It was a seminal time for video games, and Barbie was about to enter the thunderdome.īarbie wasn't Mattel's first foray into games. These games are beloved to this day, universally acclaimed as all-time classics. The Nintendo 64 had just released in Europe and Australia, as well as some of the industry's biggest IPs: Fallout, Tomb Raider 2, Mario Kart 64. Video games were also about to go mainstream. "At the time, it was one of the most valuable brands in the world, like second to Coke," Cynthia Woll, the game's executive producer and my new hero - we’ll get to that - told me. Aqua's Barbie Girl was number one on the music charts. How could a studio working on Barbie be considered underdogs? Skunkworks © Provided by Kotaku Australia This was not what I was expecting.īarbie is a cultural icon. In my research - many nights spent trawling through LinkedIn, dodgy scans of magazine articles and books from the 90’s, and squeezing the GDC Vault for all it’s worth - I’ve heard this group of people called a lot of things: the first indies, bad feminists, experimental game designers, marketing scammers. But in 1997, she says, nobody you asked at Mattel could tell you what this small group of creatives, mostly women, were making in a separate office hidden away in an old rug factory down the street from Mattel’s headquarters. When she started working at Mattel Media, Durchin was my age, in her mid-twenties. I quickly learned that her career went far beyond this game! After working on Barbie as Rapunzel as an Associate Producer, Durchin would become Mattel's Director of Girls Content, be an Imagineer at Disney, and is now a Creative Producer at Universal. She responded to my Facebook post in a global game developer’s group almost immediately. Let's start, as I did, with Jesyca Durchin.ĭurchin was the first Barbie as Rapunzel dev I tracked down. What I didn't expect was tales of decades-long industry feuds, of secretive off-the-books animated films, heckling at industry events like the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and, ultimately, a team's triumph over conventional wisdom. I expected to hear stories about a time before patches, or the pain of developing games in Adobe Shockwave. So I started reaching out to the developers. Skipping to the credits, I was struck by how many women worked on the game.
If you’re planning on doing this too, I should warn you that Rapunzel’s bird sidekick is named Twitter which does colour their interactions, locked together away from other people, with an alarmingly 2020 lockdown vibe.
During one such occasion, I discovered a YouTube playthrough of Barbie as Rapunzel.
I’m now a game developer, meaning my afternoons are sometimes spent researching why a particular type of button reminds me of my childhood (I love this job). Rapunzel with Sullen, the magic mirror who upon reflection seems to be clinically depressed and her bird sidekick, Twitter. I never anticipated that more than twenty years later, this game would hold a treasure trove of insight into my own game development experience. I loved it, I re-played the game endlessly, and I still see the talking magic mirror in my dreams. I'd say Magic Fairy Tales Barbie was a mildly unhinged collection of mini-games that let you decorate cakes, dress up, practice diplomacy with a troll and a dragon, and rescue a Prince. Wikipedia says the game was "designed to teach children early reading and decision-making skills". It's a virtual storybook, similar to the beloved Lion King game. Magic Fairy Tales: Barbie as Rapunzel is burned into my memory. I was squarely within the target audience for the first ever Barbie fantasy video game. I was five, dressed in a timeless bejeweled-satin-homemade-princess-gown-and-feather-boa combo. In the late 90’s, amongst a wave of all-new “Games for Girls”, Barbie appeared on CD-ROM for the first time.
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