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The Feminist Legacy of Barbie Video Games
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- Опубліковано 15 сер 2024
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We had Barbie Storymaker, but I admit, it was SO confusing and difficult to use. None of my sisters or cousins could really figure it out so we hardly played it. But then my Grandma got Barbie Riding Club and I was OBSESSED! Oh gosh...the nostalgia. I wish there was a way I could play it now!
Try searching the name and rom after it. You may need a rom software for it. My abandon ware is a good site that might have it. Some pc games run with out extra software.
Hey! I had the same experience with barbie storymaker! I remember just randomly clicking things to see what they could do just because that's all I could figure out how to do lol
Barbie story maker was my favorite game 🥲
Barbie Riding Club was the best!! I spend have my childhood playing that game
could it be emulated?
I feel like we're in a sort of golden age right now for games like this, with soft aesthetics, calming social gameplay with problem solving and adventure. The channel "Wholesome Games" is basically all about these, they do a yearly presentation of upcoming games called the "Wholesome Direct" that I really like.
I live for the Wholesome Direct!!!
@@uncrnsprklfrts5720 me too! :)
I remember playing Barbie in Rapunzel as a kid with my best friend at her family's PC, and later Barbie: Horse Adventure at the next door neighbor's house. Unfortunately after that I fell off Barbie and got into Nancy Drew and Style Savvy, which I still love to this day
style savvy is great!!!
Barbie as Rapunzel holds such a special place in my heart. I must have played through it hundreds of times as a kid.
Okay but I love ur shirt
It’s so funny that ppl write off her interactive and their Nancy drew games… those things were so intense for me 😭
ME TOO
Barbie fashion designer was the first computer game I played! This is such a great topic!!
Also omg yes style savvy is such an icon
i love style savvy!!!
How iconic is it? Well, one of the music from Style Savvy was featured in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
@@nicholaslienandjaja1815 thats right! and it was the japanese ver and not the eng ver!
I don't know why I'm so captivated by videos like this, I am a man who never got to play Barbie games! Most games in my household were bought for me, so all we had was basically ''boy'' games. I did enjoy playing dress up flash games with my sister, though. I think I want to give them a try 😁
“Theres some girl games that are just awful and lazy”
Its okay you can say girls go games
As an woman, I still play those games. I do look for better alternatives but there are not many. I'd love if fashion video games improved and became more of a genre that was taken seriously.
Mystery Cruise basically started a life long love of adventure games and visual novels I cannot thank it enough 😭
Style Savvy! The first real game I played that actually put effort and care into making something girls would enjoy! I still love it to this day, and have played every entry, and even though I don't identify as a girl anymore, I adore typically "girly" games ^-^
Omg same!!
yes!!! ive only played style savvy 3 (style boutique 3 here in the uk!!) but its still suchhhhh a lovely and enjoyable experience and i have like 250 hours on it!!
Also, one of the music from Style Savvy was featured in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
I've recently (within the last couple of months or so) found myself hooked on your videos. I enjoy very much your fresh and open-minded perspective on a hobby that I've had my entire life. I'm an avid collector of dolls and cute things in general.
But- I'm also a "gamer girl". One that is a good generation older than you've mentioned yourself in your videos, but a long-time enjoyer of all things button-mashy the same. My parents had an original Nintendo when I was young, and I grew up on Mario, Tetris, Jeopardy the game. They also owned several actual arcade machines, and my grandmother had an Atari I'd play at her house when I'd go visit.
Despite that- being a female in a predominantly male-oriented market has always had it's many faces of sexism and generally unsavory stereotypes. As a female, I've had to "prove" myself time and time again that I'm capable of mashing buttons to manipulate a virtual world just as well as a male.
This video is absolutely correct on many fronts. That females have been stigmatized. That often feminine games are made with significant less care and effort than ones meant for masculine markets. That the industry as we know it is currently within a movement to promote equality amongst gamers. Not just between genders and sexes, but also amidst races, creeds, disabilities, and interests.
This video was so fun and refreshing to watch and I enjoyed it immensely! Thank you for creating it! [Congrats on your sponsor, by the way! You absolutely deserve it and I'm so so happy to see your channel being successful!]😍
I really miss girly games, rarely are feminine games released with praise and the ones that are usually not even for young girls, like Bayonetta or SNK heroines, I miss games like Cooking Mama or Style Savvy, I love that women can be gamers more comfortably now but this has kind off come at the expense of femininity in games when they should really be able to coexist.
yaaaas get that sponsorship!! and personally I think if we had more games that had horses with eyeshadow we’d have world peace
the first barbie detective game is honestly noteable to me for being one of the first games i could feasably classify as horror under my belt. I'm not sure all of it was 100% on purpose by the developers, but there's certainly an uneasy atmosphere about wandering around the abandoned park at night, with the only other characters seemingly popping in and out of existence at random.
