A female video game pioneer was lost to history — until now

polygon.com:

Video game historians Kate Willaert and Kevin Bunch have been searching for Van Mai for years. They’ve sent letters across Texas, where Mai worked for Wabbit developer Apollo, and searched the internet and all kinds of records. And now they’ve found her.

As it turns out, Mai’s name was not remembered exactly right: For some time, the historians thought they were looking for a Vietnamese woman named “Ban Tran.” With the Video Game History Foundation community on a Discord channel dedicated to finding Mai, a group of collaborators realized the Wabbit developer they were looking for is actually Van Tran, who now goes by her married name, Van Mai. The group found her by searching Texas bankruptcy records; when Apollo went bankrupt in the early 1980s, there were records of former employees filing with the court to get their royalty checks. Mai was one of those employees.

Willaert and Bunch had been looking for Mai because of her involvement in Wabbit, the first video game for home consoles with a human female protagonist. Released in 1982 on the Atari 2600, Wabbit stars a character called Billie Sue, a girl who’s protecting her carrot crops from rabbits.

“I don’t think it’s any great secret that the video game industry has been male-dominated since its inception, but that doesn’t mean that no women have made games, and I think it’s important to push back against that narrative by celebrating the women who have indeed been there from very early on,” Bunch told Polygon.

Mai told her story to Bunch and Willaert, which you can read over on the Video Game History Foundation website. (The video version of the story is embedded above.) Born in Vietnam, Mai came to the United States as a refugee at the end of the Vietnam War. She