🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
N7 Day
In the 80s & 90s queer characters were all but unheard of in video games. Birdo(Mario 2) & innuendo from background joke characters was all we got (except the indie-published Caper in the Castro)
The mid 90s golden age of RPG/Adventure games started with a minor NPC Ultima VII & quickly became a protagonist who could be bi in Fallout 2 from Black Isle, with a joke shotgun marriage to either the rancher's daughter or son regardless of gender. Persona 2 allowed a same-gender romance as canon. Sierra made Curtis Craig insane but canonically bisexual in Phantasmagoria 2
Black Isle made Bauldur’s Gate with BioWare, a Canadian startup founded by D&D playing doctors. From Knights of the Old Republic in 2003 on, BioWare put queer romance options on deeply realized companions in all of their games. While Fable & the Sims 2 were making faceless gay options, BioWare gave us Juhani (KOTOR), a fallen padawan seeking redemption; Sky (Jade Empire), who feels he can never love again; Zevran (Dragon Age), a slave assassin with a sensitive heart; & Liara (Mass Effect), from a non-binary long lived species that never respected her work. In Dragon Age 2, Anders is key to the narrative & is openly bi
BioWare faced huge backlash from right wing media but doubled down. Inquisition gave us Dorian, who romances another male companion if the player doesn't, & Krem who’s so matter-of-factly trans that even gamer bros can't complain. It won the first game of the year from The Game Awards.
(Black Isle employees founded Obsidian, which made great queer companions in Fallout: New Vegas)
By sticking to their convictions BioWare made gay companions simply expected in RPGs, which normalized representation in Last of Us, Gone Home, Life is Strange, & Cyberpunk 2077
BioWare was sold to EA over 15 years ago, which slowly degraded their games. Last year EA was sold to a Saudi Arabian investment group, & it should come as no surprise that representation loses out to sports games. Last month BioWare was shut down, but their legacy of queer characters will live on
For many of us it was the first time we were allowed to love how we wanted
Keelah Se’lai
Some corrections on the history of video games.
Moonmist in 86 has a lesbian background NPC whose ex-girlfriend is getting married to a man.
Technically, a Game Boy game from 1992 called Great Greed let you marry a man as a joke at the end if you repeatedly insisted and rejected all the princesses you rescued. It was a wholesome joke.
A game called Dracula Unleashed had a Gay bookstore owner in a minor, but voiced role in 93. That same year Return of the Phantom also had a gay theater director as an allied NPC, though he’s killed
Sierra made some other good and bad characters. In '91 Laura Bow found a touching secret lesbian romance, Leisure Suit Larry III (1989) featured lesbians, and Larry 6 (1993) had a gay pool boy you could sleep with (which ended the game, but hooking up was also the way you beat the game, so technically it was a speedrun technique).
Police Quest 4 had it turn out your dead partner was a secret drag queen, but it's really bad. Rise of the Dragon featured a gay bar positively, and Gabriel Knight is seduced and bitten by an evil sexy gay werewolf.
Then there is SimCopter, where gay designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg into the flight sim that showed muscled guys in speedos kissing. He was fired (to become an activist) and the code was removed.
Star Ocean 2 allowed player-sexuality in 1999 but it was cut from the US version, while Phoenix Wright had a drag queen case in the third game.
While Fable 1 is in the post, flirting with and giving a ring to a man did not change your status to married until the sequel. Several of the Baldur's Gate clones of the late 00s also featured LGB characters in small roles or as player hook-ups, but they were never treated as major events.
Other RPGs like Vampire: The Masquerade, Bloodlines technically allowed female protagonists to sleep with women, but it was basically left-in content from the male character. Unlike the amazing Rockstar game Bully, which although it shares the same system as straight relationships, went out of its way to include a romanceable boy from each clique.
