Words: Shawn Alexander AllenYou may be wondering, ‘but Shawn! There’s a list of - counts fingers - one, two … TEN great characters I can list! Miles Morales, Franklin from GTA, the NPCs in Horizon Zero Dawn, Travis Scott in Fortnite, and the Carlton dance and… and… I mean, I could go on!’ And you’re absolutely right. Those characters do exist. Some of them are good, great even. But here’s the thing: how many Black people were involved in bringing those characters to life? How many were in charge of those teams? And why does the “Killmonger” haircut have the games industry in a chokehold? The key answer to these questions, and more, is what I said, that Black representation in games is bullshit.First, let me introduce myself. I run an independent game development company that pushes culture forward in games. I’ve worked at Rockstar Games and Major League Baseball, and I’ve released all manner of games, from tiny story-based games to VR home run derbies and, of course, some of the biggest games in the world. The first game I shipped at Rockstar was GTA (ed. Grand Theft Auto, among the best-selling video games ever) IV, after all. Now that that’s out of the way let me give you a brief history of how we got here. Most early games with Black characters in them were sports games, and that representation was all over the place, with characters ranging from pixelated abstractions of the visages of athletes and sports-adjacent celebrities to straight-up racist stereotypes. Sure, there was Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!! (where he was the bad guy?), but there was also Frank Bruno’s Boxing with a character called “Tribal Trouble” who looks like the worst stereotype. He even had a bone through his nose. Sometimes there’s a Black character who was “2P”, as in 2nd Player. Like in the Taito game Crime City, where the first character looks like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon (aka Martin Riggs), the Black “2P” character looked like… a random Black guy in a suit. While they got Gibson’s looks down pretty well, they couldn’t even bother infringing on Danny Glover’s likeness a little bit.For a while, the Black character was always the 2nd Player, and/or a sports player, and/or a celebrity. There was M.C. Kids, an official (and batshit insane) McDonalds game, where the Black kid on the cover is … the 2nd player. At least he’s on the cover? There’s a whole host of basketball games, and even Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff were in NBA Jam. And then there’s fighting games and the beat ‘em up sub-genre where Black folks were once again, the 2nd or 3rd tier character, usually with the white guy up front and center. In fact beyond white characters, the 2nd most prevalent beat ‘em up characters were the Ninja Turtles. Are the Ninja Turtles Black?For me, the first really great Black character in a game was Micheal Leroi from Shadowman on the N64 in 1999. He was a Blaxploitation character who had to travel to hell and kill a bunch of white serial killers to save the world, which I was completely on board with. A Black dude IRL at least voiced him. His co-star, “Agnetta” had the worst wannabe voodoo accent, and with the help of IMDB many, many years later, I found out she was a VERY white woman. Fast-forward and Black characters have definitely gotten better. But not because the industry wanted them to. It took some very key people to move the culture forward and bring about the best Black characters, and it was only the independent games uprising of the 2010s that we really saw a change in WHO makes the games. This is even more egregious when you look at how games REALLY got their start. I found out, with much of the world in the 2000s that Jerry Lawson, a Black programmer and technological innovator, was key in advancing the tech that allowed the games industry to exist as it does today. He was part of the team that made the Fairchild Channel F, the first game console to use cartridges, which paved the way for everything since. He also founded his own company and developed some games, but he saw his company destroyed by the video game market crash in the ‘80s. It seems only fitting that a Black man who innovated in a mostly white industry would get lost in the shuffle because that is the story of the games industry and representation. The fact that the industry made billions on cartridges, and Jerry Lawson’s name only began popping up decades later, is basically the story of American business. (Look up Uncle Nearest) Why does this even matter, right? ‘They’re just games!’ They’re for recreation! Maybe you don’t even pay attention to your character's appearance in the games you play, which is obviously a lie, but you do you. These are popular refrains from folks who claim to be fans of games while being fine with the cultural stagnation of the medium. I’ve even seen supposed Black folks proudly beat their chest about how they are “gamers” and don’t care about representation on message boards and social media, often trying to refute a Black person asking, ‘Where the Black people at?’ I’m not sure who they are trying to gain brownie points with, but that ain’t it. Games are a cultural art form like film, music, comics, animation, you name it. In fact, games, video games specifically, can encapsulate ALL other art forms, which is super special and should be celebrated. For me, as a Black kid who had aspirations as a musician, a comic artist, an animator, and a film director at one point in time, when push came to shove, video games, with their unique interactive elements was the one true artform that could satisfy what I wanted to do with my own art. That's what I do. I make cool art, as I am an artist and writer first and foremost, and I work with dope musicians, including some of the biggest and best indie Hip-Hop artists including Open Mike Eagle, Mega Ran and AIRCREDITS, to make my games even cooler. But beyond me, there’s a small but mighty contingent of independent Black game developers who are bringing the representation to games but not through tokenism or “forced diversity” (I mean, all fiction is “forced” to exist, ya dig?) but through sheer force of will in making their art. A few years back, a budding developer by the name of Derrick Fields reached out to me. They wanted to know the ins and outs of game dev. We had a great conversation, and now, Derrick has their own studio Waking Oni Studio, making games with a fusion of Japanese and Black art. The first release was the very fun Onsen Master across multiple platforms. Very recently I met C.Bedford who is a relatively new face to games. They are an amazing illustrator with a poppin’ instagram and they took their talents to work with their partner on their first game, Sorry We’re Closed, a neon, queer reenvisioning of Silent Hill, and they worked with Okumura, an amazing rap duo with an energizing flow, to make their soundtrack pop. Someone who always seems like a fresh face, even if he’s been around for a minute, is Xalavier Nelson Jr. who is a powerhouse writer and design director (who got his start writing about games at the age of 12 by tricking websites into thinking he was an adult). Between himself and his label Strange Scaffold he’s put out a staggering number of games, with my favorite being El Paso, Elsewhere, a neo noir horror love story where you slow down time and blow away werewolves, vampire mummies and biblically accurate angels as the coolest low polygon Black protagonist this side of Shadow Man. It can be a bit daunting seeing the new talent coming through, because I often wish I had been able to make my own games decades ago. It’s weird to accept that I’m sort of an “elder” in the space, but I am comforted by knowing Justin Woodward, a fellow OG in the games industry, who I met about a decade ago at EVO, the world’s biggest fighting game tournament. He was demoing Super Comboman, an offbeat fighting platformer which had such an amazing art style. But Justin had a lot more going on. Beyond his company Interabang Entertainment, he has his other brands, including the MIX games, where he’s put out some dope retro inspired games including Jay and Silent Bob: Mall Brawl, and Rugrats. Speaking of the MIX, it’s also an event, serving as the premiere way to get indie games in front of the press, and has been for over a decade. The year after I met Justin he was running the indie space at EVO.I could go on and on, because even if we’re a small group, I know and love so many of the Black folks who are sticking around despite the difficulties of our industry. I’ve worked in the nonprofit mentorship/accelerator space for almost a decade now, and the success of Black folks means a lot to me.Something very telling is how several of these titles have this raw, visceral creativity behind them. I’d say directly, my game, Treachery In Beatdown City, as well as El Paso, Elsewhere, and Sorry We’re Closed have this unflinching “Blaxploitation” era style of eschewing the norms of the industry, taking existing genres and making them very Black, where we can fight power structures and win, just like in Blaxploitation films. One day I got a text from a few colleagues telling me that TreaAndrea Russworm, a professor at University of Southern California, was lecturing about Treachery in Beatdown City and its direct connections to Blaxploitation. I felt a very warm feeling that day.This representation, the full spectrum of Blackness on display through writing, directing, art direction, music composition, and more - is how you achieve real, transformation in the industry that has no way of just being turned off because we are here to stay. There was a time where we (the collective Black people in games) were being asked by those in the press, “Will video games have their Black Panther moment” reacting to the massive cultural success of the movie. The answer is complex, and requires a mapping of history. In short, Black Panther was a confluence of many different cultural forms coming together that simply wouldn’t exist without the Blaxploitation era of film. I wager video games are just now hitting their Blaxploitation era. But as we’ve seen with the history of games, they grow quick and fast as a culture, so maybe we’ll see it sooner than later.