I also really enjoyed barbie horse riding club as a kid, they somehow managed to make that pre-rendered looping track feel like an open world map with mysteries around every corner. BOTW whomst?
I have suuuuch strong memories of playing the Barbie Princess and the Pauper CD Rom game as a little girl! Decorating the palace, making stain glass windows, embroidering tapestries... It was a simpler time :') I'm still very into video games now, especially RPGs like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Fallout New Vegas, and bright, colorful games like Splatoon.
When I was 5ish I had the Barbie Sleeping Beauty game from the 90s and I was terrified by the spindle scene, which was apparently a common experience
OH MY GOD I thought that was just me!
I have never played it- can you describe the experience briefly? :D
@@yms4355 you can actually see a longplay of it on youtube if you look up ‘barbie sleeping beauty pc game’
I never played the 90s games because I wasn’t alive yet, lol. But this video still brought me back, Barbie beauty boutique was my SHIT as a kid!!! Matching all the clothes together was part of the reason I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was little haha. There’s still a 6 year old in my brain who gets sooo excited every time a game lets me customize my character
I had a barbie 'laptop' (not actually a computer, it was only barbie games) with all sorts of educational games... I think it was part of the reason I could type and do more complex math before my peers in elementary lol.
that was in the early-mid 2000s, but I can still remember certain games from it so clearly!
Oh yeah I have 2 of those barbie computers! I loved the one I got as a child and I played it quite a lot but it never came close to the amount of time I spent on one of the family pcs playing barbie cd rom games!
I had that too! I totally forgot about it
I was in love with Barbie Pet Rescue (2000) and now I work as a veterinary technician! I don't really play video games a lot but sometimes I play animal crossing.
I unfortunately didn’t play Barbie video games as a kid, but now I wish I did.
I grew up on the barbie flash games (and polly pocket ones too). I was very girly as a kid so the makeover games and dress up ones were my favourite! Congrats on the sponsorship, and I admire all of the research put into this video!
I have always remembered I loved Barbie Riding Club, but Barbie story maker literally made me gasp. You seriously unlocked a memory for me!
I ADORED Barbie Fashion Show too! Played it again recently for a nostalgia rush 🥰🥰
I played Barbie as rapunzel on my pc a lot as a kid and loved it so much! It was the closest thing to a video game my parents would get for me, really wish there were more games like it to play with growing up
I absolutely ADORED Barbie Fashion Show: An Eye For Fashion growing up and I was devastated when the disc got stuck in a laptop and never came out. I played it for HOURS and it was such a huge part of my childhood honestly.
Barbie Fashion Designer was actually preceded by Barbie Fashion Design & Color for DOS! It was more of a dress-up/print studio hybrid than a deeply involved game as you could only really pick a setting (background), dress up barbie (some options only available for certain settings) and colour the result (either on paper by printing out what you put together or digitally in the software itself), but I'd argue it still somewhat counts.
I can't believe no one has mentioned The Daring Game for Girls yet! That Wii game was my childhood. It was mostly made up by a bunch of outdoorsy mini games (scootering, cave exploring, etc.) but it did have reoccurring characters and an overarching plot. I wasn't much good at it (probably too young to understand instructions that weren't spelled out for me lol) but I loved running around collecting things
The daring book for girls was so formative for me as a child, I didn't know there was a game based on it though!
@@aurafluff And I didn't know it was based on a book, how cool!
I had ALL the Barbie games released in the 90s and mid 2000s. The fashion games, story maker, super sports, ocean discovery, hair salon… I LOVED detective Barbie OMG. I also had the super spy game. I loved video games as a little girl, these games were so iconic to my childhood. However, Nancy Drew, American Girl storyteller and dress designer, the first Sims generation, and rollar coaster tycoon were played just as much. It was such a good time for video games!! My mom used to have to unplug the power to the living room to get me to stop playing lol
That barbie babysitting game took up so much of my attention in the past, I think I loved the colors and sound effects. I also had the barbie laptop that had a bunch of games loaded on it
I can still hear that baby giggle in my dreams
As a very girly doll collector who works in tech, and worked for a large video game company for a year, this video was so so so interesting and strangely, moved me. To hear about the intersection of my personal interests and my fields of study and how Barbie worked to merge the two is so interesting, and I can't express how much I personally appreciate this video. Thank you so much for talking about feminism in the video game industry, I feel like this is a conversation that needs to be had much more often.
