There was a day, long ago, when gender in video games was an unknown topic.  This was not because no one wanted to to talk about it – it was simply because no one ever thought to talk about it.  Early games were essentially gender-neutral; players, for the most part, were not playing people, but were instead playing things.

Pong, Space Invaders, Asteroids: in all these cases, the player’s link with the gameworld is a series of tiny blocks arranged in different shapes, sometimes a spaceship, sometimes a triangle, sometimes a rectangle.  Neutral things any player could connect with.  Things were this way mostly as a limit of technology; creating more detail was not yet an option.  As such, the idea of the avatar, of the player’s representation in-game, was a simple one, and discussions about player identity were a long ways off.

As technology advanced, so did the ability to represent the player in new and different ways.  Granted, a lot of these ways were still pretty blocky, but they had more of a shape.  Pac-Man, Q-Bert: both technically men, but still pretty neutral overall.  Even on the home consoles such as the Atari and the Intellevision, the blocky representations were more iconic abstractions of humans than anything else. Sure, the cover of the box might have showed you that the dude you were running through the dark corridors of Night Stalker was, in fact, a dude, but when you played the game, it really didn’t matter.  It was a blank slate, ready for the player to impose whatever image and personality (if any) onto it they wished.

By the time gaming reached the 8-bit era, designers now had the power to give their characters a lot more character.  Mario, despite being only a few pixels high, was able to give a clear impression of who he was.  A powerful mustache, kicky hat, and stylish overalls defined him as a plumber who was ready to stomp the hell out of some turtles.  The important thing to note here is, however, that as games transitioned to better-defined central characters, they also transitioned to them being clearly, and more or less exclusively, male.

All man.

Mario, Link, Dragon Warrior Guy: all characters sporting an XY pair.  Women in games were relegated to being the objects of rescue.  Kidnapped by wizards, kidnapped by dragons, or sometimes possibly just wandering off on their own without a map, they were there to be saved in the final scene right before the credits rolled.

There was one woman that managed to change all that.  Metroid, released in 1986, put you in the role of Samus Aran, intergalactic bounty hunter.  Samus was covered head-to-toe in advanced alien body armor, and not a single hint was given about his or her gender (and the name Samus certainly didn’t give much indication either way).  In fact, the game manual specifically referred to Samus as “he,” giving the unassuming player no reason to think otherwise.

Tasked with hunting down the Space Pirates on the planet Zebes and eliminating the Metroid threat, the player leads Samus through the planet’s dangerous and winding corridors, jumping, rolling, and shooting their way to victory.  Samus is tough; taking plenty of damage but dishing out even more in return.  After the final showdown with Mother Brain and a hasty escape, the game comes to a close, and (if you beat it fast enough) players are shown a proud Samus taking off her helmet and revealing her long, wavy hair.

Now, that probably wasn’t very shocking to you, because you already knew she was a woman.  But imagine, if you would, that this was 1986 and every videogame character you’d ever played had been a guy (or gender-neutral), and you just discovered that the heavily-armed alien-killing asskicker you’d been controlling for the past few hours was actually a woman – it would come as quite a shock.

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Yes, Samus’ identity surprised a lot of people; she is widely considered to be the first real videogame heroine (no offense to the Lady Pac), and her existance broke an invisble and almost unrealized gender barrier in the videogame world.  Since then, there have been many more virtual women to follow in her footsteps, but Samus still holds a special place in most gamer’s hearts. Samus has grown a lot since those earlier days, getting a much more richly developed backstory and personality, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, she’s still just one badass lady in powered armor ready to launch some missiles into red doors at a moment’s notice.

So, during this Women’s History Month, let’s take a moment to salute this virtual pioneer; she showed us that women in games could do more than just cry out for rescue, and that even life-sucking aliens can be loving, just so long as you raise them from birth.