It's May 17th, 2005, in the Los Angeles Convention Center for the first day of the annual E3 exposition, at the time the important event of the year for the video game industry. By the end of the weekend, 70,000 people will have been in attendance - the largest audience E3 will ever see. Four minutes ago, Reggie Fils-Aimé brought on Tina Wood, current lead writer for G4 network and future Executive Producer of New Programming for Xbox, to showcase the US release of the game Nintendogs - a surprise hit for the Nintendo DS in Japan, mostly due to its popularity with girls. Shigeru Miyamoto, a senior director for Nintendo and one of the most well-known names in gaming, is coming on stage to a grand applause. He joins her for a minute before asking if he can "show her a few more tricks" and asking her to "please follow me - backstage." Wood is caught off guard, clearly unsure how to respond to having her presentation cut short and being sexually harassed in front of a massive audience. The crowd seems unsure how to respond either. She recovers quickly, and lets him lead her off stage.
This is fascinating to me. Tina Wood is a very talented writer, speaker, and presenter and yet they only brought her on for five minutes on the showcase of an important game release? In the showcase of a console whose sales have been pushed by girls, they brought on a prominent female industry figure only to sexually harass her and push her out in five minutes? Really? Furthermore, presumably Miyamoto knows that he has to get on stage next year and sell the Wii to everyone he possibly can. He presumably also knows that a typical "hardcore" gamer audience is unlikely to be too interested in an updated GameCube with a weird hardware gimmick and they're going to have to appeal to a nontraditional audience to move units. Yet he still treats Wood like that. Does he think speaking down to and harassing women is appealing to women? Is this an appeal to the men in the audience? Or has he simply not thought about it at all and he thinks this is funny because there's nobody to challenge him?
This is a story about marketing, but it's more prominently a story about women, and about the men they work with. The story I'd like to examine here is similarly a story that is on the surface about marketing, but on a fundamental level is really about women. With that in mind, we can finally attempt to really answer one of the great questions of the ages - what happened to adventure games?
To answer this, we need to briefly talk about the rise and fall and rise again of adventure games. The adventure genre was very popular on PCs in the '80s and '90s. Two companies were particularly dominant - Sierra On-Line and LucasArts. By the late 90s, however, adventure games had lost their position. Games from both companies were receiving less financial success or outright failing. By 2000, both companies would stop making adventure titles, which wouldn't receive mainstream attention again for years. The Longest Journey designer Ragnar Tornquist said in 2006 that "for a publisher, 'adventure' is like garlic to a vampire" - something happened.
This is, on the surface, a story about marketing. There was a shift in the 2000s to market games more towards a male audience, especially with technical improvements allowing more immersive games in the first-person shooter and action/adventure genres while making adventure games more expensive to produce. This change in marketing is a big factor in why adventure games declined.
The article "Sex, Lies, and Video Games" examines marketing trends of the time by examining cover art. The authors find, obviously, that marketing of the time was indeed highly misogynistic. Men were far more likely to appear on covers, more likely to have a role, and far less likely to be sexualized. Women were almost completely absent and very likely to be objectified when they were, either by their role or physique.
This inspired me to do my own marketing investigation. I used the MobyGames database to examine the covers and promotional material of several popular adventure games, most of them from Sierra On-Line1. Most of them aren't particularly gendered. Advertisements largely focus on exploration, world design, puzzles, and plot. They generally either don't feature any characters at all or have both genders present. Of all the promotional material I looked at, only one game, the first King's Quest, only had men. Two others (King's Quest VI and King's Quest: Mask of Eternity) only had men as characters, but had images of their female designers. Sierra's designers typically get a bio on the back of the box and many covers feature designer and co-founder Roberta Williams especially prominently.
Several of the games do have women mostly as secondary though. Those are somewhere on a spectrum from King's Quest V, which has a family being led into the game, to Gabriel Knight 3, where the most prominent image of a woman is seducing the male main character. Games with women in a clearly secondary role or who are objectified include Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996)2, Grim Fandango (1998), and the beforementioned Gabriel Knight 3 (1999). All from the latter half of the decade, and all considered commercial failures. This is our first clue.
Two of them are particularly interesting. You'd be forgiven just from looking at the magazine ads and US cover art for not knowing that Gabriel Knight 3 has a female protagonist. She appears in a small box in one ad and is nowhere to be seen on the US cover. She does appear on the European back cover - smaller than and behind the male protagonist. One of the images on Phantasmagoria 2's back cover features a dominatrix holding a whip. You'd again be forgiven for not knowing that this woman is a prominent character in the game - she's one of the main character's coworkers and fairly involved in his story.
