Four years ago, Polygon published a feature that asked what happened to video game pioneer Ban Tran, a Vietnamese woman credited with creating Wabbit, the first console game to feature a named playable female human character. After years of digging and numerous “Return To Sender” marked letters, the Video Game History Foundation finally found her.
Today, the Video Game History Foundation is sharing the story of Van Mai neé Tran (who was mistakenly called Ban because of an accidental misspelling of her name in the credits) and her work in the video game industry. Mai recounts her time in the early ‘80s working for Games for Apollo, a short-lived video game company based in Texas. There, she worked on Wabbit, a game for the Atari VCS that featured a girl named Billie Sue tasked with saving her vegetable garden from a fluffle of hungry rabbits.
Check out the video essay below:
