Games - Less made by men than you've been lead to believe!

[Purple]

So lately I've been thinking a lot about how one aspect of the many issues caused by the really rampant sexism in and around games is that frankly, if you're in games, and you aren't a man, you have almost certainly done some really amazing stuff that you haven't been acknowledged for, and there's a good chance that everyone has even just picked some arbitrary dude to credit for what you've done. Sometimes this is just a flat out not putting people in the credits at all, sometimes it's properly crediting someone but then downplaying the hell out of what they did, or people being victims of mythmaking around someone else. Let's be honest, game dev has a lot of folks like Tommy Tallarico and game fandom is full of the sort of people who will happily point at Shigeru Miyamoto as the primary driving force behind a hell of a lot more games than he's actually worked on in any capacity, on top of again, the rampant rampant sexism at the root of this.

A lot of this comes from something I'm kinda half-writing for a blog post or whatever eulogizing Rieko Kodama, and all the conversations I've had with people on that where popular perception is often "oh she did some art for a couple old Sega games right?" and then you look at people who worked with her talking about her after news of her death hit, and it's all "oh yeah, she and I created Sonic the Hedgehog together" and "oh no she was absolutely calling all the shots with this whole long list of games."

And then there's also Kazuko Shibuya, who I'd certainly never heard of until a couple fairly recent interviews, who it turns out was the primary artist at Square from the earliest days of the company, and one of two women (the other of whom I don't even have a name for, because again, this is a huge problem! Unless maybe it was Kaori Tanaka, AKA Soraya Saga? Se below) responsible for literally every bit of art in the original Final Fantasy. Characters, backgrounds, menu borders, fonts, all of it. And also the next 5 games in the series, with the exception of a few boss designs in the sequel which were in fact done by the guy people to this day miscredit for all their work. And yet huh, somehow that confusion went away when a man actually took over as lead character designer and Amano "stuck around just to do promo stuff like the packaging art." As he'd been doing.

And you know, REALLY personally, just the other day I fell down a rabbit hole of reading/watching reviews for a board game that I straight up designed in more or less its entirety, but ended up sharing credits (and pay) on the box with some guy (who like I don't want to throw under the bus or anything, it was this big corporate mutli-game thing, and he was kinda playing editor, organizing blind play tests, giving all the designers feedback to keep the whole line appropriately complex for the same market). Anyway all these reviews are talking up what a consistently good designer this guy is and talking him up, for, you know, my work. Which is a tad frustrating. Also you know now that I think of it he was also my only contact with the actual publisher and this was before my bank accepted my name change and a couple moves ago so I wonder if there's royalty checks I'm just not seeing because I don't know who to flag down on that. Obscurity sucks like that.

ANYWAY point is there's a ton of women and I'd be willing to bed a pretty good number of nonbinary people out there who have done a bunch of crazy crazy impressive stuff in games that nobody ever talks about. Artists, composers, writers, game designers (hate that that's the term for the mechanics-y bits sometimes), so, here's a thread to talk about how cool people are that people aren't aware of, basically. Also to debunk weird myths.

Like just now, not even really searching for it, I had an article pop up telling me how Carol Shaw was the first woman to ever develop a video game, 1982's River Raid. And like, yeah, River Raid is pretty great, and it's cool she was properly credited for it, but the same random unhelpful search results for a totally unrelated topic go on to remind me that Roberta Williams released Mystery House in 1980, and just off the top of my head, Danielle Bunten Berry's first game was released in 1978. So... yeah there's a lot of history to be revised with a bit of digging, clearly. And a lot of rad portfolios to gush over. Let's... get gushing?

 

[Felicia]

When I started reading about Kazuko Shibuya, I sort of assumed that it was simply me personally who had been ignorant of her contributions. She seemed so obviously important that I assumed that everyone else already knew about her. But I guess her contributions have only gained attention in recent years?

 

[Peklo]

Shibuya awareness in English-language spaces is almost certainly traceable to a singular source, the 2013 4gamer interview translated and posted by shmuplations sometime in the following years (going by my own personal logs, I was making reference to having learned about her around mid-2016, so maybe that's when it was posted). Later official exposure through things like her interview in FF DOT probably helped, and her continuing work on the series through the Pixel Remasters that garner more attention than the occasional album art commemoration.

Maybe the funniest byproduct of all this anonymity was how it manifested in the discourse around the pre-remaster mobile ports of FFV and VI--the ones widely ridiculed for their visual presentation, including sprites. The character sprites were by Shibuya there as well, but the commentary always skewered the work as if it was done by ignorant amateurs, instead of an established pro who was working out and experimenting with her modern style. The results of that process are now visible in the remasters, which are more satisfactory for most, even if preferences toward one version or another will always persist.

 

[Peklo]

Kotori Yoshimura is prime material for this thread. Her story and sort of resurgence is largely chronicled in this article overview (RIP USgamer) or the more to-the-point summary over on Giant Bomb (despite the deadnaming), both of which make it clear what a genuine pioneer she is, having started a dizzying number of enduring legacies, whether they be famed companies, genre stalwart series, or a number of technologically and conceptually innovative and novel game types. She's right there with other early-days trans creators, but thanks to a cultural barrier has been rendered even more unknown than her peers.

 

[Peklo]

We all know Kaori Tanaka, or Soraya Saga as per her pen name, right? She contributed map and other graphic design to Super Famicom Square works like Final Fantasy V and Romancing SaGa 3, with her most prominent creative footprint in those days being the conceptual lead on Final Fantasy VI's Figaro brothers, that being a game where each individual of the ensemble cast was divvied out to particular staff to take charge on developing. She loved her creations so much there's a whole doujin's worth of additional background material she thought up mostly for her own pleasure, but in ways that often inform what ends up in shipped products for audiences to peruse.

What Saga is most known for is undoubtedly being, along with her husband Tetsuya Takahashi (who worked alongside her in the SFC days in a similar capacity) the creative impetus and genesis of the now world-famous Xeno series, having conceptualized the beginnings of what turned into Xenogears, and more integrally having been the scenario writer for the first Xenosaga. Unfortunately, Namco's publishing interference lead to her and many other creative staff essentially being fired from the beyond-ambitious series they'd kicked off after the first game's release, leading to the wide schism perceptible even on the audience end in simply observing the trajectory of the series and how it expressed itself.

This corporate powerplay evidently became known to the Japanese video game fan circles of the time, and lead to a targeted harassment campaign toward Saga in particular, since she made the mistake of existing as a visible woman in the industry and acknowleding that such a lockout had happened and pushing against it in whatever meager way she could. It culminated in her responding on her personal blog to the misogynistic rhetoric that aimed to harm her wellbeing by casting her as "unstable" and suicidal and curtly shutting it down. After treatment like this, is it any wonder she's been little seen in the industry since? She wrote Soma Bringer as a later Monolith work and designed a Blade for Xenoblade 2 as a guest artist, but the book seems otherwise closed even as the series she kicked off is now more popular than it has ever been. If you take anything out of this, it's probably the confirmation that gamers are culpable of identical cruelty all the world over, through the same means they've always employed.

 

[Violentvixen]

I don't have anything to add as everyone in the thread clearly knows a lot more than me, but definitely wish there was more awareness of female achievements in games when I was growing up. I got made fun of so much for liking games even though I was a girl because it was considered a "boy thing" through and through. Being able to point to some of these women as bringing games to life would have meant so much to me.

 

[lincolnic]

Yoko Shimomura has been a prolific composer for Capcom and Square since the 90s. She wrote almost all of the Street Fighter II soundtrack, and is personally responsible for the soundtracks to Super Mario RPG, Parasite Eve, Legend of Mana, Kingdom Hearts, the Mario & Luigi series, and a ton of other games. I think most recently she did the majority of the score for Final Fantasy XV.

 

[Kirin]

And then there's also Kazuko Shibuya, who I'd certainly never heard of until a couple fairly recent interviews, who it turns out was the primary artist at Square from the earliest days of the company, and one of two women (the other of whom I don't even have a name for, because again, this is a huge problem!) responsible for literally every bit of art in the original Final Fantasy.

Always good to find an interview with her I hadn't read yet, thanks! It is weird that the other artist is consistently referred to only as "another woman", though I guess in the current context one could charitably chalk that up to Japan's penchant for personal privacy. Of course there's no excuse for either of them not being credited on the original games in the first place.

Kotori Yoshimura is prime material for this thread. Her story and sort of resurgence is largely chronicled in this article overview (RIP USgamer) or the more to-the-point summary over on Giant Bomb (despite the deadnaming), both of which make it clear what a genuine pioneer she is, having started a dizzying number of enduring legacies

Dang, how had I never even heard of the existence of Wibarm, that game looks amazing. Along with the rest of Arsys Software's output for that matter. I mean I know there's a lot of holes in my video game history knowledge on the JP PC side but still. So cool.

She loved her creations so much there's a whole doujin's worth of additional background material she thought up mostly for her own pleasure, but in ways that often inform what ends up in shipped products for audiences to peruse.

Well dang, now I really want an incredibly rare and expensive doujin.

 

[Purple]

Wow, Peklo knocking out out of the park over here.

Shibuya awareness in English-language spaces is almost certainly traceable to a singular source, the 2013 4gamer interview translated and posted by shmuplations

Oh thank you! I was specifically trying to find that so I could point to the bit where she clears up the perception that Amano did a bunch of character design work and then some unnamed staffer translated it to spritework. Totally all the two super rad women who yeah, nobody I know of knew existed before this interview.

Maybe the funniest byproduct of all this anonymity was how it manifested in the discourse around the pre-remaster mobile ports of FFV and VI--the ones widely ridiculed for their visual presentation, including sprites. The character sprites were by Shibuya there as well, but the commentary always skewered the work as if it was done by ignorant amateurs, instead of an established pro who was working out and experimenting with her modern style. The results of that process are now visible in the remasters, which are more satisfactory for most, even if preferences toward one version or another will always persist.

I mean, I'm definitely guilty of that. TO BE FAIR while the rest of her work is absolutely astounding and the primary influence on any spritework I ever do, those were weird and awkward! Why are they all leaning forward like it's the Smooth Criminal video? Why does Setzer have such huge boobs? But mostly my issues with that are with the general mishmash of clashing art styles overall which I don't think's on her.

Kotori Yoshimura is prime material for this thread. Her story and sort of resurgence is largely chronicled in this article overview (RIP USgamer) or the more to-the-point summary over on Giant Bomb (despite the deadnaming), both of which make it clear what a genuine pioneer she is, having started a dizzying number of enduring legacies, whether they be famed companies, genre stalwart series, or a number of technologically and conceptually innovative and novel game types. She's right there with other early-days trans creators, but thanks to a cultural barrier has been rendered even more unknown than her peers.

So this is actually literally true. When I sat down and started this thread I almost ended it with "I'm sure someone is going to blow me away with the reveal that, I don't know, the whole FPS genre was secretly started by a trans woman who did a dozen other rad things or something" and now I really wish I hadn't cut that prediction for being hyperbolic.

We all know Kaori Tanaka, or Soraya Saga as per her pen name, right? She contributed map and other graphic design to Super Famicom Square works like Final Fantasy V and Romancing SaGa 3, with her most prominent creative footprint in those days being the conceptual lead on Final Fantasy VI's Figaro brothers, that being a game where each individual of the ensemble cast was divvied out to particular staff to take charge on developing. She loved her creations so much there's a whole doujin's worth of additional background material she thought up mostly for her own pleasure, but in ways that often inform what ends up in shipped products for audiences to peruse.

Well I sure didn't or I wouldn't have been griping about having to say I don't know the name of the other woman responsible for all the graphics in FF1. This totally slots in with all the comments in that Shibuya interview... and it's really obvious which random monsters were in fact Amano when you know what to look for. Hooray for finally having this worked out. Still just completely absurd how this was practically lost knowledge for so long.

 

[Peklo]

Well I sure didn't or I wouldn't have been griping about having to say I don't know the name of the other woman responsible for all the graphics in FF1. This totally slots in with all the comments in that Shibuya interview... and it's really obvious which random monsters were in fact Amano when you know what to look for. Hooray for finally having this worked out. Still just completely absurd how this was practically lost knowledge for so long.

Shibuya's unnamed coworker was someone else. Saga joined Square in the early '90s, as she discloses in this brief Siliconera interview.

 

[Regulus]

There are a ton of great composers that went functionally uncredited back in the day. Miki Higashino, Manami Matsumae, Junko Tamiya, Kinuyo Yamashita, Yuki Iwai, Harumi Fujita, Meiko Ishikawa, Jun Chikuma... just off the top of my head, so I'm sure there are a ton more.

 

[Oathbreaker]

Azusa Kido directing Persona 3 Portable as well as being the lead planner and scenario writer for new S-links feels like a good person to mention. The overall quality of the new stuff was imo far better than in the base game with one very unfortunate new S-link on par with any other predatory "romance" but it's tough to tell how much of that was her, the other scenario writer, or influence from someone like Hashino.

She isn't even mentioned in the game's primary fan wiki page because it just copy-pasted the original Persona 3 credits from wikipedia.

