After 40 years, the creator of one of gaming's first female protagonists has been found

pcgamer.com:

Van Mai, creator of one of the first female protagonists in videogame history, has been found and interviewed by gaming historians Kate Willært and Kevin Bunch. Mai had left the games industry shortly after completing her first project, leaving historians and enthusiasts struggling to find her when the importance of her contribution was fully realized years later.

In 1982, Texas-based developer Apollo released a game called Wabbit for the Atari 2600 (also known as the Video Computer System or VCS). Wabbit is a shooter where you take control of a young girl, Billie Sue, as she fends off marauding rabbits from her carrot patch. It was well-received at the time, and had some impressive sprite work for the VCS, but also holds an important place in videogame history: Billie Sue is one of the very first female game protagonists we have on record, and is the first named female protagonist to appear on home consoles.

Willært and Bunch's search for Mai was covered in a Polygon feature by Patricia Hernandez last year, and the issues that report raises prove startlingly accurate. Hernandez points out that the custom of women changing last names after marriage can lead to confusion for those looking back and trying to match up credits, and also postulates that Mai's coworkers could have misremembered her name.

Both suppositions proved true: Van Mai's maiden name of Van Tran was reported as «Ban Tran» by Atari fan sites and then mistakenly confirmed by former Apollo employees, hindering Willært and Bunch's search.

Aided by members of the Video Game History Foundation's Discord, Bunch and Willært tracked down Texas bankruptcy records from the closure of Apollo, including records of royalty checks paid to programmers like Mai. The