michael Daugherty, “What is Obscene, after All?” Softalk, January 1982, 23. John L. Zimmer, M.D., “What is Obscene, after All?” Softalk, January 1982, 23. “What is Obscene, after All?” Softalk, January 1982, 23. Daniel Tobias, “A Generous Spirit,” Softtalk, March 1982, 9 – 10.

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for advertising’s sake, this letter projected a type of progressive attitude that he thought computer users would have toward sex. In the February 1982 issue, Lawrence contested the inclusion of the Street Life ad, as he felt that not only did it demonstrate women as sexual objects, but it was inappropriate for his sons to see.²⁶ This is juxtaposed by another letter from James that directly responded to the letters from November 1981. He mentioned another ad for the game Interlude from the September 1981 issue that he felt probably caused an uproar. James argued that women are allowed to like sex due to “Women’s Liberation”, and that sex is not inherently a bad or dirty thing. Most interestingly, he drew a comparison between games about sex and games that include violence—he argued that war games provide an outlet for aggression, and said that in the same way, sex games could allow for release in a way that he felt culture did not encourage. He ended the letter with “Sex is one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity. It can be a physical expression of love. It can also be perverted. I feel the greatest perversion if to try and make it ‘dirty.’”²⁷ This argument is similar to the one Daniel made in March 1982, albeit a month earlier. The questioning of whether the readers are supportive of women embracing their sexuality, in addition to the accusation of puritanical ideals by Daniel, presents the want to not include overtly sexualized and objectifying ads and the acceptance of a more progressive view of women and sex as a dichotomy, when in fact it is possible to have both points of view. The climax (no pun intended) of the pornographic advertisement saga played out in Softalk in the April and June 1982 issues. In April, there were four letters regarding the advertisements—two against the ads and two in support of them. One of the letters against the advertisements invoked extreme language considering that the author wrote regarding ads for adult or pornographic video games. While Barry’s letter began similarly to the rest of the letters that protest the inclusion of the ads, his took it one step further. He argued, Our society provides many outlets for those who have needs which are objectionable to the average citizen… Those who cry loudest about freedom of speech are inevitably members of unpopular minorities who wish to impose their views upon the majority. In times past the question of minority rights has been settled by civil war, legal controversy, and social upheaval—I hope that we can resolve the current situation without recourse to any of the above.²⁸

 Lawrence Galante, “War…” Softalk, February 1982, 9.  James K. Olinger, “And Peace” Softalk, February 1982, 9.  Barry Jedrick, “The Porn is Green” Softalk, April 1982, 19 – 20.

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This rhetoric, even as a joke, was a huge overreaction to a computer magazine including advertisements that he found objectionable. It is telling that he wrote this letter in 1982, fresh off the heels of white flight into the suburbs, busing for the desegregation of schools, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. I doubt it is accidental that the imagery of a silent majority was invoked here, especially considering his earlier assertion that the magazine including these types of advertisements moved it away from a family friendly magazine into one that was “for adults with a liberal outlook.” His use of this language of unpopular vocal minorities brings to mind the politics of the early 1980s, and it certainly doesn’t seem accidental that his initial reaction to “minority rights,” which in this case would be adults that show interest or support adult-themed advertisements (regardless of how tasteless they actually are), was that one of three major political or violence-driven events would solve the issue. Meanwhile, the two letters in April 1982 that supported the inclusion of the ads either mocked the whole scenario by exaggerating that nothing in the magazine was appropriate or argued for parents to view the material beforehand and cut or mark it out before they give it to their children. In June, there were three letters, and all were in support of the advertisements. What was significant about these three letters was that they all directly had personal attacks on or mentioned by name letter writers from other issues of Softalk. A letter from a woman named Viola argued against a letter published in the April issue and written by a media organization for the University of Michigan’s School of Education and Library Science. The letter was signed by six people from the institution, and the writers asked that Softalk reconsider publishing ads “which insult and degrade female persons.”²⁹ Viola’s letter was a direct response to that letter, in which she took issue with the phrasing of “female persons,” arguing that the women are paid for their work in the ads, and that none of them are sexist. Her letter crossed into bizarre territory when she referred to the authors as “it” due to her assumption that the authors preferred to be neither man nor woman due to gender neutral language in the original letter. She repeatedly used “it,” and closed the letter with, “please do not assume all women want to be down at ‘its’ level (with no identity of gender). Some of us are proud to be feminine!”³⁰ Her obsession with gender pronouns, considering the fact that she pointed out twice within her letter that no gender identity was used in the letter itself, seemed to be a sticking point for her as to why the opinions of the group from the University of Michigan were less valid due to their usage of gender neu-

 Margaret T. Schmidt et al., “The Porn is Green,” Softalk, April 1982, 20.  Viola Corp, “Gender Bender,” Softalk, June 1982, 34.

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tral pronouns, despite the fact that they clearly identified the authors at the end of the letter, that the letter had multiple authors, and that gender identity has no impact on the validity of their arguments. Another letter in the June issue referred to those who took issue with the ads as “puritans,” and went on to question how they would allow their children to go to school or leave the house without them getting exposure to adult concepts.³¹ The last letter in this issue asked how one was to advertise at all with real people, due to the fear of coming across as sexist. The author, Alan, referred to another letter writer by his name Don, and argued that sexism was taught at home, and that Don only saw sexism because he is looking for it. He later, in the same letter, disparaged those who receive welfare or food stamps in relation to his paying for Softalk as opposed to getting it for free, which again reflected the politics of the early 1980s and Reagan’s rhetoric about welfare recipients.³² These letters, all of which referred to individuals rather than the advertisements themselves, demonstrated the strong opinions regarding the inclusion of these advertisements on both sides, and Softalk continued to get a small number of letters regarding the issue until November of 1982. This playing out of a cultural dialogue about acceptability with video games and children’s access to adult games and ads is significant to understanding the perspectives of those who played video games or demonstrated an interest in them. It is fascinating that of all the letters about the ads that Softalk received, only one writer identified himself as a teenager, and he argued that if people had problems with advertisements, they should address them to the companies themselves rather than the magazine.³³ He demonstrated more maturity about the subject than many of the adults did over the year of the controversy. One of the ads and video games mentioned in these letters as problematic was Interlude, an Apple II game that directed couples to play out various scenarios in real life that eventually would lead to intercourse. The advertisement of Interlude had a woman in white lingerie posing on a bed with satin sheets and a computer. The advertising promised that the use of the game will make for an adventurous, romantic, and fantastical love life. Much like Softporn Adventure, it utilized a woman’s body in a sexualized manner in conjunction with the technology to sell the product. The game itself, while also text-based, is meant to be played with a partner, and once both partners take a survey in the game, the software produces an “in-

 Tom Hunt, “Goodness Has Nothing To Do with It,” Softalk, June 1982, 34.  Alan Ratzburg, “Goodness Has Nothing To Do with It,” Softalk, June 1982, 34.  Josh Zelder, “Cleans and Dirties,” Softalk, July 1982, 25.

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terlude” scenario in which the two engage in. The game offers 106 interlude scenarios of different styles. While some are relatively harmless, such as the first that includes intercourse with rose petals on the bed, there are some that have both problematic language and scenarios. Once again, like many of the other adult themed video games mentioned, Interlude references rape scenarios. In conjunction with each other, Interlude 41 in particular crosses a line of acceptability. Interlude 41, “Macho Man II,” claims in the instructions to the man, One of the most common female fantasies is rape—being taken by force against her will. She doesn’t really want to be raped, of course; she just wants the feeling of helpless submission occasionally. Give your lady a safe fulfillment of this fantasy by holding her down forcefully during intercourse. Grasp her wrists and pin her hands over her head. Try to hold her motionless as she struggles. Take her now… she is yours.³⁴

The instructions to her are simply, “The more you struggle, the more excitement you will feel. Just remember, it’s a game of Let’s Pretend!” This sexually violent scenario and language push the game from one that is intended to spice up a couple’s love life into one that is actually sinister and dangerous. It continues the trend from Custer’s Revenge and Softporn Adventure in containing scenarios and language that reference or gamify rape. These games and advertisements display women as sexualized objects or contain sexually violent scenarios, while also promoting promiscuity as an achievement. It shows that women in the video games were the reward for proving masculine skill, and this was similar to men’s magazine stories where men “won” sexy women as their reward. These games were overtly sexual, despite their limited visual nature. They present a masculine fantasy of sexual conquering, with the woman or sex as reward.³⁵ Kristin Reilly of Women Against Pornography explained, these games are active participatory games. They involve the players seeing the woman, in most cases, as some kind of target for sexual aggression. And because they’re active, they take the player closer to what could be real life enactment of any kind of sexual harassment or aggression toward women or girls. It is one thing to look at films or pictures, but this acting out and seeing women as targets and seeing it as entertainment is just one step closer to seeing a woman and saying something to her that she would consider offensive.³⁶

 “Macho Man II,” Interlude, Syntonic Software Corp., 1980, 37. Instruction manual courtesy of the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/Interlude_1980_Syntonic_Software_Corp/page/ n56.  Moriarty, “Are Adults Ruining It for the Rest of Us?” 21.  Ibid., 21, 61.

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Even games that are not overtly sexual often had a woman as the final reward for completing the game. Karen Harth of Taito Corporation argued, “when it comes to winning the ‘prize’ at the end of the screens, the prize is always a woman.”³⁷ Some game developers also resisted the idea that anything they created could potentially be thought of as sexist. For example, Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated interviewed Eugene Jarvis in 1983 for an article about women’s roles in video games. Coming off his work on Robotron, he says, Yes, there’s Mommy, Daddy, and Mikey. I don’t want to be accused of being a sexist because Mommy is wearing a dress. Maybe she should have been pushing a shopping cart or carrying a purse since Dady [sic] had a briefcase. Oh well… women in videogames have been stereotypical helpless maidens up to now and in Robotron the cliché continues. I don’t think that’s good or bad, I just think that’s the way it is.³⁸

The influx of this type of content, or rather its existence at all, tarnished the reputation of video games. A lack of quality control for what was published on a platform created an opportunity for these poorly made and offensive games to appear on Atari consoles, and they signaled a beginning of the crash of the video game industry in the United States.

“If Atari Isn’t Dead…” In the 1970s, Nolan Bushnell wrote a manifesto outlining the culture of fun and play at Atari. By 1983, Jim Morgan, the new Atari chief executive from Warner, said, we must deal immediately with the establishment of a culture in the company—a corporate culture that will allow Atari to maintain many of its marvelous virtues but one which will also encourage the type of management and communications and decision-making that will allow Atari to operate with a sense of purpose… a purpose that is both well-defined and clearly understood by the entire organization.³⁹

He also argued that the new culture of Atari has “little room for the individual who expects to succeed at other people’s expense. A politics-free environment is a derivative of that thought… a company is two things: it’s owned by the stockholders and it’s run by its employees… the company exists for its stockholders.”⁴⁰    

Meyers, “The Perils of Pixel-ated Paulines,” 26. Ibid., 27. “Establishing Atari’s Corporate Culture,” Atari Life 2, no. 19 (1983), 2. Ibid.