 

[WildcatJF]

Before YT stripped away so much of the VGM scene, I was doing a series of posts on my blog covering women who composed for games. At some point I may turn this into a book and expand upon it, but it's a good launching point for many of the unsung pioneers of the industry who defined the sound of games.

 

[Purple]

Shibuya's unnamed coworker was someone else. Saga joined Square in the early '90s, as she discloses in this brief Siliconera interview.

That could be just misrecalling when things came out, but yeah. Let's track down a 3rd cool art lady.

 

[ASandoval]

A few people I'd like to mention I haven't seen yet.

First, Joyce Weisbecker, right now considered the first female video game designer/engineer having developed her first game in 1976 for RCA's Cosmac VIP shortly after graduating high school, which she was more than adept at doing having worked with the machine before... when it was a prototype her dad was building when she was still in school.

Muriel Tramis, A french developer and regarded as the first Black female game designer who spent much of the beginning of her career at Coktelvision, a studio in the 80s whose games mostly focused on historical fiction. Her games, in particular, focused on the history of her home island of Martinque and closely examined its messy history with French colonialism and slavery.

And Jamie Fenton, who worked at several foundational game and game adjacent companies in the seventies including Nutting Associates and Bally, where she worked on the Astrocade. Incidentally, she used that Astrocade experience to be an early pioneer in glitch art.

 

[RT-55J]

People tend to solely attribute Super Metroid's soundtrack to Kenji Yamamoto, when in reality he collaborated with Minako Hamano. According to the notes on official soundtrack, Hamano is responsible for the music for the title, credits, Wrecked Ship, both parts of Maridia, Tourian, and all of the boss themes (including Ridley). That literally the exact same amount of tracks that Yamamoto worked on, and probably more of the runtime than him (too lazy to do the math rn).

She was likewise a contributor to the Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission soundtracks, and I suspect that her contributions there are just as under-attributed. I haven't been unable to find any detailed per-track credits for those games, but according to the Samus Archives music CD she was at least responsible for the venerable Sector 1 (SRX) theme.

 

[Purple]

Oh damn, all the really haunting tracks that stick with you, too.

First, Joyce Weisbecker, right now considered the first female video game designer/engineer having developed her first game in 1976 for RCA's Cosmac VIP shortly after graduating high school, which she was more than adept at doing having worked with the machine before... when it was a prototype her dad was building when she was still in school.

Pretty sure that's not what you meant to link to there. Unless there's a really amazing multilingual pun I'm missing.

 

[ASandoval]

Whoops, nope, that was from an earlier, unrelated event in the night. Will fix when I'm on my pc but I meant this link: https://www.fastcompany.com/90147592/rediscovering-historys-lost-first-female-video-game-designer

Edit: And fixed!

 

[RT-55J]

Oh damn, all the really haunting tracks that stick with you, too.

I noticed this as well with the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country too. While David Wise gets all of the fame, Eveline Novakovic's contributions to the soundtrack are no slouch either. In my mind, her track Voices of the Temple and Northern Hemispheres is the rawest atmospheric pieces in the game.

Anyhow, I was going to mention Danielle Bunten Berry, but I see you namedropped her in the opening post. I'm not personally familiar with her work, but I know she was a pioneer in the area of multiplayer PC games, being the creator of 1983's M.U.L.E. and the 1988 (!) RTS Modem Wars. While reading about her personal life does make me feel melancholic (she deserved better), I take heart in knowing that her professional associates respected her and admired her life's work.

 

[Felicia]

I don't think I have a lot to contribute to this thread, but a while ago I read an excellent book on Swedish game history (unfortunately only available in Swedish), and among other things they mention some early military simulation programming being done in the 50s, with many of the programmers hired being women. This matches with other early computer history I've read about, where early on software was considered "women's work". Anyway, one incident is described where a woman, Elsa-Karin Boestad-Nilsson (who was interviewed for the book) creates a program simulating various scenarios involving tanks and anti-tank units, but it's published in 1958 by a man under his name when she goes on maternity leave. Maybe one of the earliest cases of a woman having credit stolen for a game/software?

Later on, the book also tells the sad tale of Kajsa Söderström, who is most likely the first Swedish female programmer having an actual game published, in 1984. It's a text adventure titled "Agent 999", a James Bond parody, published as a type-in in a Swedish games magazine. Unfortunately she suffered from mental health issues, and commited suicide in 1994.