This was a really cool, informative video! I loved Barbie so much as a kid. I also like that you point out that just because fashion is encouraged for girls to like doesn't mean that it is bad, or that those girls who do love makeup and such should not be given good, quality work. Hell, I'm a grown-ass man, and I would foam at the mouth for an RPG game where you start as an indie fashion dev, and work your way up to prestige!
This is actually really interesting now that I’m thinking about the difference in interests. Last summer I started a D&D game where I played the DM with a single friend (we didn’t know enough people who were free at the time). It was Lost Mines, but early on I found that my friend really didn’t like the combat portions of the game. I assumed it was because there isn’t really a team of people to play with, so for the next dungeon I focused most on puzzles, stealth, and mystery elements and we ended up having a lot more fun with it. I didn’t realize it until now that I essentially changed the experience into being an “adventure game” with an open world, combat only happening as a last resort. I think it might be true about how gender effects play styles, not just in video games but also in tabletop games.
Ocean Discovery was one of my FAVORITE games growing up! I played it over and over. What a blast from the past!
I think another video on the mobile market of "girlie" app games could be interesting. While many are just terrible games if not scams, there's also some pretty good very interesting games marketed towards women. Shining Nikki is a big one with it's center on fashion and outfit design. Puzzle games are huge as well, with too many to name, honestly. I have a number of aunts and female family members who are super into detective-style app games.
I think the sheer amount of these games and their popularity was what ended up with that huge push back a few years ago against phone games as "not *real* games" and people who played on phones being "not real gamers" simply because the majority of these people were women and sexist gaming culture couldn't handle that. Of course, now that fortnite and other FPS games are on phones, suddenly gaming on your phone isn't as looked down upon.
On another note, I'm sad that the "virtual pet" genre, that is also often marketed towards girls, is so dead right now. We had a very small revival with the popularity of furbies and tamagotchi coming back, but there still hasn't been a decent virtual pet game in ages--unless you count petting/feeding minigames inside of farming sims or pokemon games, which these are still very small and nothing like Nintendogs or old school Petz games (back when they were made by P.F. Magic and not just renamed cheap outsourced junk). It's a decent game and toy market, but currently no one seems willing to put in the effort to develop anything actually new, even the newest Tamagotchi color devices haven't changed their gameplay a huge amount in years.
I owe my love of Video Games to those old Barbie Games I had as a kid! Magic Hairstyler, Barbie Detective, Riding Club, etc. They still rank as some of my favorite games today!
the way barbie frequently used imagery of horses with eyeshadow is so wild. why did i see that as a kid and just accept it
The thumbnail is glorious lol. Barbie is the og gaslight , gatekeep, girlboss. Love ur videos
Barbie Fashion Show is a legend in my house… I played it so many times the disc became too scratched to play anymore 😭
I had barbie magic hairstyle and ocean discovery
I find it refreshing just how many people were interested in those lost media videos about the Mean Girls and Clueless DS games. It proves people still have an interest in games about stereotypically "girly" subjects.
Omg I've never heard someone outside of the Nancy Drew fandom acknowledge the HeR Interactive games. I feel so seen
As a child of the 90's I loved my Barbie games along with Purple Moon's Rockett series, ubisoft's Catz/Dogz/Babyz games, and later Her Interactive's Nancy Drew games. The Detective Barbie game was the first game my parents bought me when we got a computer. Great memories of all those games!
I loved Barbie Fashion Show as a kid!! I used to play it obsessively along with Barbie: Pet Rescue (Gameboy: Color version), Secret Agent Barbie (PC) & Barbie: Beauty Boutique (PC). Those were some of my favorite memories from when I was a kid!!
Oh my god this took me back to how I spent hoursss trying to finish the platformer game for Barbie and the 12 Dancing Princesses. The way I RAGED at the little monkey who would come down to steal your gems if you weren't fast enough.
Woah, I just saw Purple Moon and had a nostalgia wave. I need to look that up and see if the game I remember that is so vague I can barely describe it was made by them. (Also while I'm commenting... I bet that part of what added to that first game's success was how it was on a computer and not separate gaming hardware, making it more accessible to first-time/casual/less disposable income gamers.)