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Atari, the most prominent video game company in the United States, had become an entirely different company under Warner One of the primary reasons for the crash was the poor quality of some games that were released. Atari, the pioneer company, was primarily responsible for this. Seeking to ride off the success of the arcade version, Atari created a home console version of Pac-Man (1982). Atari had ordered 12 million units of the cartridge, but they sold 7 million copies. Despite the large number of cartridges that were sold, many of these copies of Pac-Man were returned and refunded because of the quality of the game.⁴¹ Among the issues were a different color scheme and mazes, simplistic and changed routes for ghosts, less dots and distinct power ups for Pac-Man to collect, and most notably, a lack of the famous Pac-Man sounds.⁴² Another misstep by Atari was the release of the home console game, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), an adaptation of the movie. The game had been in development for only six weeks. Howard Scott Warshaw designed and programmed the game, and the deal was sealed to create it in late summer of 1982 for a holiday season launch later that year.⁴³ Because of gameplay that did not resemble the movie plot, gameplay which included random holes that E.T. would fall into in order to extend the world of the game, and primitive graphical design, the game’s short development time shows.⁴⁴ It did not sell well and critics and gamers alike panned it. Many E.T. cartridges went unsold. While E.T. is often blamed as the cause of the crash, it is actually more indicative of the ultimate clash of the “old” model of creating video games where a single person had a creative idea and time to develop a game they would want to play for other people like them and the new corporate production model that forced a rushed product from a programmer in order to meet deadlines and sell product. The most infamous demonstration of the imminent crash of the video game industry was when Atari buried unused inventory, including E.T., in the New Mexico desert.⁴⁵ This event had long been considered an urban legend in the gaming world, despite the fact that even the New York Times wrote an article about the dumping in 1983.⁴⁶ The article says, “the company has dumped 14 truckloads of discarded game cartridges and other computer equipment at the

 Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 236.  Pac-Man (1982), Atari 2600, Atari, Inc.  “E.T.’s Coming to Your Home This Christmas,” Atari Life 1, no. 8 (1982), Trade Catalog Collection, Strong Museum Archives.  E.T: The Extraterrestrial (Atari 2600), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1982).  Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 240.  “Atari Parts Are Dumped,” The New York Times, September 28, 1983.

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city landfill in Alamogordo, N.M. Guards kept reporters and spectators away from the area yesterday as workers poured concrete over the dumped merchandise.” The 2014 documentary Atari: Game Over uses the excavation of the burial site as a narrative framing device around the story of Atari itself, and the fact that there was enough interest to excavate the landfill in the first place shows how significant this story is to the history of video gaming.⁴⁷ Some of the excavated games have since found their way into museums around the United States, including the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. Another major issue with the industry was that there was no quality control or regulations on what games could be released for a video game system. For example, hundreds of companies emerged to release video games at a disorienting pace, and many were poor quality or knock-offs.⁴⁸ Games were increasingly becoming too difficult, as developers tried to make them more challenging and more profitable in the arcades.⁴⁹ However, this led to gamers giving up on playing these games. Noah Falstein, a designer of Sinistar (1982), explained the move to more difficult games, “As players got better at them, coin-op games got more challenging in order to keep the coin drop high… our management insisted on making it tougher to keep it more profitable.”⁵⁰ Gamers had their own perspective on what made video games fun to play. Players felt that a sense of skill and competition drove them to keep playing. In an Asteroids focus group from 1979, a player said, Skill to me is something that by playing it a few times, you can improve. But some games, you’re as good as you are when you walk up to it and you’ll never get any better. That’s what I call a poor game. And then there’s games that are so difficult that you can’t get off first base. There’s a very limited area there where you can succeed in the beginning but with time you can develop a technique and style. That’s why I like combative games or Football. I don’t like the driving games cause it’s me against the machine, and I like competing against someone where I can share my enjoyment. It’s more interesting if playing against someone—humans are unpredictable—a program does predictable things and eventually you figure it out.⁵¹

The focus on the skill of playing Asteroids became a major point in the focus studies that Atari carried out in 1979. Players repeatedly argued that the skill,  Penn, Atari: Game Over.  Kleinfield, “Video Games Industry Comes Down to Earth.”  Donovan, Replay, 97.  Ibid., 97– 98.  “Focus Group Summary–Asteroids,” June 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 9, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.

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dexterity, and challenge of the game made it more enjoyable than other arcade games. The focus group quotes two more players as saying, “try to get a high score—everybody’s better than me—it’s a status thing” and “takes a lot of skill —can always figure out a different strategy to get better.”⁵² Further, the focus group reports said that video games with continuous action served as a “tension builder” and that it took “more skill to keep on reacting quickly to oncoming asteroids.”⁵³ However, one indication that the industry was heading toward games that were too difficult to play came from the Asteroids focus group. In a direct comparison to Space Invaders, half the members of the focus group said that they preferred Space Invaders to Asteroids because Space Invaders was easier to play, had similar and more intuitive control schemes, and that targets only came from a single direction.⁵⁴ Within the focus group, one of the most significant pieces of information was a list of characteristics Atari used to gauge how players thought of various video games with a space theme. These parameters were as follows: Boring-Fun; Too Easy-Takes a lot of skill; Realistic-Not realistic; No interest in improving-Interested in improving; Poor control over spaceship-Good control over spaceship; Do the same thing over & over-A lot of different things to do; Controls are difficult to use-Controls are easy to use; and Rip off-Money’s Worth.⁵⁵ These parameters demonstrated what Atari felt were the most important aspects for gamers regarding their enjoyment of a video game. After examining the Atariarchives, it was disappointing that there were not more in-depth focus groups with comments such as this one. The rest primarily indicated numbers of people that played and a general sense of if they liked the game or not. The Asteroids focus group provided extremely useful insight into why people enjoyed playing the types of games that they did. However, with an influx of video games that players did not enjoy given their difficulty and quality levels, the popularity and financial viability of gaming fell. In addition, the release of the adult video games plagued the video game industry in the U.S. and gave the industry a negative public image.⁵⁶ These issues all led to financial difficulties amongst the video game companies and the crash

 “Comprehensive Evaluation,” 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 9, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong National Museum of Play.  “Focus Group Summary–Asteroids,” June 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 9.  “Comprehensive Evaluation,” 1979, Atari Coin-Op Division Collection 1972– 1999, Box 1, Folder 9.  Ibid.  “The Brouhaha Over X-Rated Games,” 145.

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of the industry. Profits for the various video game companies, as well as many of the individually owned arcades, began to fall drastically in 1982. Atari stock fell significantly after a sales report indicated that their sales would only reach an increase of 10 percent instead of 50 percent. By the end of 1982, Atari had lost $356 million.⁵⁷ Others soon followed, such as Mattel’s $201 million deficit, Activision’s $3 to $5 million dollar loss, and Bally’s loss of 85 percent of its profits.⁵⁸ Eventually, Atari was split, with Warner Communications owning the coin-operated division, while the home division was sold off. Coleco, one of the biggest companies in the industry during the early 1980s, had its stock collapse much like Atari’s. The company survived until 1988 due to a shift in focus to Cabbage Patch Dolls and away from video games. Mattel dropped out of the video game industry all together in 1984.⁵⁹ The arcades also struggled to survive. The number of people who opened arcades, thinking that they would be the next big moneymaker, was large. The estimated number of arcades was 10,000 by 1982. By the time that N.R. Kleinfield wrote his article on the crash in 1983, at least 1,500 had closed.⁶⁰ However, due to the volume of arcades and the debts that arcades had from buying machines, many arcades began to close in increasing numbers from 1982 to 1984.⁶¹ An interoffice Atari memo dated April 7, 1983 included two news articles about the poor performance of Atari. Although the memo argued that some of the details were not correct, the fact that these Atari executives shared these news articles is relevant.⁶² One was from Play Meter and the other was an AP Press release. Play Meter, a magazine focusing on coin-operated video games, published an article in their April 1983 issue entitled, “Workers May Unite Against Atari Cutbacks.”⁶³ In 1983, Atari announced the move overseas for their Home Computer Division and Consumer products manufacturing facilities in order to cut costs, and this equated to a workforce reduction of about 1,700 employees. In response, Edward A. Jones organized around 3,000 Atari employees in an effort to unionize under the AFL-CIO. The Atari Vice President in 1983

 Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 234, 239.  Charles P. Alexander, “Video Games Go Crunch!” Time, October 17, 1983, 64.  Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 268, 253 – 255.  Kleinfield, “Video Games Industry Comes Down to Earth.”  Donovan, Replay, 97.  “Inter Office Memo,” April 7, 1983, Atari Coin-Operated Division Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 56, Folder 29.  Kathleen Sullivan and Mike Shaw, “Workers May Unite Against Atari Cutbacks,” Play Meter, April 1983, Atari Coin-Operated Division Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 56, Folder 29.

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responded, “if you happen to be approached by this union or a union sympathizer… we’d appreciate you telling them that we don’t need a union here at Atari.”⁶⁴ The AP Press release from April 6, 1983 was about Atari’s reduction of hours for over 300 employees. The article explained that Atari placed 350 employees on four-day work weeks, and that this came months after the announcement of layoffs for 1,700 workers.⁶⁵ This instance was also referenced in the Play Meter article from April.⁶⁶ The article attributed the layoffs to a lack of demand for coinoperated video games, and it says both the Atari computer and coin-operated divisions lost money.⁶⁷ Atari memos argued that the coin-operated division was not to blame for the loss of money when sharing this article around the company.⁶⁸ The article explained that the optimistic view of Warner and Atari in 1982 led to an increase in personnel for the company to the tune of about 1,000 employees.⁶⁹ However, due to the lack of sales and the beginnings of the industry crash, profits were down, and these employees either had their hours reduced or got laid off to try and salvage the company.⁷⁰ In an attention-grabbing headline, an article from April 1983 said “Warner Posts $19 Million Loss.” This showed the huge financial crash of the industry starting with Atari in the first quarter of the year. The press release written by Jonathan Greer laid the blame solely on Atari.⁷¹ In comparison, Warner had a profit of $77.9 million in the first quarter of 1982.⁷² Atari’s losses in particular were extensive. The company went from an operating profit of $100.6 million in 1982 to a loss of $45.6 million in 1983. Steven Ross, the Warner chairman and chief executive, attributed the loss to high numbers of Atari game cartridges still in retail inventories. Due to an announcement on December 8, 1982 that Atari video game sales were down and disappointing, video game stocks fell quickly, and Warner’s stock price fell from $51.75 on December 8 to $28.75 on April 1983.⁷³

 Ibid.  “Atari Reduces Work Hours for about 350 Employees,” Associated Press, April 6, 1983, Atari Coin-Operated Division Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 56, Folder 29.  Sullivan and Shaw, “Workers May Unite Against Atari Cutbacks.”  “Atari Reduces Work Hours for about 350 Employees,” Associated Press, April 6, 1983.  “Inter Office Memo,” April 7, 1983, Atari Coin-Operated Division Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 56, Folder 29.  “Atari Reduces Work Hours for about 350 Employees.”  Ibid.  Jonathan Greer, “Warner Posts $19 Million Loss,” April 6, 1983, Atari Coin-Operated Division Collection, Strong Museum Archives. Box 56, Folder 29.  Greer, “Warner Posts $19 Million Loss.”  Ibid.