 

[Purple]

Anyhow, I was going to mention Danielle Bunten Berry, but I see you namedropped her in the opening post. I'm not personally familiar with her work, but I know she was a pioneer in the area of multiplayer PC games, being the creator of 1983's M.U.L.E.

It is really worth noting that M.U.L.E. holds the hell up. It's like a euro-game with a little action added in. Super accessible, breezy, lot of fun options, super slick auction system, and this touch I've always loved where the final scoring isn't just about who has the highest score, but also has a bit about the overall health of your colony, so if you go full capitalist you basically get the "congrats on being the richest person on a rock nobody's ever going to visit" ending.

I don't think I have a lot to contribute to this thread, but a while ago I read an excellent book on Swedish game history (unfortunately only available in Swedish), and among other things they mention some early military simulation programming being done in the 50s, with many of the programmers hired being women. This matches with other early computer history I've read about, where early on software was considered "women's work".

Oh yeah. If anyone here wasn't in on this little bit of history, there was a good stretch of time where the word "computer" flat out meant "woman who does math super good for stuff that needs super good math. Makes for a little culture shock reading something like the Lensman books. And then yeah once we had actual computers, it was like THE most feminine profession until... I want to say the early 80s? Makes the modern myths of brogrammers having always been there that much more frustrating.

 

[Exposition Owl]

And then yeah once we had actual computers, it was like THE most feminine profession until... I want to say the early 80s? Makes the modern myths of brogrammers having always been there that much more frustrating.

I took a course from a female computer science professor back when I was in college. She once remarked that, in her experience, the explosion in popularity of computer games and LAN parties did a lot during the 90s to increase bro culture in CS and decrease its gender parity.

 

[Peklo]

Signalis likely needs no introduction at this point, a few months after its release. It has gained significant traction--we have a thread too--from both genre enthusiasts and people attracted to its individual ethos. Why it bears mentioning in the context of this thread is that for all the discussion and overall praise I've seen the game elicit, the simple acknowledgement or even a short mention of "who made it" usually doesn't happen beyond listing the developer name. In a small production like this, highlighting the individual is feasible, such as in the case of rose-engine, who are Yuri Stern and Barbara Wittmann, handling most aspects of the game. The former goes by they/them pronouns, and the latter by she/her.

This was always a game I was going to play at some point, but at a glance some of its stated inspirations left me skeptical if I would click with it as much as I would hope. Whether directly listed or inferred, sources like H. P. Lovecraft, Tsutomu Nihei, Hideaki Anno, Masamune Shirow, Hiroya Oku and whatever and whoever else clearly signpost the influences the game is working with. I also know, through recommendation and osmosis that the game deals in sapphic content, before actually playing it for myself. In this context, while not negating those concerns at will, the knowledge that Signalis is the creative result between queer people and women makes me that much more willing to engage it on those subjects and thematic fibre and find out how it incorporates them into itself. People may not think twice about highlighting the developers in such a way--and indeed I know nothing about them aside from these basic biographical details--but in my case it acts as a direct selling point in the game's favour, so I thought it important to mention here too.

 

[Peklo]

Since the topic has ended up orbiting around the unknown and pioneering women of Final Fantasy, how about one more? Kaoru Moriyama was very literally the early voice of SquareSoft in English: her resume charts the localizations (more "translation" in those days, given the strict limitations imposed on anyone working in the field with the tools they had) of Final Fantasy Legend II, Final Fantasy Adventure, Final Fantasy II (IV SFC), the unreleased Final Fantasy II proper, and directing the translation team on Secret of Mana. The only context I've ever seen Moriyama acknowledged in beyond a name among others in assorted game credits is in this old and relatively brief feature on Lost Levels, focusing on the cancelled Final Fantasy II NES she preliminarily translated. Even in its brevity, it's illuminating to have a few choice words from someone who worked on several of these games that ended up being formative for folks around the world.

The flipside of Moriyama's anonymity is that while her name is unknown, her work really isn't. These early RPG translations are frequently lambasted and mocked for the style of their expression, without a care or understanding given to the technological and organizational limitations that shaped them into the form they ended up in. It's not a working legacy of incompetence or ignorance that they represent, but the early steps of often just an individual or two trying to make work a subset of a field that was frequently misunderstood, dismissed and denied resources even from within its own development bubble. People like Ted Woolsey, who came in a little later--and with whom Moriyama collaborated on Secret of Mana, at least--became "names" to enthusiasts because their work, while facing many of the similar challenges and limitations, happened just further down enough on the line that at least some sense of character and expression was allowed to survive on the storage limitations of the time. You can play a Moriyama-translated game and gawk at the severe shortcomings of language throughout... while also taking in how much information, and yes, even concise personality is expressed through a severe budget in verbiage. Nasir Gebelli is famous for leaving Secret of Mana as his final word on his continued partnership and collaboration with Square--the reality of it is that it was Kaoru Moriyama's curtain call as well, and no one noticed.

