Back in the mid-90s, late game maker Theresa Duncan made some unconventional, ground-breaking CD games based on the everyday experiences of young girls. There’s now a Kickstarter campaign to bring them back and ensure her seminal work isn’t lost to history:
This project, by the NYC-based digital art nonprofit Rhizome, will fund the process of putting three games directed by Duncan—Chop Suey (1995, co-created with Monica Gesue), Smarty (1996), and Zero Zero (1997)—online, for the first time ever. With your help, they will be playable in any modern browser via emulation and available for free, for a minimum of one year.
Throughout my career as a video game critic, and in recent years a feminist one, I’ve noticed we tend to treat the advent of girls and women’s stories as novel. To lots of us, they are — for example I’d never read a syllabus on feminist games, or seen work like my friend Nina Freeman’s vignette games (Nina just successfully defended her thesis and got a Masters of Science in Integrated Digital Media from NYU, congrats Nina), til my adulthood.
But the games business’ particular fixation on newness and “innovation” mustn’t divorce us from our obligation to history — that’s what makes Rhizome’s work with Duncan’s oeuvre more important now than ever.
Read Jenn Frank on Theresa Duncan’s memory here, or her piece about Duncan’s Chop Suey here. For more on girlhood and the early days of games, here I am in the Guardian on Rachel Weil’s feminist art.