What's happening here? We have two games where the involvement of a prominent female character has been erased or relegated to a secondary role in marketing. Were they trying to join the industry shift to market to men? If so, it was a bad bet. Richard Moss, in a 2011 Ars Technica retrospective on adventure games, noted rising development costs and falling attention and puts the reason down to adventure games being stuck in past design while the growing first-person shooter genre offered better "immersion [and] reward-based mechanics." Tornquist in that 2006 interview seems to agree with this sentiment - he gives the same reasons for why Funcom thought they couldn't do a traditional point-and-click for Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and had to include combat and action elements.
They were wrong. Dreamfall did okay, but the combat was among the most panned elements of the game and they dropped it for 2014's Dreamfall Chapters. And as Moss notes, adventure games continued to do well in Europe, pointing to several games at the time to which we can add quite a few games in the mid-2010s when the genre was revived. Most have female protagonists or prominent female leads.
Who does the first-person shooter appeal to? Most of the literature suggests that men across the board are much more likely to play violent video games. One study looking at the emotional regulation skills of gamers had over half their female group identify as preferring non-violent video games.3 Marketing adventure games to men at the time would invoke Moss's observation. During the late '90s and '00s, it is only those games marketed to a broader audience that do well.
One 2010 study suggests that while neither men nor women were particularly likely to list adventure as their favorite, women are more likely to express a desire for more adventure games. Both say that marketing is important in attracting them to a game, but the paper's discussion suggests and the examination above shows that men are more likely to design for themselves and women are more likely to design for a general audience.
The final piece of the puzzle can be found in a piece author Joy Lanzendorfer wrote for Alta about her relationship with games and with the company Sierra in particular. She talks about specifically being alienated by the industry's masculine shift. She laments the dismissal of everything feminine and comments that "I must have realized on some level that games weren't being made as often for a player like me."
Former Sierra designer Lori Ann Cole makes much the same argument. "Publishers began to cut their losses and curb their less-profitable, less-macho titles. 'Games were marketed for boys.'" Roberta Williams in 1998 lamented "there is such a dearth of games for women. I have never seen the shelves so empty."
We therefore have an answer. Adventure games were part of the broader masculine industry shift in marketing in the late '90s and '00s, which alienated women who played them and didn't appeal as much to men (especially US men) as violent games, especially the first-person shooter, become more sophisticated. Adventure games were at the same time becoming more expensive to produce, which pushed profitability down further and caused publishers to cut funding.
But... at the same time that isn't quite satisfying. Why did they do this? Why did the Phantasmagoria 2 marketing not talk about its female characters, and why wasn't that game pushed as hard as its predecessor? Why would Sierra bury Gabriel Knight 3's female protagonist? And where did everyone who was making adventure games go? To answer those questions, we have to go back and talk about the woman whose presence has been hanging over us this whole time. We have to talk about Roberta Williams.
The story of Sierra On-Line has been told many times before, but in short, Sierra started in 1979 when Roberta Williams, looking for something to play in the same vein as Colossal Cave Adventure, designed the first graphic adventure game, Mystery House. Her husband Ken helped with the programming and marketing and the game was a surprise success, allowing them to found Sierra On-Line and produce more games like it. The success of 1984's King's Quest in particular helped propel the company to stardom.
Sierra was a female-led company that "actively invited female designers." Many of their biggest and most prominent titles were directed by women - Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight series, Lorelei Shannon's Phantasmagoria 2, Lori Ann Cole's Quest for Glory, and many others. All of their directors were given clear recognition on the covers. Many were considered leaders or rising stars in the industry, and they were getting top billing on major projects.
The most prominent name of all is Roberta Williams. Her name is featured prominently on the front cover of most of her titles and in their marketing. Her picture and bio is very prominent on box art, even being the biggest picture on the back of King's Quest VI alongside the title "the reigning queen of adventure gaming." Williams wasn't just an industry leader, she was an industry titan. There are few names in gaming that are as prominent as hers is. Hidetaka Miyazaki, Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Roberta Williams.
But Williams isn't nearly as well known as any of the other men in that list, is she? Neither is Jensen, Shannon, or Cole. Jensen is the only woman I've talked about who continued working in the industry in the 2000s, and Cole is the only woman working in the industry today. None of them have had the same prominence or funding as they had at Sierra. Jensen went on to found Oberon, a studio which mostly worked on licensed and low-budget casual and hidden object games.4 Her last game was a large Kickstarter project in 2014, but it didn't attract enough attention or sales to keep going. "Unfortunately, it became clear that Kickstarter was not a viable way to finance games in future... if we do any more games, it will be with a publisher who fully finances them... it's simpler to write a novel," she later wrote.