 

[Felicia]

The mentioning of Lost Levels and localization reminded me of these cute photos from the localization work on the NES Earthbound, featuring two women, Kuniko Sakurai and Miyuke Kure, credited as "Scenario Assistant" and "game Co-Designer" respectively. Seems like they might be two other "forgotten" female game creators.

 

[Peklo]

The Women Who Wrote Dragon Quest
​

There are few developers of comparable magnitude to Yuji Horii and his most famous creations. The reverence and influence that Dragon Quest commands extends to how its writing voice is regarded: despite being past 35 years in existence and at around a dozen entries, these games are considered highly auteurial; they are thought of as Horii's stories that he conveys to millions upon millions of people as a storyteller. Horii however doesn't write alone--he never has, except maybe in the earliest of early days when Portopia was his claim to fame as a bedroom developer. It's both easier, more "convenient" and more alluring as far as mythmaking to summarize the large teams in creative work like video games to the prominent key individuals, so the total credited contributors escape notice in full or functional anonymity. Sometimes there's enough of a record to highlight them and their work, belatedly and as if retracing a digital paper trail.

Rika Suzuki stands as an industry pioneer whether you've heard of her or not. Founding the development company Riverhill Soft in 1982, Suzuki was an early voice in adventure games in the Japanese video game scene, putting out works contemporarily with Horii's Portopia which is so often credited wholesale for the genre's boom--rest assured her gameography includes her own share of mystery games with "satsujin jiken" included somewhere in the title. In 1986, Suzuki debuted the first game in the J.B. Harold series of graphical adventure murder mystery games, which would go on to become a constant in the studio's repertoire for the next several years and provided an episodic serial starring the same recurring protagonist--predating Data East's storied Saburō Jingūji/Jake Hunter series by about a year. Parallel to that series, she also created the 1920s period piece serials starring detective Tōdō Ryūnosuke, presaging developers like Shu Takumi and the change of setting in their own adventure games turning to early 20th century Japan.

Riverhill Soft's expansion in the '90s brought about a more diverse development pool and range--future Level-5 founder Akihiro Hino came up through the studio's ranks, and was involved in the similarly early survival horror works in Doctor Hauzer and OverBlood, making very evident the genres' shared genealogy--but distanced Suzuki from direct game creation thanks to increased organizational duties. She returned to hands-on game development through the founding of Cing in 1999, who lasted about a decade. Within that time, the lean but significant oeuvre the company produced resuscitated the parallel series dynamic of Suzuki's Riverhill Soft days: Another Code and Hotel Dusk made Suzuki's sensibilities widely accessible to a global audience for the first time, with the former series being a fresh experiment on her part, and the latter being a return to her signature style with some of the strongest tonal and aesthetic work the medium had ever seen. Both were gone too soon, but left a lasting impact, with Cing's bankruptcy lamented to this day. Suzuki continues to work in games and writing at Bellwood, with that moment of global prominence (though hardly recognition) in the past, just as Riverhill Soft's works remain obscure on an international stage.

What of Dragon Quest, then? However it happened--the details aren't available as far as I know--Suzuki and Horii were at the very least aware of each other, in those early days when both were making the graphic adventure games that would foster an entire genre. They were interviewed together in 1987 in that context, but they were both also collaborators by then: Suzuki is credited as a scenario assistant for all the Famicom-era Dragon Quests, four in all. To know this isn't surprising as far as sensibility goes, as who would better gel with the investigative and light adventure-inflected game design codified by the games than Horii's fellow peer--who would even go on to make her own RPGs in the Burai series later down the line and be involved in the production of others. It may also go toward explaining why that leg of the series feels distinct from the others: staff members and entire studios shift across the eras bringing about their own change, but these were the only games that Suzuki was involved with.