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Newspapers also covered the video game crash as well. By April 20, 1983, The New York Times started covering the crash in action. In an article called “Warner, Citing Atari, Posts $18.9 Million Loss,” author Andrew Pollack stated that the same source of Warner’s amazing growth in 1982 was the source of its losses in 1983—Atari.⁷⁴ Pollack said the loss was due to increased competition from new companies as well as an excess of product from the holiday season. The company replaced their chairman, laid off thousands of employees, began manufacturing overseas, reduced the number of distributors from 140 to 40, and reinvigorated their home computer line to try and stop the bleeding of cash from Atari.⁷⁵ On September 27, 1983, Ray Kassar, the former CEO of Atari, and Dennis Groth, the senior vice-president of Atari, were charged with insider trading of Atari stocks. Kassar and Groth sold their Atari stock before it fell to $16.75 per share in December 1982 after an announcement of lower than expected earnings. The article attributed the growth of Atari to Kassar’s work to “change Atari from the loosely organized band of engineers that it had been under its founder, Nolan Bushnell, into a more businesslike company. In doing so, he earned a reputation as an autocrat who was quick to dismiss subordinates who fell from his favor.”⁷⁶ The Baltimore Sun also covered news about the losses of Atari. In the article, Steve Ross of Warner said, “the continuing chaotic marketplaces for video games, home computers, and coin-operated games, including distressed sales of inventory by companies leaving the business, were the principal contributing factors to Atari’s third quarter loss.”⁷⁷ However, this article argued that the issues were not exclusive to Atari, and that other video game companies also struggled financially. In December of 1984, Atari created an “Industry Overview” from 1981 until the end of 1984. This memo is useful in understanding how Atari as a company was positioned within the video game industry at this point, and how the corporation saw their future. The memo explained that in 1981 and 1982 an extraordinary amount of growth in how many people played video games, as well as new locations and products, encouraged an oversaturation of the market.⁷⁸ By 1983,

 Andrew Pollack, “Warner, Citing Atari, Posts $18.9 Million Loss,” The New York Times, April 20, 1983.  Ibid.  Kenneth B. Noble, “2 Charged in Atari Stock Sale,” The New York Times, September 27, 1983.  “Warner Posts $122.4 Million Loss, Puts the Blame on Struggling Atari,” The Baltimore Sun, October 15, 1983.  “Industry Overview,” December 1984, Atari Coin-Operated Division Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 51, Folder 9.

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the memo said, “distributors and operators were squandered with outstanding debts, cash flow problems, and the resulting inability to finance new game purchases.” Significantly, the large amounts of inventory left for retailers led to close-out sales and lowered prices for video games. In the 1984 section, the memo referred to the crash as the “shakeout,” which is echoed by Douglas Carlston of Brøderbund in his book Software People. ⁷⁹ Atari’s memo said 1984 had the most dramatic decline in the twelve-year history of the industry, and there are numerous explanations within the memo as to why this occurred. The entire industry, they argued, was in a conservative state of survival in an effort to continue operations.⁸⁰ Due to this level of oversaturation, many companies closed, and others left the industry entirely. This state of the industry memo included a product strategy plan for 1985, and these plans included creating content that was universally accepted by all ages, male and female, as well as casual and regular players. They were also to have unique elements, ease of understanding the controls, overall value in the game time, enhanced music and graphics, as well as variety that would lead to continuous and repeated play. After the fiasco of E.T The Extraterrestrial and Pac-Man in 1982, Atari planned to not license any properties for games in 1985, and they wanted developers to stick to common themes such as sports, space, adventure, characters, and driving.⁸¹ These efforts demonstrate that Atari was struggling to survive the early 1980s crash, and the coin-operated division decided to find out what exactly went wrong in an effort to correct the course back to the days of their success. In 1984, the Warner Shareholder reports began by explaining that the Atari home computer and home video game division were sold off. Warner solely placed the blame of the loss of $586.1 million in 1983 on Atari.⁸² They were written off the balance sheet, and there was no longer a consumer electronics section in the Warner Shareholder report. Atari effectively died at the hands of Warner in 1984, and the US companies’ lead in the video game industry died with them. Atari was not the only company suffering the effects of the crash beginning in 1982. Brøderbund also began planning their future in games in 1983. In their 1983 documents for the state of the industry and their plans, Brøderbund noted a decline in video game machines, and the company chose to focus more directly

   

Ibid.; Carlston, Software People, 9. “Industry Overview,” December 1984. Ibid. Ibid.

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on non-gaming based software in the future.⁸³ In an article called “Video-game Makers Play by New Rules,” Roger Rapoport reported on the state of the industry in 1983.⁸⁴ The article explained that Atari and Warner laid employees off and had a second quarter of losses, while Mattel lost $20 million in 1983 due to the Intellivision. The article argued that Brøderbund was the future of the video game industry since they focused on computer games, due to increased competition and a limited market in home console gaming. Rapoport argued the influence of foreign video game companies and the increased competition would reduce the American video game industry from 200 companies to about 50 by 1984. The article explained, “New York’s Bernstein Research, a leading student of the field, expects ‘1983 to be the last year of growth in the domestic video game market,’” which ultimately proved to be true.⁸⁵ The article quoted Bill Grubb of Imagic as saying, “the number one bestseller this year is selling fewer units than the top seller last year. I understand that the top 20 titles are now only about 45 percent of total sales volume.” This article demonstrated that the industry suffered greatly as of 1983, and the general consensus was that the future of video games was in computer games and software, rather than arcadesor home consoles. Carlston of Brøderbund wrote about the crash in 1985. He attributed the “shakeout” to four primary causes. These four causes are intrinsically tied to the development of the video game industry. The first is that many of the entrepreneurs who began the industry lacked business management skills, and they forgot that companies must turn a profit to survive instead of just making fun games.⁸⁶ The second reason applies to the corporate sector that took over the industry in the 1980s. He said that after this takeover, the video game companies no longer produced good video games, since there was “an inability to develop and handle new sources of quality products.” He argued that an inability of corporations to communicate with creative “hackers” who created great software was detrimental to the quality of games and the hiring of good programmers. Third, he stated that companies did not understand where they should develop for, since he said many focused on Atari because of an existing install base. Lastly, he argued that the overabundance of money, rather than lack of it, led to investments in many software ideas. By the early 1980s, competition became ram-

 “1983 Shareholder Report,” Brøderbund Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 4, Folder 2; “6/27/1983” Brøderbund Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 4, Folder 2.  Roger Rapoport, “Video-game Makers Play by New Rules,” Brøderbund Collection, Strong Museum Archives, Box 9, Folder 10.  Ibid.  Carlston, Software People, 241– 245.

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pant, and Carlston said these companies had “soft underbellies.” Carlston felt that the crash was not the end of the industry, but it was the end of an era where every company succeeded. However, he too focused on Japan as the next era of the industry by the end of this book. By 1984, The New York Times continued to cover Atari’s struggle for survival. This mostly included the cutting of jobs in March, April, and June, which affected both white-collar jobs and those in plants.⁸⁷ In January 1984, The New York Times wrote a piece about Steve Ross of Warner and his precarious situation with the company after the fall of Atari. The article said, “Ironically Atari, which had been Mr. Ross’s greatest triumph, is now the major cause of his problems.”⁸⁸ Harold Vogel, a Merrill Lynch analyst, argued that the failure of Warner could be attributed to Ross’ inexperience with consumer electronics.⁸⁹ However, one important aspect of this failure was the shift from engineer entrepreneurs into a corporate business endeavor. Vogel said, “at Atari, the style of management was clearly at fault. They didn’t understand the business they were in and it was grossly mismanaged.” Another analyst, Lee Isgur with Paine Webber, went even further with his critique of the Atari management. He said, “top executives at Atari used to brag that they didn’t know the first thing about using a computer. It was absentee management. They lost respect for their customers and didn’t listen to what their customers were telling them.” As for the failure of Atari, Isgur continued, “if Atari isn’t dead, it’s ill and it might be terminal.”⁹⁰ This crash of the early industry led to a decline in US development, and it also meant the end of the advances that women made in the early 1980s in both game development and as consumers of video games, due to the closing of companies or the change in focus for those that did survive. While women continued to develop and play video games, the industry’s initial recognition of women as potential developers and consumers took a hit with the crash. The video game industry changed because of the crash in the early 1980s, but some threads and continuity from this early industry existed in the US industry after it recovered.

 “Job Cuts at Atari Headquarters,” The New York Times, March 21, 1984; David E. Sanger, “Atari to Cut 550 Jobs at 2 Plants,” The New York Times, April 7, 1984; “Atari Layoffs Start at Home Office,” The New York Times, June 1, 1984.  Leslie Wayne, “The Battle for Survival at Warner,” The New York Times, January 8, 1984.  Ibid.  Ibid.