I spent so much time as a kid playing Detective Barbie and the Carnival Caper and the Barbie Super Sports game - at a time when I thoroughly rejected Barbie. I LOVED Carnival Caper (could be in part because of my love of amusement parks), I believe that they also could have multiple endings randomly generated each time? It was so cool. Super Sports was also a lot of fun even with some stiff controls at times. Super Sports, Carnival Caper and My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens were my "Trinity" of "Girl Games" at the time
One thing I've wanted to mention is the cross gender appeal of Splatoon. Shooters as a whole have historically been a testosterone poisoned genre, with multiple ad campaigns built around "your mom will hate it" or just having a male focus even when the game is more cartoony (Like TF2 and Fortnite)
Then a shooter like Splatoon comes along. A bright, silly, colourful game with sweet designs where the shooting is just games of paintball and you don't die but get temporarily incapacitated and the weapons are made out of water guns, paint rollers and umbrellas and where fashion is both a core game mechanic and lore aspect (Inkling culture places a high value on looking fashionable). Where a majority of the major characters in the game are girl characters and the Girl Inkling is always the most prominent, default character in the game. In a genre that's so typically coded masculine, it's nice to have a shooter that has a stronger focus on girls!
15:14 I am now convinced that Barbie movie maker, magic hairstyler, and fashion designer were all combined at one point cuz I’m looking at all this and it looks/sounds EXACTLY like the single Barbie PC game I had
THANK YOU for mentioning the Her Interactive Nancy Drew games!! I was obsessed with them and spent time on their forums in middle school, but they're very niche and I don't know anyone besides my sister and I who has played them.
Holy cow im so late to this. But seeing the Barbie fashion designer trailer unlocked a childhood memory like in an earth quaking fashion. I have goosebumps
I grew up in Greece on an island. I have memories of me visiting my cousins house in the big city, they had a more modern computer with CD roms, and one of the games I played was Barbie fashion designer. I loved it. I remember my uncle being like "the shoe color should match the shirt color" - he wasn't 100% right, bit it was the first time I learnt some fashion basics like color coordination. I believe it was 1998-99. I was 9. They didn't have the fabric paper to actually print the clothes, but still it was fun. You brought me backk
My sister and I grew up on Barbie Dreamhouse Party and Barbie Puppy Rescue on our Wii U, they were kinda bad Ngl but they were fun. My personal favorite girly game series would be Cooking Mama, Hatsune Miku Project Diva, and Bayonetta
OMG, I NEVER KNEW IT WAS CALLED BARBIE FASHION SHOW!! I played that game RELIGIOUSLY as a kid, I was obsessed with it and making outfits from the tropical themed outfit set!! Always these black dresses with the star cut out brush to make them look like the night sky, it's such a good memory for me :) this and the barbie spy game were the ones I played the most of.
Barbie Jet Set Style was amazing and the soundtrack was *chef kiss. The soundtrack is full of bops that I sometimes listen to when I do my homework or pretend to do my homework and jam out to the music of my childhood.
I really enjoyed this more then I thought I would! Not that I went into it thinking booo but learning about the history of Barbie video games was so interesting!! I'd love to watch more videos about other doll video games histories or any other "girly game franchises" too I reckon they would be sicccckkk otherwise thank you for the rad video like always ❤️❤️❤️
Highly recommend Ray Mona's channel, she covers lost girly video games and the investigations are lots of fun to watch.
@@cutegamesclub thank you so much sweet ray of sunshine!!! I'm gonna enjoy binging this 😍
There is NOTHING that defined my childhood more than the Barbie DS and GBA games I had as a kid. Secret Agent Barbie: Royal Jewels Mission is ICONIC (even if I didn't know how to play when I was 5 LMAO)
i still love "casual games", story driven games, and dress up games. azalea dolls, dolldivine (rip rinmaru), picrew, meiker games, free platformers (rip flash...), dressupgames...
me and my siblings would take turns trying to beat Barbie Explorer, it was definitely way harder than it should have been 😅 we did eventually beat it though! I also remember having a Barbie Princess and the Pauper game where you did things like find the cats and bake/decorate cakes, I also vaguely remember an ice skating game? Oregon Trail and Nancy Drew were also staples in our house though lol
For PC, in my early years I had Cool Designs, Barbie as Sleeping Beauty, Barbie as Princess Bride, Team Gymnastics, Super Spy, Kelly Club, and Swan Lake. I played the first three I mentioned the most and distinctly having my brother help me with Super Spy 🤣
For GameBoy, I had Groovy Games, Princess and the Pauper, and Barbie Diaries. PatP was my favorite because it actually gave me a challenge at different parts
Barbie Horse Adventures, the Princess & the Pauper game, Barbie Secret Agent...those were my favorite games of all time as a kid. And I'm still obsessed lol.
