GayBlade (found LGBTQ+ PC game; 1992)

Manual cover

Status: Found

Date found: 17 Jan 2020 (Windows)

Found by: Ryan Best

GayBlade is a role-playing game released in 1992 on Windows and Mac. The game is notable for being one of the first centrally LGBT-themed video games to be released - in fact, at the time it was often marketed as the "first" LGBT game, however, this was not actually true, as the lesser-known Caper in the Castro had already been released three years prior. The plot revolves around a party of "Drag Queens, Queers, Lesbians, and others" venturing into a dungeon to rescue Empress Nelda from right-wingers, with enemies including "TV Preachers", "Homophobic Yuppies" and "Hell Crabs". Upon release, the game received significant coverage, and not just from the gay press - it was featured in more mainstream sources such as The Village Voice, USA Today and Der Spiegel. According to the developer, Ryan Best, "my phone was ringing day and night with calls for interviews”. The game was even accused by the "Pro-Life Activist's Encyclopedia" of supporting the "homosexual agenda". In spite of this initial spate of public interest, the game soon faded into obscurity.

Search efforts

The existence of GayBlade was rediscovered by Professor Adrienne Shaw, who had founded the LGBTQ Games Archive in 2015. Shaw interviewed Best in January 2018, who provided more background info on the development of the game, where he described it as a creative outlet for the homophobia that he had faced growing up in Illinois. He also explained that after having written a mainstream game entitled Citadel of the Dead and not making any money from sales after signing a bad contract, he decided to use code from an unfinished project of his entitled DragonBlade to make a specifically queer-focused game. Shaw's efforts in unearthing Caper in the Castro and GayBlade, alongside other documentation and archival work, received media recognition from VentureBeat and Kotaku in July 2018.

Although GayBlade sold "thousands" of copies according to Best, the game was known to exist only thanks to the aforementioned media articles. The game itself had become lost, as Ryan Best had lost the original game files. However, he was able to provide a copy of the game's manual and press kit to the LGBTQ Games Archive, which are available here and here respectively. A few screenshots survived as well that had been featured in articles about the game. Ironically, Caper in the Castro, despite being lesser known than GayBlade, had survived in the form of the original diskettes of the game's creator and was made playable in an emulated form on the Internet Archive.

Release

Best finally found the original game files in 2019, and Matthias Oborski of Computerspiele Museum in Germany helped to make a playable version out of them. With the collaboration of the LGTBQ Video Game Archive and Jason Scott of the Internet Archive it was uploaded as a playable Windows version on January 17th, 2020 to the Internet Archive.

See Also

• Caper in the Castro, another homosexual-themed that had been lost to the public, but found despite being lesser known than GayBlade.

External Link

• CRPG Addict review of GayBlade (along with other games that use the same base system). Retrieved 16 Sept '18