“Are you Man Enough to Run with Us?” In 2016, the Entertainment Software Association announced in a press release that the video game industry had generated $30.4 billion in the United States from sales of software, hardware, downloadable content, mobile games, and subscriptions.¹ Video gaming has returned to being a financial juggernaut, but it is a more international business now, with many companies from Japan, France, Sweden, the United States, and other countries seeing sales in 2016. One thing is for certain—there are still parallels and traditions from the early video game industry prevalent today. In recent years, there has been rhetoric asking if the industry is on route for another video game crash due to some of the same reasons of 1983—creativity versus maximized profit and quality versus quantity.² In addition, now there are issues of massive budgets for gaming and poor working conditions for development teams.³ Finishing projects quicker for profits leads to a decrease in quality, which is the exact same thing that happened with E.T. in 1982. However, as Leigh Alexander explains, “unhappy gamers are jerks, unhappy games media are lazy and unprofessional, and unhappy developers make crappy games. But unhappy investors mean a company can’t survive.”⁴ Andrew Groen, in his article “The Death March: The Problem of Crunch Time in Game Development,” argued that the new culture of game development is a “culture of fear,” one much like team sports, where if you are not participating you are not a team player and may get cut.⁵ Leigh Alexander’s 2010 analysis of the game industry, “Analysis: Is the Game Industry a Happy Place?,” also examines this new culture of the industry. She quotes an anonymous game developer  “U.S. Video Game Industry Generates $30.4 Billion in Revenue for 2016,” January 19, 2017, http://www.theesa.com/article/u-s-video-game-industry-generates-30-4-billion-revenue-2016/.  J.F. Sargent and Dave Williams, “5 Reasons the Video Game Industry is About to Crash,” December 11, 2013, http://www.cracked.com/article_20727_5-reasons-video-game-industry-aboutto-crash.html; William Usher, “AAA Games Could Lead to Mainstream Crash,” 2012, https:// www.cinemablend.com/games/AAA-Games-Could-Lead-Mainstream-Crash-44200.html; Ryan Lambie, “The 1983 Videogame Crash: Could It Happen Again?”, February 20, 2013, http:// www.denofgeek.com/us/64579/the-1983-videogame-crash-what-went-wrong-and-could-it-hap pen-again.  Andrew Groen, “The Death March: The Problem of Crunch Time in Game Development,” Ars Technica, May 27, 2011, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/05/the-death-march-the-problemof-crunch-time-in-game-development/.  Leigh Alexander, “Anaylsis: Is the Game Industry a Happy Place?” Gamasutra, July 23, 2010, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29292/.  Groen, “The Death March: The Problem of Crunch Time in Game Development.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668575-008

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as saying, “A lot of game developers have an ‘are you man enough to run with us’ attitude… it’s like a wolf pack or a gang or something. Instead of taking the time to get everyone working in a team together, it’s ‘see if he can survive our harsh environment.’”⁶ The culture of video game development, because of this behavior and the nature of video games as a whole, leads to a continuous sense of competitiveness with each other and other game companies.⁷ The rhetoric surrounding game development is survival of the fittest—it takes a certain amount of “machismo” to survive in the games industry.⁸ While this is certainly different than the culture of the early video games industry, it does still have a distinctly masculine nature, and promotes a sense of competitiveness. In some ways it is very different from the original counter-cultural nature of the very early industry, as well as the later business culture of gaming in the 1980s, but there are enough commonalities. In comparison to the era of Atari, there has been an influx of violent gaming, a continued perceived male audience, and a culture that is defined by male aggression and competitiveness. In addition, negative gender relations have also plagued the video game industry. One of the most notable instances is the movement called GamerGate, which began in 2014 when an ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoë Quinn created a blog post accusing them of an inappropriate relationship with a male journalist to sway reviews for their games.⁹ This review and relationship never happened, but the online abuse did. Quinn’s definition of GamerGate is: GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation.¹⁰

After incessantly harassing Quinn with rape and death threats, the movement expanded to attack people, often women or minorities, either critiquing gaming or

 Alexander, “Anaylsis: Is the Game Industry a Happy Place?”  Ibid.  Marie-Josée Legault and Johanna Weststar, “Are Game Developers Standing Up for Their Rights?” Gamasutra, January 9, 2013, https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/184504/are_ game_developers_standing_up_.php.  Simon Parkin, “Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest,” The New Yorker, September 9, 2014, https:// www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/zoe-quinns-depression-quest.  Zoë Quinn, Crash Override: How GamerGate [Nearly] Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), 4.

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involved in the industry, such as Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, as well as anybody who supported them or worked with them. They also targeted many marginalized people during their attacks based solely on race, gender, and sexuality. Although harassment of women and marginalized people was not new, especially once video gaming became intertwined with the Internet, the blatant misogyny and prominent position of GamerGate in the news made it significant.¹¹ It also represents a new tension—gamers and “gamer culture” versus those deemed as outsiders. As Andrea Braithwaite explains, we can also see ‘GamerGater’ as a gendered identity, tied to the popular perception of a gamer as a socially inept young white male… we see GamerGaters on a crusade to save an innocuous male pastime from killjoy critics… GamerGaters discipline and discredit these critics as the wrong kind of women, who need to be put back in their place.¹²

The identity of GamerGate proponents is based on victimhood—they risk losing the types of games they enjoy as games attempt to embrace diversity and inclusion. Emma M. Woolley best describes the mindset of GamerGate. She says, “to these people, anyone who has opinions on how games could be more inclusive or go beyond men’s power fantasies is an enemy.”¹³ Proponents of the movement conducted an extensive harassment campaign against Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian, as well as any that defended them. Despite the assertion that GamerGate focused on ethics in games journalism, comments from online message board 4chan that conducted most of the harassment provide a different side of the story. For example, one commenter explained, “I couldn’t care less about vidya [video games], I just want to see Zoe receive her comeuppance.”¹⁴ Sarkeesian cancelled a scheduled talk at Utah State University in 2014 after the school received a threat of “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the

 Amy O’Leary, “In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment is All Too Real,” The New York Times, August 2, 2012.  Braithwaite, “‘It’s about ethics in game journalism’? GamerGaters and Geek Masculinity,” 1.  Emma M. Woolley, “Don’t Believe the ‘Conspiracy,’ Gaming has Bigger Problems than ‘Corruption’,” The Globe and Mail, August 27, 2014, updated March 25, 2017, https://www.theglo beandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/dont-believe-the-conspiracy-gaming-has-bigger-prob lems-than-corruption/article20230850/#dashboard/follows/.  David Futrelle, “Zoe’s Screenshots of 4chan’s Dirty Tricks Were Just the Appetizer. Here’s the First Course of the Dinner, Directly from the IRC Log,” We Hunted the Mammoth, September 8, 2014, http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/09/08/zoe-quinns-screenshots-of-4chansdirty-tricks-were-just-the-appetizer-heres-the-first-course-of-the-dinner-directly-from-the-irc-log/

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lecture occurred.¹⁵ Casey Johnson of Ars Technica pointed out, “enough outlets have, by now, highlighted the profound irony that one woman who dared point out some of the misogyny in video games was so deluged by misogynistic threats over how there is no misogyny in video games that she was driven into hiding.”¹⁶ In fact, the three main targets of GamerGate fled their homes after sustained harassment, bomb, rape, and death threats.¹⁷ The situation escalated to the point of the FBI opening an investigation into GamerGate, which saw the heavily redacted information released in January 2017.¹⁸ Newsweek analyzed tweets using the GamerGate hashtag, and they discovered, unsurprisingly, that it was used more to harass critics than discuss what the movement supposedly concerned itself with—“ethics in games journalism.”¹⁹ For example, they demonstrate that Zoë Quinn, the game developer and activist against online harassment, received tweets 10,400 times using the hashtag, while the actual journalist they felt violated ethics only received 732 Twitter mentions using the hashtag.²⁰ It becomes clear that harassing marginalized people involved in video games or video game critiques became more important than the stated goal of obtaining transparency in gaming journalism. GamerGate as a movement is a continuation of gatekeeping, as it served as a methodological way of exclusion so that games and the identity of the gamer could survive as a predominately masculine and misogynist hobby, despite the changing dynamics of who actually plays video games. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw clarify a point I want to reiterate, as I feel that my book promotes

 Soraya Nadia McDonald, “‘GamerGate’: Feminist Video Game Critic Anita Sarkeesian Cancels Utah Lecture After Threat,” The Washington Post, October 15, 2014, https://www.wash ingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/10/15/GamerGate-feminist-video-game-critic-anitasarkeesian-cancels-utah-lecture-after-threat-citing-police-inability-to-prevent-concealed-weap ons-at-event/?utm_term=.917c8fae4341.  Casey Johnson, “The Death of the ‘Gamers’ and the Women Who ‘Killed’ Them,” Ars Technica, August 28, 2014, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/08/the-death-of-the-gamers-and-thewomen-who-killed-them/.  Adi Robertson, “Trolls Drive Anita Sarkeesian Out of Her House to Prove Misogyny Doesn’t Exist,” The Verge, August 27, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6075179/anita-sarkee sian-says-she-was-driven-out-of-house-by-threats; Andrew Hart, “Game Developer Brianna Wu Flees Home After Death Threats,” Huffington Post, October 11, 2014, https://www.huffington post.com/2014/10/11/game-developer-death-threats_n_5970966.html; Parkin, “Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest.”  FBI, GamerGate. FOI/PA# 1339704– 1, January 2017.  Taylor Wofford, “Is GamerGate about Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows,” Newsweek, October 25, 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/GamerGate-about-mediaethics-or-harassing-women-harassment-data-show-279736.  Ibid.

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the same idea: “In referring to the video game industry’s patriarchal undercurrent, we do not mean to imply that all men working in the game industry or who are involved in gaming culture are personally guided by sexism—but rather that systemic sexism structures the industry and gaming culture…”²¹ This is key, as not every person in the industry engages in this type of behavior, but the structure and culture of the industry and many of those who also play games support sexist and misogynistic behavior and rhetoric. This misogynistic behavior carries over into the culture of playing video games as well. Some high-profile examples of gamers utilizing language associated with rape or using rape as a synonym for winning in the video game occurred in recent years. One was during Microsoft’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) conference in 2013. During the demonstration of Killer Instinct, a fighting game, a man and a woman fought against each other on stage. The man was a producer for the game, and the woman was an Xbox Live Community Manager. When the producer started to win, he said, “Here we go. Just let it happen. It’ll be over soon,” and the audience laughed in response.²² After they demonstrated more fighting, the community manager lamented that the producer was fighting with a fight stick, which makes the game play more like an arcade version. He continued, “Wow, you like those,” while she responded, “No, I don’t like this.” Soon after, some Twitter users pointed out how this language is not only associated with rape, but given the fact that Microsoft intentionally set it up to have the producer dominate the woman in the game, it was in poor taste even if it was unintentional.²³ Microsoft explained that it was not scripted and later apologized for the language. During Capcom’s 2012 “Cross Assault,” a web-TV series focusing on players of Tekken and Street Fighter, the coach of the Tekken team and a competitive gamer sexually harassed the only woman player on his team during a live stream. He zoomed in on parts of her body as she tried to hide them from view, such as her feet, breasts, thighs, and buttocks. When she did not go along with his harassment, he called her “uncooperative” and “insubordinate,”

 Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 59, no. 1 (2015): 208 – 209.  Patricia Hernandez, “The Trash Talk During Microsoft’s Conference was Awful. [UPDATE],” Kotaku, June 10, 2013, https://kotaku.com/the-trash-talk-during-microsofts-conference-wasawful-512330167.  Chenda Ngak, “E3 Audience Offended by ‘Rape Joke’ at Microsoft Xbox One Event,” CBS News, June 11, 2013, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/e3-audience-offended-by-rape-joke-at-mi crosoft-xbox-one-event/.