Soooo glad you talked about Barbie Fashion show! It was also my favourite Barbie game and I couldn’t ever remember which one it was. I was obsessed with making everything that blue shimmery colour because of how funky it looked. Been loving your channel lately ❤
I had barbie Ocean Discovery and Detective Barbie 2 The Vacation Mystery. I remember basically nothing about ocean discovery, but the bits you showed are definitely familiar and nostalgic.
In Detective Barbie, I remember several hidden item puzzles, as well as the bad guy riding away on a jet ski that I always sucked at.
Edit: One other thing was that you could pick a name, but it included EVERY NAME to the point where it was annoying and I always picked an A or B name because I just couldn't deal with scrolling that far.
Now these were both extremely hard in my memory, but I was probably maybe just too young because I was born basically WHEN they came out.
I had Barbie Secret Agent for GameBoy Advance (well, one of my sisters did- I was raised and currently am masc presenting). My brother and 2 sisters played the hell out of it- our 3 most coveted games for GBA were Barbie Secret Agent, Super Mario Bros 3, and Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga. But I have tonnes of fond memories playing Barbie Secret Agent in the basement on rainy afternoons when we were supposed to be doing chores or homework but Grade 3 me didn't care. I have a tonne of respect for Barbie games when they're programmed well. And we often role played it with our Lego (I wasn't really allowed to touch actual Barbie dolls because boy). So yeah, Barbie had a big impact on my upbringing.
By the time Barbie Fashion Show came out, my parents had gotten really strict with what we could do on our PC as they figured any game would give the computer a virus, but my sisters were allowed to play it. I watched from time to time because it was fun.
Not even a mention of Secret Agent Barbie? That was my absolutely favorite game as a kid! I also played the hell out of Horse Adventure and Detective Barbie (and I still have the original disks for all of them), but Secret Agent was the best. It's baby's first stealth game, with dress up elements. It's so great.
Also shout out to secret agent barbie for the character of Becky (sic), the tech specialist who happened to be in a wheelchair. (I only played the first detective barbie, and she's there but we only see her face. not sure about the sequels) Seeing that character literally made little 8 year old me go 'hey why aren't there disabled people in more tv and movies?', and after becoming disabled I realized how special that character was. They didn't have to make her disabled. Some programmer had to go out of their way to make a model just for her wheelchair. But there was obviously someone on that team who knew it was important to have good disability representation.
I'm still an absolutely sucker for any media with a character who's disabled, but their disability isn't the plot. Cardpocolypse is a recent game that does this well.
When I was a young unhinged horse girl, I had this one “open world” Barbie horse riding game that I generally did NOT play as intended… Instead I’d be role playing as a wild horse, and trying to jump into areas I wasn’t supposed, to like to the top of mountains, or off of cliffs…. Also the day-night cycle mechanic was kinda busted, the sun would set after a bit and then Ken would call Barbie’s cellphone, and answering him would reset the day. BUT if you ignored him you got to run your horse around in an eternal night :)
my absolute FAVORITE Barbie PC game was Girl Gotta Groove--outfits, makeup, hairstyles, DANCE ROUTINES, & stage performance (and design, a little, if i'm remembering correctly?!)!!!! if i could find a version of it online *anywhere* i would literally pay money to play that game again LMAO. ofc, the pet rescue one was also a fave. not lying abt the skills required for those adventure games tho--Secret Agent Barbie's upper levels right to the boss fight were the absolute *bane* of my existence in early elementary school LMAO. i feel like i *only* won it years later when i was like, 9 or 10 or something, & finally had the frustration tolerance to finish the game XD
My barbie game was barbie as princess bride, I played the shit out of it as a kid on the downstairs computer. My favourite was designing her wedding dress and getting flowers from the garden to decorate the wedding cake id just baked. I was also very much a bratz and sims kid too. Now I mostly play simulation and sandbox games, and even the high quality dress up games online (dolldivine ily)
I had a friend who had Barbie Fashion Designer. They made me watch them play and rarely let me play myself. My childhood best friend had the Purple Moon game Rockett’s New School. It was the first game I really connected with.
When I was really young, we didn't have a lot of games, as we didn't have a lot of money, so I played some older DOS games that my dad managed to get to work on windows, and a whatever games he manged to download or get from others. The ones I played the most were lemmings, commander keen, word rescue and math rescue & a few I don't recall the title of. Later we also got Sim City and Sim City 2000 and Mario for pc. Also Yoda Stories, but I didn't play it quite that much.