As Suzuki's collaborations dwindled, another recurring name becomes prominent within Dragon Quest, that of Sachiko Sugimura. Whether she was involved in the company's founding in 1989, Sugimura is nonetheless synonymous with ArtePiazza, who are known for their frequent Dragon Quest development collaborations, usually in a remake capacity. Sugimura herself is credited for the same scenario writer and assistant role that Suzuki was, spanning each entry in the series between IV and VII, and taking charge as a planner for each of those respective eventual remakes, as well as the earlier entries that would go on to be developed. ArtePiazza's most prominent original work remains Opoona, the unforgettable and iconoclastic Wii RPG, which Sugimura directed and wrote.

These aren't the only writers who have contributed to Dragon Quest over the years, and even with this knowledge, it's difficult to impossible to ascertain how it might change one's interpretation of the work itself. Creators such as key visual artists or composers have the benefit of forward-facing output that can be isolated and pointed out as belonging to or originating from them as individuals, but the vast majority of game development is "invisible" work for its inherently collaborative nature that cannot be readily picked out from the whole unless the person responsible divulges and specifies their contributions. Suzuki and Sugimura, despite their respective and long involvements with the series, are ultimately just names in a credits list, and we return to defaulting to talking about "Yuji Horii's writing" in absence of a clearer picture. It's only thanks to these creators' works, careers and accomplishments elsewhere that we might even have the baseline level of recognition to call attention to them at all in the capacity that they contributed to what is one of the most popular media products in its medium. For people like Suzuki, her history in games outside of Dragon Quest is likely more interesting and storied, but it should not translate to rendering her or anyone else invisible for whatever they contributed to a legacy that's cherished to this day, often for the aspects they took part in shaping.

For more on Rika Suzuki, consider:

1987 interview with Yuji Horii
2022 episode in the "geimu" documentary series by the Game Preservation Society (highly recommended viewing)

 

[Peklo]

Miwa Shoda: queer heart-throbs and unstealable jewels​

Miwa Shoda might have written for your favourite game, but would you know she did? Hired by Square in 1995, her resume--partially as it can be gleaned--ranges from cult favourites to major blockbusters, as a scenario and scriptwriter. That partial list of works includes:

• Radical Dreamers (1996)
• SaGa Frontier (1997)
• Legend of Mana (1999)
• Sword of Mana (2003)
• Final Fantasy XII (2006)
• The Last Remnant (2008)
• Nights of Azure (2015)
• Street Fighter V (2016)

You can assume her body of works to be much vaster, in addition comprising a number of less accessible material like mobile games since having ceased operation, many things in the otome genre of visual novels, or--it can probably be assumed--further work during her time with Square and Square Enix for projects that simply did not credit their writers; a few places think she worked on SaGa Frontier 2 and Unlimited SaGa as well (and that would fit her work history as a frequent Kawazu collaborator) but I could not verify a primary source for them. The best source for Shoda's catalogue is her own site, and whenever a game directly credits her.

Knowing a name to attach to a work only tells one so much, though--what does a writing voice like Shoda's sound like, and how can it be isolated from projects where her role within them varies in its prominence, but because of the medium, is practically always collaborative in nature? Fortunately, Shoda herself has specified and highlighted her own contributions for a number of her works: for Radical Dreamers, she was responsible for the "Shadow Realm and the Goddess of Death" scenario; for SaGa Frontier, the Asellus scenario and the Mystics setting; for Legend of Mana, the Jumi scenario with the jewel thief Sandra, comprising one of the game's three major story arcs.

That gets you somewhere in discerning a style and sensibilities to a creator. Before I knew of Shoda and how her fingerprints extended to games I came to love, the Asellus story in particular stood out as unbelievably distinct and exceptional for the themes and subject matter it explored, even within a game as diversely creative as SaGa Frontier. 1990s Square is widely considered their golden period for creativity, but it wasn't exactly teeming with women writing talent in terms of who got to pen whichever notable project that took off. There was the aforementioned Kaori Tanaka/Soraya Saga, but that's about as recurring as it ever got in those days; even absent of a qualifier like that, one of the only other writing credits by women that exists in this era is for Yuko Sakamoto, also on SaGa Frontier, who penned Blue's scenario. "Names" that could cultivate their own fandoms and followings simply didn't materialize in the way that male creators would build their own reputations... or when they did, as with Tanaka, they were punished for it by those very audiences.