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in addition to threatening her practice time for not listening to his “authority.”²⁴ In a later conversation between the coach, Aris Bakhtanians, and a Twitch community manager, Jared Rea, they discussed the behavior of the fighting game community. Rea asked, “Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?” and Bakhtanians responded, “You can’t because they’re one and the same thing.”²⁵ , The language became sexually aggressive and began to reference rape, which reflects the casual relationship with rape that some video games have had since the early 1980s: Rea: When I go to SoCal regionals and I see a Phoenix [from Marvel vs. Capcom 3] on main stage getting blown up and there’s some dude in the audience just yelling “Bitch! Bitch!” every time she gets hit and then she killed [sic] and goes “Yeah, rape that bitch!” Yeah, that’s totally acceptable! Really? Really? You’re going to tell me that’s acceptable?

Bakhtanians: Look, man. What is unacceptable about that? There’s nothing unacceptable about that. These are people, we’re in America, man, this isn’t North Korea. We can say what we want. People get emotional.²⁶ This language isn’t exclusive to the fighting game world, as you will certainly see it in the lobbies of First-Person Shooter (FPS) video games as well, but these two high profile cases demonstrate how this rhetoric and behavior not only serves as a method of exclusion for women, but also shows that men who engage in it feel that serious topics such as sexual harassment and rape are equivalent to jokes. The gamification of rape continued into modern video games as well. In 2012, Crystal Dynamics released a new trailer for Tomb Raider, and the trailer depicted a scene that many interpreted as an attempted sexual assault on Lara Croft. When discussing the trailer and Lara’s new origin story, Executive Producer Ron Rosenberg explained that in order to make Lara’s character fight back, they have scavengers try to rape her.²⁷ When Jason Schreier from Kotaku tried to question if this scenario would happen to a protagonist who is a man in a

 Jason Schreier, “This is What a Gamer’s Sexual Harassment Looks Like,” Kotaku, February 29, 2012, https://kotaku.com/this-is-what-a-gamers-sexual-harassment-looks-like-5889415.  Patrick Klepek, “When Passions Flare, Lines are Crossed [UPDATED],” Giant Bomb, February 28, 2012, https://www.giantbomb.com/articles/when-passions-flare-lines-are-crossed-updated/ 1100-4006/?irgwc=1&clickid=Wd2XbiwsQwYAxc706U3TOTmpUknyq80P2W080w0&ttag= 10078&vndid=10078&sharedid=kotaku.com&ftag=ACQ-09-10aag0a.  Ibid.  Jason Schreier, “Tomb Raider Creators are No Longer Referring To Game’s Attempted ‘Rape’ Scene as an Attempted Rape Scene,” Kotaku, June 13, 2012, https://kotaku.com/493389871.

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video game, Global Brand Director for Crystal Dynamics Karl Stewart said that it would not. Stewart argued that this behavior strengthened Lara’s character and empowers her, and when Schreier pushed back against this, arguing again that this was sexual violence, a PR representative interrupted and stopped his questioning.²⁸ This argument, while also framed with the original interview with Ron Rosenberg arguing that people would have a hard time projecting themselves into the character Lara, suggests they developed her as someone that the player would want to protect. It’s a sexist argument, but it also demonstrates that the only way that Crystal Dynamics felt that gamers, presumably men, would play as a Lara Croft who is not hypersexualized is if they turned her into a character that required protection, even to the extent of creating a scenario where she was potentially sexually assaulted.²⁹ Another example of the gamification of rape is the visual novel Rape Day. The game was to be released on Valve’s digital gaming platform Steam in April 2019, and involved the raping of women during a zombie apocalypse. The game’s description stated that the gameplay would have players, “verbally harass, kill, and rape women as you choose to progress the story.”³⁰ The developer states that murder is normalized in fiction, but rape is not, and Rape Day was created to combat that while creating a game that he felt would appeal to sociopaths. Steam eventually banned the game from release in March 2019, but the fact that the game existed and tried to push the boundaries of acceptability by allowing for the gamification for rape and even explicitly stating that the game would appeal to sociopaths is quite similar to the pushing of boundaries with the X-Rated video games of the early 1980s, including Custer’s Revenge that had the player control a character who rapes a woman to “beat” the game. The sexism in video games is not limited to the actions in gaming. Many academics have written on the sexualization of women in video games, and some of the same people being harassed by GamerGate have also been accused of making characters less sexy. Chess and Shaw cite an example of a YouTube video

 Jason Schreier, “Tomb Raider Creators Say ‘Rape’ is Not a Word in their Vocabulary,” Kotaku, June 29, 2012, https://kotaku.com/tomb-raider-creators-say-rape-is-not-a-word-in-their-vo5922228.  Jason Schreier, “You’ll ‘Want to Protect’ the New, Less Curvy Lara Croft,” Kotaku, June 11, 2012, https://kotaku.com/youll-want-to-protect-the-new-less-curvy-lara-croft-5917400.  Tyler Wilde, Evan Lahti, and Fraser Brown, “Steam is Currently Listing a Game Called Rape Day in Which You Play as a ‘Serial Killer Rapist’ (Updated),” PC Gamer, March 5, 2019, https:// www.pcgamer.com/steam-is-currently-listing-a-game-called-rape-day-in-which-you-play-as-a-se rial-killer-rapist/.

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with pictures of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider throughout the years with the question “does anyone out there know what happened to the sexy Lara Croft?”³¹ GamerGate accuses academics and feminists for causing game developers to make Lara Croft more realistic, and thus less attractive to them. It is notable that popular gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly ran an article in 1997 with a pinup of Lara in a bikini, and it also provided information on where to obtain naked pictures of the game character. It says, “given a beautiful, well-endowed woman and present her to a teenage audience with time on their hands… web sites pop up with nude pictures of Lara. For the best fantasy images of Lara, check out the Nude Raider site!”³² While Lara Croft has often been the notable overtly sexualized character in video gaming and is recognizable to many who have never even touched a video game, she is not the only character that is hypersexualized in gaming. Teresa Lynch researched playable female characters from 1989 – 2014 based on her definitions of hypersexualization, which included nudity, emphasized breasts and hips, and unrealistic waistlines.³³ Research found that women disliked playing as sexualized women characters in video games, and conditioning deters women from becoming game developers who might break that male perspective in gaming.³⁴ Women would see sexualized women repeatedly and avoid video games, and thus there is a self-perpetuating cycle of women’s diminished interest in gaming and thus development. Lynch’s study found that while sexualization of women peaked in the 1990s, it still remains quite common. The study also found that as women characters became more capable, they too became more sexualized. Lynch concludes that the decrease in overall sexualization could be attributed to game companies responding to critics, as well as a rising interest in gaming by women. However, she also states that traditional genres that appeal to women, such as fighting games, have the highest rate of sexualization of women characters. This shows that while there have been some improvements toward making the industry more inclusive, there is still a long way to go.

 Chess and Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” 216.  “Polygonal Pinup,” Electronic Gaming Monthly, no. 97, August 1997, 88.  Lora Strum, “Study Tracks 31- year History of Female Sexualization in Video Games,” PBS, July 8, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/study-tracks-31-year-history-of-female-sexu alization-in-video-games.  Teresa Lynch et al., “Sexy, Strong, and Secondary: A Content Analysis of Female Characters in Video Games Across 31 Years,” Journal of Communication 66 (2016): 566.

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There has also been a continuing debate since the 1980s on the use of “booth babes” at industry events. Far from the days of the “Bo Derrick Scientific Method,” the PAX gaming event banned the practice of “booth babes,” with their official policy stating, “PAX has a strict ‘no booth babe’ policy with the purpose of creating an environment where everyone can feel comfortable and welcome, and the focus is on games, not hired booth staff.”³⁵ They explain that “booth babes” are defined by promoting “their products at PAX by using overtly sexual and suggestive methods.” The regulations state, “partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4” above the knee are not allowed.” However, there is still a tradition of using this type of advertisement in other gaming events, such as E3 and Tokyo Game Show. Women as objectified decoration continued to be visible within print advertising as well. A PlayStation Vita ad from 2012 showed a woman with four breasts, with her head not visible.³⁶ The woman was equated to the console itself, but she was not personified. She had figuratively become the object in the advertisement. Another parallel to the industry of the 1980s was an attempt to create games which pandered to a potential female audience. Although games such as Wii Sports (2006) clicked with a large audience, the mid-2000s saw an influx of games meant for younger girls, often in poor quality and quickly rushed out.³⁷ These games often stuck to gender stereotypes as well. In a former life, I worked at a video game retailer, and games such as Imagine: Fashion Designer (2007), Imagine: Interior Designer (2008), Cooking Mama (2006), Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey (2007), and a slew of titles encouraging the caretaking of all kinds of babies were often the only types of games purchased for young girls. Many of these games were of poor quality, with most of their scores on popular aggregate review site Metacritic.com being below 60, with most in the 30 – 50

 “Booth Babe Policies,” http://west.paxsite.com/safety-and-security; however, it is important to note that PAX is run by the two men behind the online comic strip, Penny Arcade, who have their own controversy about hypermasculine rhetoric. See Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 3 (July 2012): 401– 416.  Tom Philips, “Sony Ad Compares PlayStation Vita to a Woman with Four Breasts,” Eurogamer, January 11, 2012, http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-01-sony-ad-compares-playstation-vitato-a-woman-with-four-breasts.  For information on Wii Sports see John Sterlicchi, “Nintendo’s Wii Console Captures New Game Market,” The Guardian, October 10, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/ oct/10/usnews.internationalnews.

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range. While it is absolutely acceptable for girls to want to play those types of games, the lack of quality was not.³⁸ This is reminiscent of the attempt to capture the female audience in the early 1980s with games that used bright colors and “cutesy” marketing. This demonstrates that gender relations and attitudes in regards to women developers, gamers, and the culture of gaming itself remain in a position where they are reminiscent of the early industry in that men and boys are seen as the audience, women are marginalized, sexualized, or pandered to, and an overall lack of women in the industry makes it difficult to change this perspective, especially with pushback from movements such as GamerGate.