I also played a bunch of demos while dreaming about owning the full game. The best demo was Jazz Jackrabbit, which unlike other demos was fully functional just short, only about three or four levels, but my goodness we played that a lot. When I was 11 we got our first gaming system, a nintendo 64 to share and I played the heck out of pokemon stadium (and later pkmn Snap), and also occasionally star wars racing. For my 12th birthday the entire family got together and gifted me a game boy colour and pokemon yellow, I loved it.
But we still played pc games and over the course of my tweens and early teens I finally mananged to get my hands on the full versions of those demos I so loved. (Except jazz jackrabbit, to my regret, and that 101 dalmations painting game.) The first was Sim Safari one of the best kids games ever made, I adored it and so did my brother. Then I finally got Dogz 4 (ua-cam.com/video/Bhrgwwg16iU/v-deo.html&ab_channel=HamtaroTV which was basically just a pet simulator, it came out waaay before nintendogs, and was charming and fun), after years and years of dreaming about it. I loved that game. I also eventually got Theme Hospital, which I quite enjoyed as well.
I never really got the option to play girly games, and later had no interrest, but there was one exception. My grandparents had a exceptionally girly game that I adored that they installed for me to play. I think it was called Magic Doll House? Anyway you opened up a virtual doll house and then clicked on the room you wanted to explore, which then came with mini games and posibly some customization? There was definately exploration and interaction. There was a little mascot that talked to you occasionally and congratulated you on clearing the tasks. But everything reset once you left the room, and there was never any progression, it did have a tendancy to feel like it was insulting my intellegence which is why I both loved and disliked it. I still played it a bunch but it definately had its flaws.
Honorable mentions for games I played at school, and/or at other people's homes: Sim Farm, Bubble Bobble, Crash Bandicoot (playstation), Spyro (PS), Harvest Moon (PS), Pippi Longstocking, and DX Ball.
Games that were too hard so I mostly watched other ppl play them: CD-man (basically pacman), Kings Quest, Digger, Diggers, and Tetris. (The latter I did eventually play quite a bit when I got older, but I was never that good at it. lol.)
These days I have one PC game Stardew Valley, which is the one I play the most, and occasionally I'll play a game on my DS or Switch, mostly pokemon, but I've also got some others.
Did you ever play on any other devices?
I really enjoyed Barbie Fashion Designer and considering how popular home crafts have gotten I am really surprised they haven't brought it back- I still remember trying to make dresses out of regular paper because we'd run out of the special fabric paper.
I also had the Super NES Barbie game but most of what I remember of that is the screen of Barbie resting with a hugs cast in her penthouse that you got if you got hit too many times in the side-scrolling portion and "died"
I had a couple Barbie computer games growing up. One was a pet rescue game with like less than an hour of actual gameplay. You just get a call about a stray, rescue it, then get to watch it run around in your gigantic animal playplace. Cute, but I wasn't a huge fan. The other was an adventure game where you're riding a horse throughout an old western area, getting items and progressing a "missing person" storyline by solving puzzles. That's the game I loved growing up.
you talking about rdr makes me think of that barbie horse adventures and rdr2 edit on tumblr
i played Barbie Fashion Show as a kid! i honestly adored it to the point that ive hunted down a rom of it to play and relive all the memories. and the soundtrack? it's burned into my brain from all the hours i spent with it.
I had some Barbie Wii games! They were awesome! I also had a really cool "girly" Disney Princess Wii adventure game. Feminine games definitely played a big role in my playing them at all. As a girl, I typically leaned to feminine things with the exception of when I worried of what people would think about me. Some women and girls made me feel like I had to be more tomboy than I was. I wanted the feminine things. Part of this is due to feeling more seen in the representation, I always favored non blonde girl characters over anyone else. The bigger reason though was because it aligned more with my interests. Play at my own speed, customization, and feminine aesthetics were what I wanted and still want. As for as the market today, I'd love more feminine games. It isn't because women and girls need a separate video game, it is because people who like femininity deserve their interests catered to as well. It would also make the gaming world more accessible to girls resonate more to femininity because girls like that still exist. These games don't have to be just for girls, anyone can play, they could also offer non female characters to play as.
I've played a lot of games in my childhood because my uncle introdued it to me and it took me a while to find out that there were Barbie and Bratz video games which blew my mind. I'd play Barbie games based on the movies such as 12 Dancing Princesses and Island Princess. With Bratz, it was Forever Diamonds I think and I liked that a lot more because it had a lot of fun interactions. I play a lot of fighting games along with JRPGs, but I do like to balance it out with casual games. I hope that there'll be a lot more fun doll games because it can sometimes make you feel more connected to them because of how much you've interacted in the game.
