WE MADE THE GAMES WE WANTED

A beautifully formatted rant about the representation of women and girls in the games industry that segways into every other industry.

Carol Shaw was the first female developer Atari hired. She is best known for designing and programming River Raid for the Atari 2600 at Activision. She says never got the sense that the games she made were for one gender or another, and there was never a mandate from higher-ups to target a certain audience. When she interviewed for the job, she didn’t believe she was at any disadvantage because she was a woman, nor did she feel that video games were the realm of men. She knew not many women held bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering, but she held both. She was qualified to do the job, and that was that. “We never really discussed who our target demographic was,” she says. “We didn’t discuss gender or age. We just did games we thought would be fun.“