“No Boobs, No Ditsy Behavior, and No Bitchy Attitude” With the rise of gaming and streaming on Twitch and YouTube, the same gatekeeping and misogynistic rhetoric have been employed elsewhere in the gaming world. Twitch and YouTube serve as platforms for people to stream themselves playing games for an audience they can interact with. There are also women streamers, and many of them have been labelled with the derogatory nickname of “boobie streamers.”³⁹ The assertion is that women who stream on Twitch and YouTube, especially now in the IRL (in real life) section of Twitch, are taking advantage of the platform to make money. In 2017, a streamer by the name of Trainwreck went on a rant regarding these women and how he did not want them on Twitch: This used to be a god damn community of gamers, nerds, kids that got bullied, kids that got fucked with, kids that resorted to the gaming world because the real world was too fucking hard, too shitty, too lonely, too sad, and depressing. [He sees women on Twitch as] the same sluts that rejected us, the same sluts that chose the god damn cool kids over us. The same

 Carly Kocurek researches the games for girls movement in the 1990s, which was a movement to get more girls playing video games by creating games for them. These were not poor quality and rushed like the ones I have mentioned. For example, Carly Kocurek, Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). She and Rachel Simone Weil also spoke about this movement at MAGFest 2020. Carly Kocurek and Rachel Simone Weil, “Some Incidents in the History of Games for Girls,” Super MAGFest 2020, January 2020, https:// youtu.be/DvjhnJSKQYE. Rachel Simone Weil runs the FEMICOM Museum, which also studies games for girls, which can be found at http://femicom.org.  Cecilia D’Anastasio, “The Stereotype That Women on Twitch are ‘Asking for It’,” Kotaku, January 26, 2018, https://kotaku.com/the-stereotype-that-women-on-twitch-are-asking-for-it1822454131.

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sluts that are coming into our community, taking the money, taking the subs, the same way they did back in the day.⁴⁰

In using this type of rhetoric, not only did Trainwreck say misogynistic things, but he also attempted to gatekeep Twitch and streaming to only the “community of gamers,” which in this case would exempt women from his definition of gamers. Trainwreck is not alone in his hatred of women on Twitch. There is a subset of people who take it upon themselves to police women who stream, especially if they consider them to be “boobie streamers,” “camwhores,” or “thots.” While the terms “boobie streamer” and “camwhore” are self-explanatory, “thot” is a bit more complicated. It’s an acronym standing for “That Hoe Over There,” with one of the definitions on urbandictionary.com describing a thot as someone active on social media, “half-naked,” and that “unfortunately the only way she gets confidence is by getting validation from men on social media by posting pictures showing off her figure and plastic face.”⁴¹ Another says, “if women are products, then thots are cheap goods.”⁴² There are 124 pages of definitions, which shows that people are extremely opinionated on the term. With this in mind, in September 2019, a woman streamer named Quqco received a ban from Twitch for sexually suggestive content when she cosplayed as Chun Li from the fighting game series Street Fighter. ⁴³ She later tweeted she felt this was due to a concerted effort by members of a subreddit called r/ LivestreamFail to mass report her “because I’ve been branded a thot.”⁴⁴ Kotaku later confirmed from the subreddit that someone stated that they reported her instantly when they saw her streaming due to her being a “thot.”⁴⁵ While Twitch was started in 2011, it began to gain in popularity in 2013. Patricia Hernandez, formerly of Kotaku who now writes for Polygon, wrote two arti-

 Nathan Grayson, “Streamer’s Hateful Rant Revives Debate about Women on Twitch,” Kotaku, November 15, 2017, https://kotaku.com/streamers-hateful-rant-revives-debate-about-women-ontw-1820418898.  Asian.Barbie, “Thot,” Urban Dictionary, January 16, 2017, https://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=THOT&=true.  Knoturname, “Thot,” Urban Dictionary, January 11, 2017, https://www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=THOT&=true.  Cosplaying is dressing as a fictional character, usually associated with video games, anime, and sci fi.  Cecilia D’Anastasio, “Twitch Suspends Streamer After She Wears Chun-Li Cosplay,” Kotaku, September 16, 2019, https://kotaku.com/twitch-suspends-streamer-after-she-wears-chun-licospla-1838142321.  Ibid.

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cles in early 2013 examining the world of women streamers, as well as the backlash against them. One covered a YouTuber who provided instructionals on how to best harass women streamers, and while the videos are no longer available, a statement from Hernandez in the article stands out—she says that while the videos themselves may not have been real, the commenters are real people who think in the same manner.⁴⁶ In another article, Hernandez addressed the terminology of “camwhore.”⁴⁷ She confronts her own biases in what she sees the streamers doing, including stating that there is a judgment on women who are attractive, game, and also ask for money on their pages to cover expenses. As she puts it, “we expect people to be humble and we expect them to willingly do things ‘out of love,’ which apparently also means sacrifice. You can’t care about money and be passionate too. That’d make you a sell-out. That’d make you calculating. In this case, it’d make you a camwhore.” She also spoke with a streamer named Mia Rose, who tended to receive explicitly sexual questions during her stream due to her past as an adult film star. However, Rose is also a someone who has a long-standing love of gaming, and her streaming is a combination of performing and gaming. When Hernandez asked Rose what her reasons were for streaming, she said, I want to inspire people—especially other girl gamers—and show them it’s possible that you can be as sexy, empowered and attractive as you want to be, while still playing video games at a competitive level and being sort of a nerd. The whole internet gaming culture is pretty much a boy’s club. ‘Tits or GTFO’ [Get the Fuck Out] comes to mind.⁴⁸

Women streamers are participating in what is seen as the men’s realm of gaming, according to streamers like Trainwreck, and if they dare to be attractive or care about their appearance at all, they’re ultimately labeled with derogatory terms or harassed. Instead of blaming the misogynist harassment of women streamers on those who are perpetuating the harassment, many instead are policing and blaming women for someone else’s behavior toward them if they dare show their faces or bodies in any capacity.

 Patricia Hernandez, “Faith in Humanity Slowly Depleting: This Jerk and His Supporters Find Joy in Harassing Women Gamers,” Kotaku, January 3, 2013, https://kotaku.com/faith-in-hu manity-slowly-depleting-this-jerk-and-his-s-5972869.  Patricia Hernandez, “They’re Attractive, They’re Women, and They Play Games Live on the Internet. But They’re Not ‘Camwhores,’” Kotaku, February 6, 2013, https://kotaku.com/theyreattractive-theyre-women-and-they-play-games-li-5982137.  Ibid.

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Even if they don’t try to worry about their looks and just want to stream with a webcam, women are attacked. In a Reddit thread on r/GirlGamers asking about webcam usage, the original poster lamented that women are insulted for their looks, as well as the double standard of men using webcams and not receiving negative attention. The “best” response to the question was when a representative from Twitch stated that the original poster’s hesitation to use a webcam was “founded in truths.”⁴⁹ He also offered tips on how to protect your stream from being attacked. The fact alone that this is necessary says how negatively women who stream are treated if they decide they want to use a webcam. In a video discussing what it is like to be a woman in streaming, Lolrenaynay’s advice to those just starting out was, “Prepare to be discounted for being a chick,” while Kaceytron says, “If you’re a woman and you play games, you shouldn’t have to justify to anyone why you play games, like at all.”⁵⁰ One of the most famous streamers, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, sparked controversy when he decided he would not stream with women. He argued that by not streaming with women, he would avoid false rumors of flirting or gossip that might strain his marriage. Streamers and content creators debated his decision on Twitter after he made the announcement. While many stated they respected this from the perspective of him protecting his personal life, others pushed back against the decision. Others argued that his stance was both emblematic of the toxic nature of Twitch but also exclusionary toward women—many who struggle in the same toxic culture of Twitch simply for being a woman.⁵¹ Youtuber Riley Dennis stated that because Ninja has such a large platform, he should use it to help women streamers. While ultimately Ninja’s decision wasn’t initiated from malicious intent on his part, his exclusion of women streamers blames women, once again, for the behavior of the culture of streaming and Twitch rather than addressing the concerns of harassing behavior perpetuated by the community. The rhetoric behind this pushback against women streamers is reminiscent of some of the language comparisons made back in the 1980s when women began playing in arcades, like judging women supposed promiscuity and selfworth based on what she plays, or in this case streams. In addition, there is

 Brandnewaquarium, “Streamers: Webcam or No?” Reddit r/GirlGamers, January 2, 2013, https://www.reddit.com/r/GirlGamers/comments/15v57z/streamers_webcam_or_no/.  “Dropped Frames, Special Edition (Part 2)- Streaming as Female,” Dropped Frames, March 20, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nsEs2qbJVU.  Palmer Haasch and Petrana Radulovic, “Twitch Streamers have Mixed Reactions to Ninja’s Choice to Not Play with Female Streamers,” Polygon, August 13, 2018, https://www.polygon. com/2018/8/13/17684832/ninja-twitch-female-streamers-reactions-pokimane-valkyrae.

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Figure 5: Riley Dennis tweets about Ninja. August 11, 2018. Courtesy of Riley Dennis, URL: https://twitter.com/RileyJayDennis/status/1028385957005803520?s=20 [11. 06. 2020].

the same distinction of skill levels and ease of playing certain games that came out in the years of Pac-Man. In response to a 2014 Wall Street Journal article called “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers,” the subreddit r/gamernews commenters gave their opinions on these statistics. These include statements such as, while technically they may be ‘gamers’, there’s gamers and then there’s GAMERS. There’s quite a gap between people owning gaming PCS, or consoles, and buy games at $50 – 60 a pop, who play MMOs [Massively Multiplayer Online] religiously etc., and someone who slices up flying fruit for 15 mins a week on their Android phone.⁵²

While there is obviously no distinction here other than the capital letters, the commenter argues that the money and time spent is what constitutes a “real” gamer. Another says, “Please don’t put us in the same class of ‘gamer’ as iPhoners. I bought and built a custom rig for playing. I invested time and money into my hobby. These people play games on their iPhones. There is a clear and appa-

 Sabbathius, “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers,” August 20, 2014, https://np. reddit.com/r/gamernews/comments/2e4elw/women_now_make_up_almost_half_of_gamers_ adult/.

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rent difference.”⁵³ One other commenter argues, “Some woman who only plays angry birds on an airplane or some girl playing shitty Facebook games because she’s bored in class does not classify as gamers. That’s if like the only thing from Japan I watched was Naruto and I called myself an anime fan.”⁵⁴ There always is some way that the commenters try to separate themselves as what they consider “real” gamers from those that they feel don’t invest enough time nor money into the hobby and thus should not count. Most importantly, those that they consider to not count as gamers in this case are women who they automatically assume play games that they feel do not count for arbitrary reasons. The men in the thread see that women are playing games and catching up in numbers to them, but they dismiss the style of gaming they engage in and diminish them. The fact alone that the vast majority of the responses to an article about women and gaming discuss whether these women are valid as gamers and their sense of belonging in the community, rather than celebrating the numbers or commenting on the content itself, is significant in the level of gatekeeping that some men who are gamers engage in. Even someone that identifies themselves as a mobile developer says in the same thread, “we’re very much aware of the mobile market. And we can say with absolute certainty that if all you’re playing is mobile games, then you’re not a gamer,” reflecting that developers and players’ rhetoric still mirrors each other.⁵⁵ Esports (electronic sports) has also risen in popularity in the 2010s, and this is another arena, so to speak, that women face pushback when they play video games. Esports is competitive gaming, and it is primarily dominated by men. According to a report in February 2019, women made up only 35 percent of esports players.⁵⁶ When esports organizer DreamHack created an all women Counter Strike: Global Offensive tournament in May 2019, in the subreddit r/GlobalOffensive, which is dedicated to the game, the reaction was mostly negative. One user, KannaNom, argued that because current tournaments are not restricted by gender, “females” are already welcome. The user, however, also stated, “There is just  Chronic_gamer, “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers,” August 20, 2014, https://np. reddit.com/r/gamernews/comments/2e4elw/women_now_make_up_almost_half_of_gamers_ adult/.  Fireblaster, “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers,” August 20, 2014, https://np.reddit. com/r/gamernews/comments/2e4elw/women_now_make_up_almost_half_of_gamers_adult/.  deliciousnachos, “Women Now Make Up Almost Half of Gamers,” August 20, 2014, https:// np.reddit.com/r/gamernews/comments/2e4elw/women_now_make_up_almost_half_of_ gamers_adult/.  Dean Takahashi, “Interpret: Women Make Up 30 % of Esports Audience, up 6.5 % from 2016,” Venture Beat, February 2, 2019, https://venturebeat.com/2019/02/21/interpret-female-esportsviewership-grew-6-5-percentage-points-over-two-years/.