I used to play the Barbie rapunzel PC game for hours
My friends and I played so much Barbie Magic Hairstyler, including making all of the Sailor Scouts. 💕
Barbie Riding Club and Detective Barbie were freakin' JAM growing up! I also really liked Ocarina of Time and later on the Tomb Raider games growing up. I lobe adventure and seeing women (and Link lol) be adventurous was really inspiring.
As a detective Barbie connoisseur, can confirm the difficulty jump from 1 to 2. Personally, I think it had to do with Nancy drew & wanting to cater to the same, but older audience. Also, detective Barbie 2 is the star of a tale of some copies having a fatal glitch where you could not complete game due to a particular puzzle supposedly not being fully printed on the disk (game changes every time you play, so the fix was just Star over if you got a roll with that puzzle). Also, I never realized how groundbreaking detective Barbie was in placing her in an active role. That definitely would explain why so many that played detective Barbie crossed over to Nancy drew and bigger adventure games.
Last time I was this early I didn't miss Reel Drama Lagoona
Barbie Fashion Show (fr the 2000s) solos. I replayed so many times, it kinda gave me the inspiration for getting into art.
I think there is deffinetly a market for fashion games now days, there's a bunch of pretty popular fashion apps (like love nikki, helix waltz, cocoppa play, etc), I hope we can get more games like that in actual video game consoles
As a kid, I loved Barbie Genie. I remember rescuing the genies and thinking they were super pretty. I think it used a code system to save? I also played the spy computer game and had a blast following the bad guys in the stealth outfit.
Now I love BotW, Rune Factory, and Persona. Go figure.
i’m so happy that you got yourself a sponsor!!! you deserve it so much, love your content
This video opened such a Pandora’s box of feelings for me and gave me the words to describe something I hadn’t been able to ever. Like, multiple paragraphs kind of unlocking. Definitely getting major hipster syndrome (read: feminist indignance) about the gameplay styles that massively appeal to me (RPG, customization, exploration, etc) being reduced to “girly games” in the west, only to now have a resurgence in games that I love (but did not have the language until this video to understand why I love) IE RDR2, the newer God of Wars, Disco Elysium, etc.
I watch this kind of retrospective media on UA-cam to look for people talking about, in depth, what it is that appealed to us as kids about these games. This video went above and beyond in that respect - we need to recognize the nuances of the gameplay in the things made for girls instead of reducing them to just the “girly games”, especially when the genres that they ushered in (“cozy games”) have terms and standards like any other genre. There are nuances in these games. Barbie exploration games belong in the same category as RDR2 because they are exploration games first and foremost.
There’s a lot more, so much more I want to say about this - about the flip side - about how frustrated I was as a kid that most of the games that had playstyles I liked were about women that fit beauty standards I already could not fit into, a femininity I didn’t identify with, robust social circles I wasn’t allowed into in real life, etc. But that didn’t mean I disliked them or that they are less than or have no place in games. Far from it! I want different stories to be told about women. I also want to continue to see the fashion game formula. They are just as important as FPS are just as important as platformers.
Anyways. Great work, thank you for what this video did for me, and basic respect for girly and girls’ media now!
Loved this format of a mini video essay, would love to see more videos like this and the impact dolls have on other forms of media!
HER INTERACTIVE OH MY GOD THE NOSTALGIA I JUST HAD ..... so sad that the company has gone to shart now :((
YES TO BARBIE EXPLORER! The controls are super difficult and repetitive but I had to work to complete it as a kid and so did my siblings haha. It was definitely dense but so fun!
I had the second detective game but mine was broken so you couldn’t get past a certain area 😭 I also had a Barbie rapunzel game, the horse adventure one and one where you would swipe physical cards with outfits on them into your computer (that one was pretty cool I can’t lie). I looooved Barbie video games as a kid and I wish I could still play the detective ones
I loved Barbie Fashion Show soooo much! When I was a kid it went mysteriously missing and I still haven't found it 😔
I had Barbie Detective 1 and 2 for the pc a long time ago and I remembered loving to solve puzzles and playing as a detective which also gotten me into some CSI video games a bit later on in solving crimes. Feels very nostalgic looking back at it. Around the 2000’s, I have also gotten into the Sims as well and even Harvest Moon.
