Video games are a highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary medium. There are thousands of artists, designers, programmers, QA testers, and more in the video game industry. To celebrate International Women’s Day and all the women in games, we’d like to recognise some of the talented women who’ve helped bring many of gaming’s most beloved franchises to life.
Amy Hennig – Uncharted
Amy Hennig departed from game developer Naughty Dog while mid-production on Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Since, Hennig has worked on an unreleased Star Wars project at Visceral Games and is now the President of a new interactive division at Skydance Media, which is working on a narrative-driven game in partnership with Marvel Entertainment.
However, we cannot under estimate Hennig’s influence on the industry with Uncharted. Now a landmark franchise with its own movie, the Uncharted games course-corrected PlayStation during the seventh console generation and kick-started the rise of narrative-driven AAA games. Hennig is credited as creative director and head writer for all three PlayStation 3 Uncharted games (Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception), two of which land in the console’s top five best-selling games.
Released in 2007, the impact of the original Uncharted can be felt to this day, helping to define modern AAA games’ big-budget spectacles, walk-and-talk segments interweaving story and gameplay, and more. Uncharted is emblematic of globe-trotting adventure games and modern PlayStation as a whole.
Simply look at PlayStation’s portfolio pre and post-Uncharted. Without Hennig’s push for cinematic storytelling in games, we doubt we would’ve seen Naughty Dog have the confidence to pursue The Last of Us, another of gaming’s most celebrated releases. Extend this logic to any number of cinematic games in today’s market – God of War for instance – and you’ll see Hennig’s influence everywhere.
Aya Kyogoku – Animal Crossing
Starting out at Nintendo as a script writer for The Legend of Zelda series, Aya Kyogoku now heads the team behind the Animal Crossing and Splatoon series as manager of Nintento’s EPD Group No. 5. Before Kyogoku, no women had reached this high a rank at the Japanese company. Kyogoku was the first woman game developer at Nintendo’s EPD Group, and the first woman to direct a game there.
“We [females] are still largely in the minority, but gradually more and more females are joining the department [EPD],” said Kyogoku in a talk given at the Games Develop conference. “Female developers are increasing at an impressive rate and the percentage of male and female developers is evening out. Particularly on the Animal Crossing: New Leaf team, almost half of those involved were women.” There’s probably not a whole lot of games developers that can claim an even split between men and woman. “When I was starting in the gaming industry, it wasn’t uncommon to be the only woman on the entire team.”
“In my years at Nintendo, I have come to discover that when there are women in a variety of roles on the project, you get a wider [range] of opinions and ideas. So, when you are trying to create something that will appeal to many types of people, I have experienced how beneficial it is to have diversity on your team.”
Since 2007, Kyogoku is credited for many roles on Animal Crossing, from producer to supervisor. Most notably, however, Kyogoku was a director on Animal Crossing: New Leaf as well as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which became a world-wide phenomenon at its release in early 2020. With over 40 million copies sold, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the best-selling game of 2020 and it’s the second best-selling game for the record-breaking Nintendo Switch.
Kim Swift – Portal
Did you know that Portal, one of gaming’s most revered releases and a permanent display at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, started out as a student project? Kim Swift and her classmates’ final year project at DigiPen, a technical university for interactive media and video games, was a game called Narbacular Drop. The student team presented Narbacular Drop at the university’s end-of-course show.
Image by: Valve
Located in Redmond, Washington, DigiPen is next door to some of the industry’s biggest developers and publishers. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve were all present at this show, interviewing students and reviewing their projects. A couple of spokespeople from Valve took an interest in Narbacular Drop, handing Swift and the team their business card.
Seeking feedback on how to improve Narbacular Drop ahead of the student showcase at the Independent Game Festival, Valve invited Swift and the team up to their headquarters.
What started out as a small meeting of two or three people soon piled up to twenty, all eager to see Narbacular Drop in action. Among the crowd was Valve’s co-founder and president, Gabe Newell. After seeing the student’s demo, Newell left only to return a few minutes later to offer Swift and the team jobs at Valve.
The whole Narbacular Drop team, with Swift as the team lead and level designer, were brought on board to turn their student project into what we now know as Portal. At the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards, Swift accepted the Innovation and Game of the Year awards for her work on Portal.
Image by: Valve
Swift stayed on at Valve for a few years as a level designer and artist, working on Left 4 Dead and its sequel, before moving onto new ventures. Swift is currently at Xbox Game Studio as the senior director of cloud gaming.
Rieko Kodama – Phantasy Star
Entering the gaming industry in 1984, Rieko Kodama’s long tenure at Sega saw her involved on many of the company’s most acclaimed games, including Skies of Arcadia and the Phantasy Star series. Notable roles include working as a graphics designer on the original Sonic the Hedgehog, a zone artist on its sequel, and as a director of Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium.
Sega’s Phantasy Star was created to compete with Enix’s Dragon Quest, a wildly poplar role-playing game series in Japan. When a Dragon Quest game releases in Japan, it might as well be a publish holiday. Releasing in the West nearly a year before Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star was many people’s first introduction to JRPGs, helping establish and proliferate the genre outside of Japan. The fourth instalment, which Kodama directed, is highly regarded and ended the classic Phantasy Star quadrilogy.
From character design to 2-D environments and battle screens, Kodama was the main artist on the first entry and graphic artist on the rest. Admiring the way Star Wars took inspiration from Japanese culture, such as the samurai iconography of the Jedi’s robes, Kodama games Phantasy Star its distinct medieval-sci-fi look. Wanting to steer away from typical Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, Phantasy Star was one of the first games to feature a female protagonist, as designed by Kodama.
Joining in the early days of the Sega Master System, Kodama is often celebrated as one of the first female game developers. Kodama remained at Sega until her passing in 2022. Kodama lead the Sega Ages initiative as producer, ensuring the company’s classic games are preserved for future generations with accurate emulation and enhanced features.
Kodama wasn’t properly credited for her earlier work. In the early days, Sega used to enforce a policy in which employees weren’t allowed to use their real names in a game’s credits, fearing rival companies would poach their talent. Instead, they used aliases. As the gaming industry was male-dominated back then, you might’ve assumed these aliases were for an all-male development team. However, Kodama was right there the whole time as ‘Phoenix Rie’.