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no female team that is good enough to compete at higher levels. But hey, let’s reward them for their gender instead of their actual talent.”⁵⁷ Another referred to the event as “eye candy and a total waste of time.”⁵⁸ The assertion by many of the commenters was that creating women only tournaments was a form of sexism against men, and that such events are only formed because women are not good enough to compete with men—neither of which are true. There is also a significant pay gap in esports. In 2019, analysis from EsportsEarnings demonstrated that the top 400 women’s earnings in esports equaled less than half of what the top man in esports made alone. Johan Sundstein made $6,889,591.79 from DotA (Defense of the Ancients 2) tournaments. Meanwhile, the top 400 women combined made $3,030,000.⁵⁹ After the disbanding of a League of Legends all-woman esports team in 2013, Kaitlin Silver wrote an article about the rise and fall of Team Siren. After the description of events, Silver wrote a section on respecting each other. She wrote advice for both men and women involved in streaming and esports: Ladies! Serious female players should take the game seriously, and by that, I mean that streams should be professional at all times! It’s hard to take a female gamer’s stream seriously when the webcam’s primary focus is on your revealing chest and not your face (or even your gameplay for that matter). As much as you may want to attract guys with your sex appeal, you will not be taken seriously as a professional gamer if you don’t fix this little mistake first. No boobs, no ditzy behavior, and no bitchy attitude. You need to be intelligent and informative about the game because that’s a lot more enjoyable to watch. You are only going to be a target of harassment in your stream’s chatbox if you aren’t acting professional on purpose. Guys! You need to respect these females gamers who wish to stream! This means no sexual harassment, no misogynist jokes (keep your “kitchen” jokes to yourself), no insulting comments about physical appearance or anything that you wouldn’t say to your grandmother, sister, girlfriend, or close female acquaintance for that matter. It’s immature and downright rude, and, unless you are a diamond-tier or professional player, you

 KannaNom, “DreamHack Announces All-Female Showdown Tournament with $100,000 Prize Pool,” May 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/brbmvo/dream hack_announces_allfemale_showdown_tournament/.  An0nylllous, “DreamHack Announces All-Female Showdown Tournament with $100,000 Prize Pool,” May 2019, https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/brbmvo/dream hack_announces_allfemale_showdown_tournament/.  Kirk McKeand, “The Top 400 Women in Esports Combined Earn Less than Half of What the Top Man Makes,” VG24/7, September 9, 2019, https://www.vg247.com/2019/09/09/women-esportsgender-pay-gap/.

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have no right to judge any player on their skills during their streams (regardless of gender).⁶⁰

Both of these suggestions portray misogyny in streaming and esports. For men, Silver told them to behave and keep their sexist rhetoric to themselves, and the fact that she had to encourage that demonstrates the prevalence of the behavior toward women streamers. However, Silver’s suggestions for women police both their personalities and their physical appearances. She argued that a woman playing games will never be taken seriously unless they follow these rules on appearance and behavior. Women are not to have a bitchy attitude so they will be taken seriously as gamers and streamers, while many guy streamers like Trainwreck could easily be categorized as having a “bitchy attitude,” but still as of writing have 420,607 followers on Twitch. The video game industry, while it has certainly made strides, still has its fair share of problems. There are some aspects of the industry that truly have their roots in the early industry described here, and there are also many lessons that the games industry continues to pay attention to regarding earlier consequences in the industry. Fears of another gaming crash, for example, are ever present in the minds of the culture of gaming. However, some lessons have not stuck, and gaming is still seen as an adolescent male hobby, which has not changed since the 1970s. There is still marked misogynistic language being perpetuated in the industry, even to the point of harassment of women who enter the world of gaming. Gatekeeping and the redefining of the label of “gamer,” and arguing that women only play games that are easy to pick up— or even degrade people (but mostly targeting women) who do only play because some games have a low barrier for entry and can be a fun way to kill time—remains an issue even today, and players used the same arguments to deny that women can and do play video games. Considering this issue of representation and gatekeeping has existed since the 1970s and 1980s, it shows that the industry still has a lot of growing to do in terms of equality. However, in January 2018, the industry did acknowledge some of its past transgressions on gender relations. The Game Developers Conference in 2018 planned to award Nolan Bushnell the Pioneer Award for his work in the founding of the industry. A movement online using the hashtag #notnolan stated it was inappropriate to give Nolan Bushnell the award in the light of

 Kaitlin Silver, “League of Legends Team Siren Disbands: Valuable Lessons Learned,” Gameskinny, June 26, 2013, https://www.gameskinny.com/hzi5j/league-of-legends-team-siren-disbandsvaluable-lessons-learned.

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the emergence of another social movement exposing sexual abuse, #metoo.⁶¹ Jennifer Scheurle, a game designer at Opaque Space, said, “Bushnell has without a doubt done a lot of interesting work in the field with his work on PONG, but we can’t forget that his methods at Atari, and how he treated female staff, have been part of the difficult culture for women in the game industry we face today.”⁶² Given the backlash, the GDC chose to rescind the Pioneer award for Nolan Bushnell, and the official Twitter account stated, “they [Game Developers Choice Awards Advisory Committee] believe their picks should reflect the values of today’s game industry and will dedicate this year’s award to honor the pioneering and unheard voices of the past.”⁶³ There have also been movements from within the industry to diversify but also to call out the negative treatment some women receive. #1ReasonWhy started to indicate why there are not more women in the video game industry today. Kim Swift, known for being designer of the Portal (Valve, 2007), tweeted, “Because I get mistaken for the receptionist or day-hire marketing at trade shows. #1reasonwhy.”⁶⁴ Brenda Romero said, “Because I am not his arm candy, motherfucker. I make games. #1reasonwhy.”⁶⁵ On the flip side, another hashtag, #1reasontobe, began to compliment the reasons why women work in the game industry. Kate Welch tweeted, “because for every shithead misogynist, there are loads of respectful, funny, & brilliant men & women to work with in game dev. #1reasontobe.”⁶⁶ Zoë Quinn explained, “#1reasontobe the feeling when you whip out a computer/iphone/whatever and said, ‘I made this’ and someone engages with it.” These two hashtags demonstrate that there is still a lot of work to do in the industry, but there are people who are willing to share both their positive and negative experiences as someone working within it. It gives us an inside

 Stefanie Fogel, “GDC Re-Examines Award for Atari Founder After Outcry Over Past Conduct,” Rolling Stone, January 30, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/nolan-bush nell-metoo-gdc-award-w516148.  Ibid.  Megan Farokhmanesh, “GDC Rescinds Award for Atari Founder After Criticisms of Sexually Inappropriate Behavior,” The Verge, January 31, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/ 16955232/nolan-bushnell-gdc-2018-pioneer-award.  Luke Plunkett, “Here’s a Devastating Account of the Crap Women in the Games Business have to Deal with. In 2012,” Kotaku, November 27, 2012, https://kotaku.com/heres-a-devastat ing-account-of-the-crap-women-in-the-ga-5963528.  Brenda Romero’s husband is Doom developer John Romero. Plunkett, “Here’s a Devastating Account of the Crap Women in the Games Business have to Deal with. In 2012.”  Stephen Tolito, “And Here’s Why Women in the Games Business Put Up with So Much Crap,” Kotaku, November 27, 2012, https://kotaku.com/and-heres-why-women-in-the-games-businessput-up-with-s-5963755.

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look into what it is like to be marginalized within the industry, but also the positives that come from creating video games. The field of game development has gotten slightly more diverse in the United States as well. I recently had the pleasure of learning about three transgender women early game developers, Danielle Bunten Berry, Cathryn Mataga, and Jamie Fenton.⁶⁷ In addition, Brenda Romero continued in the industry, and she not only has a catalog of nearly 50 games that she worked on, but also serves on the Board of Advisors for the Game Developers Conference and has written or co-written three books on the game industry.⁶⁸ The majority of game developers are still heavily white, heterosexual, and identify as men, but as of 2018, a survey of game developers found that 23 % of respondents identify as female, 5 % identify as transgender, and 19 % identify as non-heterosexual. Unfortunately, people who identify as Latinx were only 4 %, and only 1 % of respondents identified as Black, African American, or African. ⁶⁹ Despite these numbers, a growing indie video game scene has emerged in recent years. These indie games and their developers allow for more diversity in developers and content. For example, Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013) was an indie video game exploring the daily life of someone with depression and the choices they can and cannot make. Dys4ia (2012) explored Anna Anthropy’s own experiences with gender dysphoria and transitioning. Momo Pixels created Hair Nah (2017), which has the player slapping away white hands who try to touch a black woman’s hair without permission, which she says is inspired by her own life experiences.⁷⁰ These are just some higher profile examples of indie video games created by women, non-binary people, and women of color. Indie games create spaces where diverse voices can be heard through the creation of video games, and these triumphs are worth celebrating. Hopefully this trend continues, and the industry continues to become more diverse in the AAA game (mainstream games with large budgets and marketing) development field as well.

 Whitney Pow, “The Glitch: Queer and Transgender Video Game History,” Video Game History Panel Track, MAGFest 2020, National Harbor, MD, January 2020, https://youtu.be/NatzxWm3rts. Media historian Whitney Pow researches transgender and queer video game designers and programmers.  Brenda Romero’s website contains all the awards, games, and academic work she has done since she started in the industry in 1981. It can be found at http://brenda.games.  Kellen Beck, “Diversity in the Video Game Industry is (Surprise) Not Good,” Mashable, January 9, 2018, https://mashable.com/2018/01/09/video-game-diversity/.  Heather Schwedel, “Momo Pixel Lives Life in 8-bit,” Slate, December 27, 2017, https://slate. com/technology/2017/12/how-momo-pixel-creator-of-hair-nah-uses-the-internet.html.