I still HAVE the Barbie vacation mystery game - I could never figure it out as a kid and then when I tried to play it again a year or so ago I actually managed to make some headway before it would just crash at a specific doorway 🤦♂ I also still have "Beauty Styler" which I've never actually tried to play again and don't remember much about. I do remember having osme other kind of hair/beauty styling game that was supposed to let you import digital photos of yourself to style but we couldn't get that feature to work 🤷♂ and I had what I think was a VERY early release (1994 I think when I looked it up) "Barbie's Magical House" which just sorta let you explore around a house and change decorations and stuff. and GOD the flash games are such a blast from the past, I spent so much of my life on the polly pocket, barbie, diva stars, whats her face sites, I loved them. Funny you should bring up the sims too because I often joke that I basically "play dress up with characters and mash them together like barbie dolls" 😂
I think I was lucky tho - my mum worked in IT and was already something of a gamer (and still is, more so than me, I'd say) so I had my own PC from a young age (getting my mum's old one when she upgraded) and grew up watching her play games and having quite a lot of my own; I never felt much in the way of barriers in the 90s when it came to computers and games as a "girl".
Having not really played any of the barbie games I didn't relate at first but then you mentioned the babysitting flash game. THE FLASH GAMES. Clicking around on the barbie and neopets websites was my childhood.
Looking at the number of beautiful soft games that are accepted now, I think it's wild to think not that long ago, games were either puzzle/arcade types like bubble poppers and tetris or FPS/fighter games. In some ways they've been neutralized more, i feel like the sparkly pretty stuff has been relegated to mobile games. So yeah have we really made progress or are we just back where we were....?
secret agent barbie on the game boy advance is a really cute game. i can tell they really tried their best with the shovelware budget they were given. and i think some of barbie's spy gadgets were MGS references iirc
does anyone remember the barbie rapunzel game where you would paint the things in the castle and there was a level where you had to go through a maze? i vividly remember that one
I played Barbie as Princess Bride over and over as a kid. Secret Agent too, but I always hit a point in the game where the missions were too hard to beat for me. Sometimes I'm tempted to try and redownload it, see if I can't get through it now as an adult. I also recall really enjoying a Barbie Diaries PC game. Good times.
For some people in my own family, the fact that I play games was/is a revelation.
Despite having excellent credentials, I have also been wildly underestimated as a game dev.
So indeed, bias in gaming is still a thing.
A a woman dev in particular there is definitely this pressure that in order to be taken seriously we need to behave more masculine than is authentic.
Women, and those of us in general who identify heavily with the feminine, still need that space so we can be truly recognized for our interests, desires, and capabilities.
Ttat aside...
Anyway, thanks for this video. I never actually played the Barbie games. My obsession as a youth was more along the life/pet simulator games (Dogz, Catz, Babyz, The Sims), and Final Fantasy. But it was very enlightening to hear the history of Barbie games.
Interesting thing to note is that there are various RPGs out there that kind of mimic some of those Barbie fashion and makeover mechanics. Many RPGs (e.g. Fallout, Elder Scrolls) have character creation systems that can be highly detailed. Level of detail can be further augmented by mods. Almost feels like playing dress up, in a classic Barbie style.... before you actually enter the game and start gunning down raiders, shooting down dragons, and fire blasting zombies.. xD
One of my favorite childhood memories with barbie is a racing game for the ps1
You decorated your horse, named it, then took it on trails that all had the same mini games to play
But that's not what was important, my older cousin and brother stayed up one night and beat it while I was asleep .
And I remember waking up thinking well if they have fun with my games why they heck can't I play theirs
And only made me like video games more lol
I liked stereotypically my girly barbie and tv tie in games and RPG games and Zelda too
10:30 I think I had a very similar game as a boy in the early 00s. It came with a bunch of stickers and a Barbie branded/themed printer and was a dress up game that had other stuff but all I remember is the makeup part but it came WITH THE PRINTER AND STICKERS. I don’t remember much but I remember the printer and stickers lol
growing up in the late 90's and early 2000s, i had quite a few computer game discs, i loved them. looking back, many were fashion or nurturing oriented, but i liked the customization and design, the control i felt, like playing with a doll house. also some were fantasy and history based, my main interests. i had barbie, my little pony, littlest pet shop...also a liberty kids game, and a time travel dress up game.
HOWEVER, i also remember playing some of my brothers video games when he came along, which were more skill and timing based. once we had handhelds like gameboy, i played cooking mama and stuff, but i often stole my brother's mariocart, spongebob, and power ranger fighting game.
I think simply including (non ridiculous) female player characters in such games is enough to make me feel included. I never developed great hand coordination or controller skills, and it's hard now i'm older to teach myself. Tried to play skyrim, but it was my first such game and i couldn't stop accidentally looking at the sky...
but i liked killing people with swords! it made me feel cool and strong in a way i normally don't. now i play dnd to meet that need for an outlet.
i enjoy games with simple controls but complex stories, like NITW, and Little Misfortune. Nancy Drew mysteries are good too.