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Women have been creating, developing, designing, and writing games since the Atari and arcade days. Here are a few names you should know.
Carol Shaw
Carol Shaw is famous as one of the first women to design and program video games. She’s best known for River Raid, a vertical-scrolling shooter game. One million cartridges were sold for the Atari 5200, and the game was ported to a number of other systems. She created many other games and was able to retire early thanks to the success of River Raid.
Roberta Williams
If you were gaming in the eighties, you no doubt played Sierra games. You also probably remember when they were called On-Line Systems or Sierra On-Line. (Yes, Gen Z, we did used to hyphenate online. Don’t make fun of us.) Well, Roberta Williams and her husband co-founded Sierra after the two played the text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure (you can play it here) and loved it. Wisely, they decided that while text might be fun, graphics makes things better, and Williams created Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game and one of the first horror games. She’s also known for creating the first eight King’s Quest games, which were essential for fantasy gamers, and for Phantasmagoria, a horror game made for adults and known for its live action scenes and Hollywood special effects.
Donna Bailey
If you were playing games during the golden age of arcades, you probably have vivid memories of Centipede, one of the first games with a significant female player base and Atari’s second-best-selling coin-operated arcade game. Bailey designed the game with a broad audience in mind, choosing the only idea Atari had at the time that didn’t involve sports or lasers. Noting that “it didn’t seem bad to shoot a bug,” Bailey designed a game where a multi-segmented centipede in pastel colours came down the screen at the player, and if shot, could break into multiple bugs.
Jade Raymond
Montreal native Jade Raymond is best known for helping create Assassin’s Creed. After producing the game, she went on to executive produce Assassin’s Creed II and Watch Dogs. After that, she built both Ubisoft Toronto and EA Motive Studios. And because she seems to love building studios, Raymond founded Haven in Montreal, which was acquired by PlayStation. Their first game will be Fairgame$, a heist game for the PS5.
Mary DeMarle
Another Montrealer, Mary DeMarle has a solid track record of writing for video games, writing for Myst III (aka, the best Myst), Homeworld 2, Myst IV, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (aka, the best Deus Ex), Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, for which she won a Games Award for Best Narrative. Now, she’s joined BioWare as their head of narrative, so we’re excited to see what games they’re doing next.
