Historical video game Kevin Bunch remember that in 2019 he sent a dozen letters by email, each with the same name. The white envelopes travel across different addresses in Texas, some reach their destination safely, others return with a bright yellow note: ‘Return to the sender. ATTEMPT – NOT KNOWN. ANSWER TO GO AHEAD. ”
But even the letters that made it did not find their true purpose. The post may have been opened by people with the exact name that Bunch wrote down, but they were not the specific person he and many others had been trying to track down for more than a decade.
Her name is Ban Tran, and I think you have no idea who she is or what she has to do with video games. It is also unfortunate because Ban Tran has made a reasonable contribution to the gambling industry, and yet she has been removed from history.
Admittedly, the gaming industry is notorious for preserving its own history. Even modern games can be lost by the eater as services weaken or titles are no longer printed or supported. It’s even worse the further you go back, especially when it comes to women. Not only are women in technology often overlooked, but it certainly plays a role in this mystery. It is that cultural norms around marriage make it harder to keep track of it.
“One of the hardest parts about writing women in game history,” game historian Kate Willaert said, “is when they get a new name after publishing some work, and suddenly their work is split in two or it is completely deleted.”
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Photo: Getty Images
Some women in the gambling industry tell Polygon that they deliberately retained their surnames after getting married because the existing credits in games sent refer to them in a specific way. If these women were to divorce, creditworthiness would become a nightmare between what legal articles say, what the internet prints, and what a gambling credit list contains. There are measures to strengthen identities, with industry websites such as MobyGames displaying different aliases for game developers. But some women do not want to take the chance – not in an industry where game credits determine whether you get the next job.
“I feel it should not matter,” said one developer, “but in this industry you never know.”
Another ripple here is that Ban Tran is a very common Vietnamese name; in Texas alone, the white pages show more than 100 results. Bunch tried to only send letters to people who could theoretically fit the age group, but it still leaves room for error.
Why search for Ban Tran in the first place? Let’s start with a pop quiz. Who is the first female character in video games? Many will say Me. Pac-Man, but she’s not a real person – she does not even have her own name. Truly, it is difficult to determine exactly who should get the honor here, because it depends entirely on the criteria you use, and whether we are considering the whole arcade games, consoles and computer games.
‘The first female character to be played on screen is probably in an arcade game of [game developer] Exidy called Score, ”Said Willaert. Also, it almost lost time. There’s no way to play the game anymore, and there are no screenshots of Score online. Print ads or flyers promoting the game do not really show what Score looks like. We only know what is at stake, from descriptions in trade journals, which according to Willaert say that the game is a ‘battle between the sexes’.
“We can not even find a working cabinet, although some Exidy collectors and historians are watching,” Willaert said.
As Me. Pac-Man has been excluded, and there is little evidence that Score existed, the next best example is a game called Wabbit. Released in 1982 by Texan developer Apollo, Wabbit is a title for the Atari 2600 that makes the distinction that it is the first console game with a said playable female character that is not off screen. In Wabbit, you control Billie Sue as she tries to protect her root crops from pesky rabbits. This is a shooting game where you try to compete against the rabbits for a high score.
“It’s colorful, it has these beautifully identifiable objects on the screen, it’s fast and it’s unique,” Bunch said. ‘Wabbit is probably one of the best games the company has offered. ”
WabbitExistence is a curiosity not only because of what it depicts, but also because of how it originated. According to Willaert’s research, Ban Tran was hired by Apollo after sending some “outrageous” game concepts to the company – ideas that surpassed the capabilities of the video game hardware of the time. Despite her strange ideas, or maybe why, Tran got an interview.
We do not know what Tran’s technological background was for this, but she should have had some experience because she jumped right and made a game on her own. While one former employee said that Apollo did not need experience to join, Tran’s quick ability to come up with ‘intense’ game concepts surprised those around her, especially since there were not many women making games at the time. . Bunch also noted: ‘The [Atari 2600] is not an easy machine to develop! ”
Wherever Tran came from, her time at Apollo did not last. The company went bankrupt about a year later, and although Tran has been working on other projects for a while, no one knows what happened to her next one. She may not be in Texas yet, and she may not still be going through Ban Tran. Is she not there at all yet?
Willaert is determined to figure it out, as she’s in the middle of producing a 50 – piece YouTube series about playable female protagonists.
“Most of these characters are treated as footnotes in game history – if it is mentioned at all – so I wanted to challenge myself to find enough information to give each one his own ‘chapter’ in this series,” Willaert said.
She has been working on this project for a decade now, which is also about as long as she and other internet peacemakers Tran tried to find. So far, despite tapping on other game historians, call on social media, and sending many physical letters, the search for Tran hit a wall. We can not ask Tran if Wabbit was influenced by the existence of Space Invaders, or what her other wild ideas apparently were. We do not know what she is going to do, and whether she does not have technology at all. We do not even know if she’s still called Ban Tran.
Willaert and Bunch have a lot more questions because the little we know is completely thin. First-hand accounts of the few Apollo developers with an online presence can not even remember who she was, except to know that she is Vietnamese and determined to be hired. These developers assume she should be named Ban Tran because that’s what fans say her name was. But they are not sure; they can not remember well. Where did the fan sites get their name in the first place? As Score in front of her hangs Tran’s contribution to video games hanging on a wire.
“It looks like she’s become a ghost,” Bunch said.