Pre-emptively Answered Questions
I kinda figure this project might raise a few questions so I'm just gonna answer a few in advance
What made you go and do this?
Okay so on Trans Day of Visibility 2025, Checkpoint Gaming published what they called the "definitive list" of trans games throughout history.
While it highlighted a great deal of excellent titles featuring trans
representation and trans developers from the last decade or so, it
could hardly be described as definitive or
throughout history. Out of the whole list, only two games were older
than 2010, one by a trans woman (M.U.L.E by Danielle Bunten Berry), and
one with a prominent trans character (Paper Mario: The Thousand Year
Door). This honestly cheesed me off big time because we've always been
here. of course we have, but articles like this risk implying the
transphobic narrative that we're some kind of trendy social contagion
invented by Joe Biden to sell more Cloud Atlas tickets or fucking
whatever. So I decided fuck it. I'm making my own list. a list of as
many games as possible from before 2010 which we know for a fact had a
trans person on the dev team. We've probably touched way more games
than you think.
Why the 2010 cutoff?
Couple of reasons. First of all, as said above, I was specifically
looking for older games and Fifteen Years Ago seems like a good
dividing line. It's where the Checkpoint list ran dry.
Also, the later we go the more that larger studios tend to balloon in
size to the point where it would get statistically REALLY weird if it
was all-cis teams. Like, case in point, did you know that there was at
least one trans person on the GTA 5 dev team? (And there is
btw. I know someone who knows her). That isn't nessecarily something
people would KNOW know, but it's also just not an interesting fact at
that kind of scale.. Rockstar North in Scotland alone had over 360
employees at the time of GTA 5's release, and thousands more people
worked on the game across ALL of Rockstar's studios. Even if you take
the most conservative estimate of what percentage of people are trans,
and ignore the fact that a relatively high amount of trans people end
up in tech, it would STILL be a hell of a statistical anomaly if
absolutely NONE of those thousands of people had at least SOMETHING a
bit gendery going on. So yeah it would basically get to the point where
you could probably just list Every "AAA" Game.
Is that the page finished then?
Oh HELL no. I've still got to add a whole bunch of screenshots
and descriptions and links about the various games. Heck, there's a
bunch I've still got to get around to actually playing. ALSO I keep
finding out about more games and more trans people. I swear I didn't
think this was going to be as long a list as it is. You'd think I'd
have learned not to underestimate other trans people by now but here we
are.
Hey you missed a game/developer.
Brilliant! I want to know about this. Probably the best way to contact
me right now is on the Fediverse so yell at me there about it. You can
find me at https://chitter.xyz/@DotMaetrix
The list seems awfully transfem heavy. Aren't there more (or heck, any) trans men that have done videogames?
Probably. Once again, if you know about any, I REALLY want to know. TBH
I think one of the side effects of the games industry being a bit of a
Boys Club is that a lot of trans developers will have either got their
starts while they were still presenting as men, or living stealth as
men.
website by dot maetrix, 2025
If you like what I'm doing and want to support you can buy me a coffee as a treat <3