GayBlade2.0
download Not only was GayBlade shaping up to be a cult classic amongst gays and straights alike, it was also getting some decent coverage from the press, especially for an indie LGBTQ+ game in the 90’s. There were interviews with USA Today, Howard Stern, and even internationally with news sources as big as Der Spiegel in Germany. It was blowing up, generating controversy (naturally, with religious and conservative groups that found themselves vilified for their hate speech) but equal amounts of praise and admiration for its incredibly direct reclamation of stereotypes in positively promoting the LGBTQ+ community. And then, it all disappeared. Best said on High Score that he lost all his copies of the game, plus the original source code, in a move years ago, and had spent his time since searching for any trace of the game and possible hidden copies. As it would turn out, the docuseries would provide Best with the attention he needed to attract someone who did have a surviving copy of GayBlade. The word got out, and the Schwules Museum in Berlin - the first LGBTQ+ museum in the world - were able to provide Best with an original copy of the game.It was then digitally preserved with the help of numerous archiving groups like the LGBTQ Video Game Archive and the Internet Archive, who also made the game available to download last year. This was a massive victory for the LGBTQ+ community, and gaming. To uncover one of the earliest titles focused on the community, with such an obvious narrative relating to the treatment of queer people at the time, GayBlade is both an instrument of cultural understanding and, in many ways, an empowering tool that could have become a marker of LGBTQ+ representation in gaming very early on.
You may wonder, why did it take so long for anyone to catch on and start searching for GayBlade? Mainly, it’s because High Score was the first account of the story of video games that saw fit to truly include marginalised groups and their importance to the industry. Ryan Best and his contribution as an LGBTQ+ developer was not the only one: there was also focus on the importance of a woman developer in pioneering the massive RPG genre, the black engineer who can take credit for the cartridge system, and plenty more scattered through the series. High Score was the first documentary to really celebrate the way these marginalised developers pushed the boundaries of video games and get their stories into the mainstream. If attempts had been made to uncover the story of the first LGBTQ+ games sooner, we could have been enjoying the revived version of GayBlade far earlier, and Ryan Best would have got his closure on a culturally significant game that he thought was lost. So what next? GayBlade is just one of many LGBTQ+ focused games that was lost in the margins of the gaming industry. High Score shed some light, but there is yet to be a full beam cast over LGBTQ+ game development or its community. The LGBTQ+ Video Game Archive and other such groups are doing excellent work in preserving and promoting titles that put queer characters and stories front and centre. Perhaps with the little push of another big money doc like High Score, there can be proper recognition of the efforts of marginalised communities in furthering the gaming industry.
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