A female video game pioneer, Wabbit’s Van Mai, was lost to history — until now

Kevin Bunch and Kate Willaert, videogame historians, have searched for Van Mai for many years. They’ve sent letters across Texas, where Mai worked for WabbitApollo searched the web and found many records. And now they’ve found her.

As it turns out, Mai’s name was not remembered exactly right: For some time, the historians thought they were looking for a Vietnamese woman named “Ban Tran.” With the Video Game History Foundation community on a Discord channel dedicated to finding Mai, a group of collaborators realized the WabbitThey found the developer they sought. Van TranVan Mai, now a married woman, is the name she uses. She was discovered by her group of friends when they searched Texas bankruptcy records. Records from Apollo’s early 1980s bankruptcy showed that there were files of ex-employees who had applied to the court for royalty checks. Mai was among those former employees.

Willaert & Bunch were looking for Mai due to her involvement in Wabbit“The first game on home consoles featuring a woman protagonist” was “The First Video Game with Human Female Characterization”. This game was first released in 1982 by Atari 2600. Wabbit stars a character called Billie Sue, a girl who’s protecting her carrot crops from rabbits.

“I don’t think it’s any great secret that the video game industry has been male-dominated since its inception, but that doesn’t mean that no women have made games, and I think it’s important to push back against that narrative by celebrating the women who have indeed been there from very early on,” Bunch told Polygon.

Bunch and Willaert heard Mai’s story, which can be found on the Video Game History Foundation site. The video version is embedded below. Mai was born in Vietnam and fled the Vietnam War to seek refugee status. She eventually learned computer programming — and was hired at Apollo after seeing an ad for the job in a local newspaper. She hadn’t made games before, but her concept, which was specifically targeting little girls, impressed the studio. Apollo declared bankruptcy shortly after the game was released. It took between four and six months for Apollo to create.

It’s huge that the world knows her story now; as Polygon wrote in 2021, the gaming industry has had a particularly hard time preserving its own history — even with modern games. Understanding women’s impact on early game history, too, has been overlooked.

“A lot of people out there think that video games are and have always been created by guys for guys, when before the Genesis era games were typically marketed to the whole family, and women weren’t blocked from making them as long as they knew how to program,” Willaert told Polygon. “Women being discouraged from learning to program is a whole other story, of course. But the reason its important to write about women who’ve been erased from gaming history is the same reason its important to write about women who’ve been erased from history in general: to prove that women aren’t, like, biologically incapable of doing these things if given the opportunity.”

Willaert explained that Mai found her was a great relief. The team had thought for a while she may have been dead. “Several people had found a news article about a Ban Tran who was brutally murdered in the mid ’80s,” she said. “I’d sort of come to terms with this being how the story ends, if we could just find confirmation it was definitely the same person.”

Willaert continued: “The ‘Van Tran’ breakthrough was such a major shift my in my reality. Even when Kevin told me he heard back from her, it almost didn’t seem real!”

Mai continued to collaborate with her Apollo colleagues, Willaert, Bunch, and MicroGraphic Image after Apollo was closed. Mai spent a while working on an Atari 5200 port. Solar FoxAfter a career that was short, but very impactful, she quit the videogame industry.

“In Van Mai’s case, here’s someone who not only made video games, but purposely made a game specifically for young girls, a demographic that even today is pretty underserved,” Bunch said. “And it’s good, which honestly you can’t say about most of Apollo’s output!”