The untold history of Barbie Fashion Designer, the first mass-market ‘game for girls’

polygon.com:

Girls don’t play video games, or so it was said. Video game software didn’t fit in with the pink-and-purple glow of the girls’ toy aisle in the 1990s, and so software was for boys.

Of course, that’s never been true: Girls have always played video games and used computers. Video games, though, were marketed to boys, creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and reinforcing the stereotypes that very marketing created.

Barbie Fashion Designer was one of the first commercially successful video games marketed specifically to little girls — a game that’s now credited for kicking off the “games for girls” movement. It’s after Barbie Fashion Designer that major game companies and marketers realized there is money to be made with so-called “girl games.” The success was hard-won, though. Over in the software aisle, retailers pushed back against the title, unsure of where to put it. Yes, it was Barbie, but it didn’t make sense for a computer game to sit alongside actual dolls. But its hot-pink box stuck out in the software aisle, a place marketers had figured girls didn’t venture into anyway. And so Barbie Fashion Designer lingered in marketing equilibrium for a bit before Mattel had an idea: a TV commercial targeting both parents and children.

Mattel sold more than 1 million copies of Barbie Fashion Designer by 1998, a couple years after its initial release, according to Billboard numbers from 1998. The game topped charts and outsold several games considered to be for boys, like Quake.

“[Barbie Fashion Designer] was a bestselling software title in 1996,” said Rachel Simone Weil, video game historian and founder of FEMICOM Museum, which preserves the history of girls’ toys and games, to Polygon. “How amazing that we