So this is a thing that is VERY VERY much nowhere near done yet, but I want to share what I've got so far. It's a list of as many retro games as I can find which had a trans person on the dev team or otherwise involved in some way, along with a quick summary of who and what they did. It's partially an attempt to counter the narrative that trans people are some New Thing that's only just showed up on the gameing scene and also society in general, which sometimes these kinds of lists can accidentally imply, and also it's just kind of a fun bit of HEY LOOK AT ALL THIS COOL SHIT TRANS PEOPLE DID. I've found over 170 games so far, with quite a lot I'm still to properly go off on.

(Edit: That's over 300 (!) games now. Thank you SO much people who've pointed me at stuff I've missed. I'll be working on trying to play all of these and write up stuff about the ones I haven't really said anything about yet.)

https://dotmaetrix.neocities.org/classictranslist

@DotMaetrix Oh wow, this reminds me that I actually knew one of the people on this list when I was a kid. We both frequented the same online forum. I suspected she was trans because I ran across her deadname, but she made it clear she did not want to talk about that, so I dropped the subject. People didn't talk about such things back then. She had no way to know I'd be accepting about that (and I had no way to know part of that was because I'm nb.)

I wonder if she remembers me. Probably not.

@DotMaetrix Heya! I have another one you might want to include on that! I worked on Champions Online, which launched in 2009.

The only wrinkle there is that I wasn't out of the closet back when we first shipped the game, but I did end up working on it more years after starting transition, and my name's even been updated in the credits!

Thanks for making the list!!! This is awesome!

Also, if it were inclusive to games in 2010, I'd have to mention Star Trek Online, too (same deal).

@DotMaetrix i really shouldn't be surprised, but... multiple CoD games...

@ExpiredPopsicle I've had a couple of people ask me if stuff they did before coming out counts, and the way I see it, it'd be unthinkable to suggest that the Matrix films weren't made by trans people just because the Wachowski Sisters weren't out yet, so yeah, pretransition and closeted work absolutely counts

@ExpiredPopsicle Also that absolutely rules that you got your name fixed in the credits. There's so many publishers out there that just never bother with that no matter how many updates and re releases drop

@DotMaetrix Yeah! It was really awesome of them!

I worked at the company twice. First time was pre-transition, and by the time I came back, I was already pretty far into transition.

But they actually updated my name for me during the gap where I wasn't even working for them, after I emailed and asked them to do it.

And even when I came back to the company later on, *nobody* deadnamed me. I think I only ever heard my old name one time, and that was someone reading from an ancient Jira who didn't realize, and hadn't made the connection. Also they hadn't even known me before.

There were some really wonderful people there. Glad to still have a bunch of them as friends.