To be faced with Asellus's story of complex queer soul-searching which centers women in ways that few contemporary peers would was enough to tip one off that something was up and out of order from the way these kinds of stories were usually told. And maybe that's just the thing, in that "this kind" of story hadn't been explored by this company, at this point (and not really since). For precedents, Final Fantasy V's Faris lifted the Takarazuka Revue-inflected premise of women-playing-men that carries its obvious conceptual and aesthetic appeal but which did not approach the subject from a particularly thoughtful gendered perspective; it wasn't the kind of story built to support that kind of internal focus. For Shoda, Asellus's story was personal from inception, in how she conceived of it and what it represented for her:

“Asellus’ story is based on a dream I had a long time ago and never forgot. In that dream, I was hit by a carriage and on the brink of death, when someone alighted from the carriage and saved my life by giving me their blood. I incorporated this into the explanation for how Asellus became a Half-Mystic, then expanded on her character from there. It’s common to see stories where the heroine saves the person she likes, but I hate it when female characters rely on men. Not only that, but such a simplistic characterization of femininity for women in games is beyond my suspension of belief. That’s why I wanted to create a strong female character who could live without men, and who other women would fall for. But not all of that got past the planning stage, so I changed the proposal to something more like “the coming-of-age story of a strong female protagonist” (laugh).”

You have to remember the working environment and era in which Shoda made these kinds of statements and what she put into her work. Square was a boys' club of writing talent, putting out games that would include porn magazines/underwear as easter eggs or sidequests (Final Fantasy IV, Live A Live, Chrono Trigger--all games with input from Takashi Tokita, with the middle game particularly being his sexism magnum opus), or base the entire long-term development of a story and central character dynamics on a cuckolding betrayal fantasy stemming from a writer's own experiences with women, such as with the Motomu Toriyama-written Bahamut Lagoon. These kinds of expressions were exceedingly normalized, and of course not limited only to Square as a company, and anecdotally the '90s were a time of great cultural shifts in the video game space, both on the creator and audience end, in that girls and women were being increasingly othered from participating in the industry on a cultural and professional level. For women like Shoda, it was the time they were establishing themselves as creators, and had to navigate the attitudes and creative customs around them. In Legend of Mana, her presence in the project lead to changes in her fellow writers's work, who evidently heeded her perspective:

Masato Yagi: I wanted to depict the theme of “bonds” in the Dragon Killer story. In the very beginning of our planning, Larc and Sierra were not siblings, but lovers. Sierra gets brainwashed by Tiamat, but at the end she comes to her senses thanks to her strong bond with Larc. Shoda said that was too cliche though. (laughs) She also pointed out that “For a woman to show her weakness as a woman, it’s not very flattering.” For those reasons we changed them into brother and sister. So while the form may have changed a bit, that theme of bonds ended up the same.

Whether she has ever directly adopted the term, it's no stretch to characterize Shoda, based on these few excerpts that exist in the public record and the themes inherent in her work, as a feminist writer and voice in a company that very much was not used to that kind of viewpoint in the work that they produced. More specifically, the recurring themes of queer femininity appear in her output: Asellus as the foremost example, but also in Legend of Mana's Sandra who presents masculinely under her Alex alter ego. Works other than these are more difficult to credit to her specific contributions, but a game like 2015's Nights of Azure not only lists her as its sole writer, but carries the hallmarks of her prior work, as gothic-romantic fantasy centered on a lesbian romance and relationship. As a work by Gust, it walks the complicated line between gross exploitation of that femininity and the lived-in, representational aspects that would appeal to those that saw reflections of themselves in it.

Shoda, as far as I know, is still active in the industry, but as is common for her profession, her participation in projects is not prominently announced or promoted, and finding reliable record of it may prove impossible in cases that said work goes anonymous. The ability and opportunity to glean even this much comes down to statements and interviews she and fellow staff gave decades ago, and that these sources were tracked down, submitted, commissioned, translated and released for perusal now in a different language by dedicated hobbyists. She could have been rendered wholly invisible as so many have been, and I'm under no illusions that this is the "full story" of her career as it stands. Whether that's willing and preferred privacy, or just the cascading arbitrary nature of how information is passed on and along in this industry, I'm happy to have been made aware of the writer behind some of my favourite material in the medium.

Links:

The Essence of SaGa Frontier is the foremost repository for inside-baseball discussions on the game, and its translation project is an invaluable resource on those topics:

Miwa Shoda interview on Asellus
Development notes on the Asellus scenario by Shoda. Much like Kaori Tanaka in conceptualizing the Figaro brothers for Final Fantasy VI, Shoda wrote extensively on the setting she created, much of which went unintegrated or truncated in the final game.

Shmuplations remains as integral as ever for divulging additional context on vintage game production:

Legend of Mana - 1999 Developer Interview