Gaming historians Kate Willært and Kevin Bunch tracked down and interviewed Van Mai, creator of one of the first female protagonists in video game history. Historians and fans have had trouble locating her since Mai left the games industry after completing her first project. The importance of their work was not fully recognized until years later.
In 1982, the Apollo development studio released a game called Wabbit for the legendary Atari 2600. It was a shooter in which the player takes control of a young girl named Billie Sue and then has to stop rampaging rabbits from the carrot patch. So Wabbit has an important place in video game history: Billie Sue is considered one of the very first known female game characters and the first named protagonist to appear on home consoles.
One Mini-documentary on the Video Game History Foundation Youtube channel introduces Van Mai’s life and journey to Apollo and Wabbit. Previously already set Polygon item the search for May itself comes to the fore. The fact that Mai changed her last name after her marriage caused confusion. For example, Mai’s birth name Van Tran was given as “Ban Tran” by Atari fan sites and then even confirmed by former Apollo employees. With the help of members of the Video Game History Foundation’s Discord channel, Willært and Bunch were eventually able to locate the post-Apollo bankruptcy records, including records of the royalties paid to Mai. This allowed the historians to locate Mai and interview her.
After her involvement in the video game industry at Apollo, Mai earned a degree in computer science and worked in the areas of telecommunications and banking. Mai herself expressed her gratitude for the limitations of early game development: “I learned to write compact code, to write good code”. She explained to historians: “Later, when I went to university, memory and space on the computer wasn’t that important. They had enough of it. I think that’s why I’m a good programmer, because in the beginning you don’t have plenty of room to write its logic.”
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