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From the earliest days of the commercial video game industry in the United States where Nolan Bushnell recreated a game he enjoyed playing as an engineering student to the release of Pac-Man, X-Rated video games, hypersexualized characters like Lara Croft, and eventually the rise of streaming and esports, gender has been a significant factor. The industry was young and mostly male-identifying in the early years, and the developers primarily created and marketed games for people like themselves. Eventually in the early 1980s, the industry took an interest in incorporating women as developers and marketing toward more women, but there was also a pushback against those women entering this perceived masculine world. After gaining a negative image due to poor quality games as well as X-Rated video games that gamified gender violence, the US industry lost its standing as the leaders of the game industry. However, many of the same gendered rhetoric, development, and even video games that involve gendered violence continued in the video game industry in the United States as well as the culture surrounding gaming. Technology is quick to change, but the culture of video games and the industry is slower to adapt or evolve in a more inclusive manner. That does not mean that there are not those in the United States who are navigating this world and working to create a more diverse industry that produces a games that can speak to a larger audience. Eugene Jarvis has remained in the industry since the 1980s, and he continues to mentor new developers. Jarvis’s perspective is telling as someone who was active during the early years of the video game industry and has continued in game development even after the crash in the United States. Games have evolved since the 1980s, and when asked about the difference in gaming then and now, he says, “Thirty years ago, we put a couple of blips on the screen and that’d be a game. Now, it’s the whole gamut of human experience.”⁷¹

 Jan Hieggelke, “Professor of Play: How Eugene Jarvis Parlayed the Fine Art of Killing Martians into the Best Job Ever,” New City, April 3, 2008, https://newcity.com/2008/04/03/pro fessor-of-play-how-eugene-jarvis-parlayed-the-fine-art-of-killing-martians-into-the-best-job-ever/ .

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Gameography Adventure 2600), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1980). Asteroids (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1979). Atari Basketball (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1978). Atari Football (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1978). Bachelor Party (Atari 2600), Mystique (Mystique, 1982). Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em (Atari 2600), Mystique (Mystique, 1982). Breakout (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1976).

Gameography

133

Centipede (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1981). Combat (Atari 2600), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1977) Custer’s Revenge (Atari 2600), Mystique (Mystique, 1982). Death Race (Coin-Operated), Exidy (Exidy, 1976). Defender (Coin-Operated), Williams Electronics (Williams Electronics, 1981). Dragon’s Lair (Coin-Operated), Cinematronics (Advanced Microcomputer Systems, 1983). E.T: The Extraterrestrial (Atari 2600), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1982). Gotcha (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1973). Gun Fight (Coin-Operated), Taito and David Nutting (Midway Games, 1975). Kaboom (Atari 2600), Activision (Activision, 1981). Knight on the Town (Atari 2600), Playaround (Playaround, 1982). Mr. Do! (Coin-Operated), Universal (Taito, 1982). Ms. Pac-Man (Coin-Operated), General Computer Corporation (Bally-Midway, 1982). Pac-Man (Coin-Operated), Namco (Bally-Midway, 1980). PONG (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1972). Q*Bert (Coin-Operated), Gottlieb (Gottlieb, 1982). Softporn Adventure (Apple II), Blue Sky Software (Sierra On-Line, 1981). Space Invaders (Coin-Operated), Taito (Midway Games Inc., 1979). Spacewar! (Not commercially released), Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen (1962). Tank (Coin-Operated), Atari (Atari, Inc., 1974). X-Man (Atari 2600), Universal Game-X (Universal Game-X, 1983.

Index 4chan

104, See Gamergate

A.N.A.L.O.G 85 addiction 47 advertisement 35, 71 advertising 36 – 41, 43, 51, 57, 64, 70, 86 – 91, 110 Alcorn, Al 23, 42 Alexander, Leigh 1, 102 Anthropy, Anna 120 arcades 47, 50 , 59, 94 – class 21 – 23, 39, 56 – environment 48 , 55, 73 – women in 37, 55, 58 – 61, 74, 77 Atari 20, 22, 24 – 28, 31, 33, 35 – 37, 39 – 43, 47, 50 , 58, 60, 62 , 66 – 69, 72, 76, 80 , 83, 92 – 101, 103, 119 – party environment 24 Bailey, Dona 20, 26, 33, 37, 58, 66 , 76, 78 Benton, Chuck 27, 84 – 86 Bluth, Don 52 booth babes 29, 31 , 110 Brathwaite, Brenda 68, 119 , See Romero, Brenda Bushnell, Nolan 20, 22 – 28, 33, 41 – 43, 46, 50, 56 , 92, 98, 118 , 121 Carlston, Douglas 27, 99 – 101, See game companies:Brøderbund Carol Shaw 68, 77 Croft, Lara 107 – 109, 121, See Tomb Raider cutesy games 4, 58, 69, 72, 75 , 78, 111 Dabney, Ted 22 Davis, June 77 demographics – gamers 39 – 41, 50 – 52, 74, 77 – industry 21, 26, 62 – modern industry 120 development 64 – crunch culture 102

– use of colors 66, 72, 78 drug use 20, 26 Electronic Games 73 – 75 emasculation 83 Entertainment Software Association esports 116 , 121

102

feminism 78, 109 – geek feminism 16 – 18 – Steinem, Gloria 76 – 78 – Van Gelder, Lindsy 76 fighting game culture 107 Forner, Susan 61, 64 gambling 46 , 50, 73, 84 game companies – Activision 28, 68, 82, 96 – Bally 36, 96 – Bally-Midway 58, 61, 62, 71 – Brøderbund 27, 62 , 99 – Crystal Dynamics 107 – Data East 60 – Exidy 41 – Gottlieb 41, 72 – Magnavox 23 – Mattel 96, 100 – Microsoft 106 – Midway 3, 36, 60, 69 – Mystique 80, See X-Rated Video Games – Nintendo 80 – Nutting Associates 22, 61, 64, 68 – Playaround 82, See X-Rated Video Games – Sierra On-Line 21, 27, 64, 77, 84 – 86 – Universal Game-X 83, See X-Rated Video Games – Williams Electronics 78 gameography – Asteroids 14, 39, 51, 72, 74 , 94 – Atari Football 35, 41 – Bachelor Party 82 – Beat ’Em and Eat ’Em 82 – Bosconian 36

Index

– Centipede 45, 58, 60, 66 , 69, 74 – 76 – Computer Space 21 – 24, 50 – Cooking Mama 110 – Counter Strike: Global Offensive 116 – Custer’s Revenge 81, 83, 108 – Death Race 41 – Defender 41, 51, 74 – Depression Quest 120 – Disney Princess Enchanted Journey 110 – Donkey Kong 4, 74 – Dragon’s Lair 52, 80 – Dys4ia 120 – E.T. The Extraterrestrial 80, 93, 99, 102 – Galaga 36 – Gotcha 36, 41 – 43, 45 – Gran Trak 10 36 – Hair Nah 120 – Imagine Fashion Designer 110 – Imagine Interior Designer 110 – Interlude 88, 90 – K.C Munchkin 64 – Killer Instinct 106 – King’s Quest IV 65 – Knight on the Town 83 – Lady in Wading 83 – Legend of Zelda, The 4 – Mr. Do! 69, 72, 75 – Ms. Pac-Man 3, 36 , 65, 69 – 71, 75 – Pac-Man 3, 58 – 62, 67, 69 – 71, 74 – 76, 78 , 81, 93, 99, 115, 121 – PONG 22 – 24, 33, 36, 42, 50, 119 – Q*Bert 41, 69, 72 , 80 – Rape Day 108 – Softporn Adventure 84 – 86 – Space Ace 53 – Space Invaders 49, 61, 72, 75, 95 – Space Race 36 – Spacewar! 11 , 22, 39 – Street Fighter 106 , 112 – Street Life 87 – Super Mario Bros 4 – Tekken 106 – Tomb Raider 107, 109 – Wii Sports 110 – Winner 36 – Wiping 72 – X-Man 83

135

GamerGate 103 – 105, 108 gender and technology 5 – 7, 9 gendered violence 81, 85, 91, 105 – 108 globalization of the video game industry 1, 4, 102 Hendricks, Janice Hustler Magazine Iwatani, Toru

64, 68, 78 82

3, 59 , 69, 81

Jarvis, Eugune 41 , 51, 60, 92, 121 Joystik Magazine 41, 55, 72, 75 Kassar, Ray 27, 68, 98 Krueger, Anne 61, 64 Magnavox Odyssey 23 masculinity 5 – 8, 11, 13 – 15, 17, 22, 29, 33, 35 – 37, 39, 41 , 47 – 50, 53 , 56 – 58, 68, 73, 76 – 78, 91, 103, 105, 121 – geek masculinity 11 – 16, 18, 26 – hegemonic masculinity 11 , 14 – technomasculinity 7, 12 , 49 Meade, E.C. 52 misogyny 26, 33, 104 , 118 Miyamoto, Shigeru 4 Penthouse 86 performative gender 5 – 7, 26, 28 pinball 45 – 50, 53, 56, 73 Pixels, Momo 120 Play Meter 96 Playboy 33, 39, 48, 86 Quinn, Zoë

103 – 105, 119

race 2, 120 Reagan, Ronald 89 Reddit 10, 67, 112, 114 – 116 Romero, Brenda 68, 119 , See Brathwaite, Brenda Russell, Steve 11 Sarkeesian, Anita 104 sexism 12, 17, 20, 28, 31, 33, 41, 52, 55, 70 , 86, 89 , 92, 106, 108, 118

136

Index

sexuality 20, 41 , 48 , 57, 85, 87 sexualization 48, 87, 108 Softalk 86 – 90 Softline 85 streaming – boobie streamers 111 – 114 – experience of women 112 – 114 – Ninja 114 – Trainwreck 111 – 113 – Twitch 107, 111 , 114, 118 – YouTube 111 The New York Times 98, 101

Video Games Magazine 29, 61, 72 Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated 29, 52 – 54, 76 , 92 Warner, Inc 27, 37, 41, 45, 92 , 96 – 101 Warshaw, Howard Scott 25, 93 Washington Post 11 Williams, Ken 21, 27, 64, 86, See game companies: Sierra On-Line Williams, Roberta 27, 64 , 77, 86, See game companies:Sierra On-Line Wu, Brianna 104

11, 13, 22 , 41, 54 , 93,

video game industry crash 69, 79 , 93 , 96 – 102

X-Rated Video Games 81 – 88, 90 , 108 – reaction to 81 – 83, 86 – 91 1, 11, 19, 32, 58,