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Girls love gaming just as much as the boys.
The #WomenInGaming hashtag alone has more than 230 million videos on TikTok that range from female gamers showing off their skills and gaming gear to opening up about dealing with sexism in the male-dominated gaming world.
Women have played a large, often hidden role in the gaming industry, but there’s still work to do — namely in representation and closing the pay gap. From Xbox to PlayStation, PC gaming, and back to the days of Atari, ’80s arcades games and beyond, women helped design, develop, write, direct and produce some of the most groundbreaking and beloved video games in history. To celebrate Women’s History Month and the forthcoming Halo series debuting via Paramount+ on Thursday (March 24), we rounded up a few popular video games that were created, developed, executive produced, directed or written by women. See more below.
Uncharted
You don’t have to be a gamer to be familiar with Uncharted. The action-adventure game, created by Amy Hennig, has been adopted into novels and a movie. Hennig was the head writer and director behind the initial Uncharted release in 2007. The gaming veteran started out as a freelance artist on the 1989 Atari game Electropop and moved on to Electronic Arts, where she worked on Desert Strike: Return of the Gulf before making her Nintendo design debut with 1989’s Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City. Hennig also helped develop the Legacy of Kain series and Soul Reaver 2 during her time with Crystal Dynamics. Prior to creating Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Hennig helped develop the Jak and Daxter series.
After parting with Naughty Dog in 2014, Hennig joined Visceral Games (an offshoot of Electronic Arts) before leaving EA and joining Skydance Media in 2019. She is among the team of developers behind Forspoken, an action-adventure game slated for release on Oct. 11.
Buy: Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection ($19.75)
Tomb Raider
Tom Raider lead character Lara Croft holds the Guinness World Record as the best-selling video game franchise led by a female protagonist. The video game centers on archeologist Croft and her adventures with ancient artifacts. The game was originally supposed to be led by a male character, but creator Toby Gard changed the concept to a single-player, female lead.
The first Tomb Raider video game was released in 1996 and developed by a mostly male team with the exception of Heather Gibson, one of the key developers on the game, and Vicky Arnold, who wrote the script. Gibson and Arnold worked on other games in the Tomb Raider franchise, the popularity of which birthed Laura Croft: Tomb Raider and other silver-screen adaptations. Other games in the franchise that were written by women include 2013’s Tomb Raider release penned by Susan O’Conner, Rhianna Pratchett and John Stafford. Pratchett also wrote Rise of the Tomb Raider, while Jill Murray and Jason Dozois co-wrote Shadow of the Tomb Raider (pictured above).
Buy: Shadow of the Tomb Raider ($27.95)
Halo 4
The Halo mega-franchise put Xbox on the map. The first game was created and developed by an all-male team at Bungie by way of Microsoft. After Bungie split with Microsoft, Halo landed at 343 Industries, a Microsoft subset led by Bonnie Ross.
Ross began her career co-developing and publishing video games and joined Microsoft after graduating college in 1989. She previously worked on games such as Zoo Tycoon, Jade Empire and Fuscion Frenzy, and was named general manager of Microsoft Game Studios prior to becoming the head of 343 Industries. The subsidiary’s first major video game was Halo 4, released in 2012. Gaming developer Corrinne Yu also worked on Halo 4, which was executive produced by Kiki Wolfkill.
In 2013, Yu joined Sony video game developer Naughty Dog as a graphic programmer for PlayStation. Early in her career, Yu worked on adventure games such as King’s Quest and Quake 2.
Wolfkill, who also produced Halo: The Master Chief Collection, began her career as a developer for Microsoft Encarta. She transitioned into the company’s gaming studios in the late ‘90s and joined 343 Industries in 2008. Ross and Wolfkill are both producers on the Halo TV series.
Buy: Halo 4 ($39.77)
King’s Quest
Roberta Williams is a pioneer of the adventure gaming genre. Williams co-founded the development studio Sierra Online with her husband and released the computer game My House in 1980. My House is credited as the first ever adventure game, but Williams didn’t stop there. She developed more than a dozen video games throughout the ’90s including the King’s Quests series, Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra and Phantasmagoria. The Williams recently announced that they are developing their first video game in over 20 years.