What's going on here? Studio closures, changes, and layoffs happen in the industry, but they typically don't end the careers of company leaders and major designers. The industry is infamously unstable, but these were experienced project leads on games with budgets in the millions! This is weird.
There are two games in particular that tell us what happened here. Phantasmagoria 2 and King's Quest: Mask of Eternity. 1995's Phantasmagoria is Williams' favorite project. The original pitch was for a series of three horror games with disconnected plots but similar themes. The first game was controversial, but received and sold very well. Its marketing prominently boasts Williams' name and features women. A woman is front and center on the cover. Contrast with Phantasmagoria 2, released just a year later. The cover features a dominatrix with a whip on the back, and Shannon's blurb is there but far less prominent. There's also far less marketing, which barely talks about the game at all and doesn't feature Shannon.5 The game was less well received, and was commercially disappointing. The third Phantasmagoria was scrapped.
Why on Earth would Sierra push this game so much less than its successful predecessor? Simply, because Sierra had changed. At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was acquired by consumer conglomerate CUC (later Cendant) for $1.06 billion. Williams and the board opposed it, but feared retribution from shareholders if they turned it down. She was told outright that "[Cendant manager] Henry Silverman isn't sure he wants to sell Phantasmagoria."
Changes started to be immediately made at Sierra. Williams, a 20 year-old industry veteran, suddenly wasn't being taken seriously. Managers demanded changes to Mask of Eternity and developers made changes without her input or knowledge. Her own requests were repeatedly ignored. Some days, she came home crying. She liquidated her stock in Sierra and left the company after its release. Shortly afterward, massive accounting fraud was found at CUC and the main studio was shut down. Sierra On-Line was over.6
Around the same time, Sierra's main rival LucasArts announced they were pulling out of the adventure genre. Tim Schafer's 1998 game Grim Fangango was a commercial failure and 2000's Escape From Monkey Island was disappointing. LucasArts let many of its developers go, and that was that.
Except, it wasn't. Tim Schafer's name is very recognizable from his work at the studio he left LucasArts to found, Double Fine. Many of LucasArts' developers ended up at companies like Double Fine or Telltale Games, where they worked on similar projects. They would help revive the genre in the 2010s - Telltale with The Walking Dead in 2012 and Double Fine with Broken Age in 20147. Double Fine had some financial troubles at first, but it eventually found commercial success, especially with Broken Age having a very successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012.
Something weird happened here. Two studios by former major adventure developers had a Kickstarter for a new adventure game in 2012, and both games released in 2014 - Tim Schafer's Double Fine with Broken Age and Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road with Moebius: Empire Rising. One Kickstarter was immensely successful and produced a commercial success that saved the studio and propelled it to become an indie darling; the other was barely successful and the game failed to perform, contributing to the director's decision to retire from the industry altogether. Why? What is it about Sierra that killed the careers of so many associated with it? In a story where so many women's careers stagnate or end after 1998, why were men's careers largely unaffected or even aided?8
This isn't really a story about adventure games, or even about marketing. The real answer to the question I posed at the beginning is that adventure games were fine. Sure, traditional point-and-click adventures stopped doing well in the 2000s in the US and they've never been a particularly dominant genre since, but they continued selling decently in Europe, and a revival was coming in the 2010s. No, this is a story about women. The real question we have to answer is what happened to all the women who were making adventure games?
"The gaming site Old Man Murray gave us an award for killing adventure games because of the cat hair puzzle, as I remember... It's just typical Internet hate. Some guy wrote this scathing article about it, and I still have people who will harass me - people who have never played any of the games - because they've read that article and they think I'm the worst game designer in the world." - Jane Jensen, on Gabriel Knight 3
The industry's masculine shift wasn't just in its marketing. "Women who worked on those games found other jobs," Cole said of the time. MIC concludes that "from the mid-'90s through the '00s, outsourcing chipped [women's administrative] jobs away to nothing." Women have always been marginal in the gaming space, but the industry actively pushed them away in the '90s and '00s both in terms of who played them, who was designing them, and who was working in them. A new "gamer" identity was forming, and there was no place in it for women. Misogyny is the reason that women were pushed out of development, and that misogyny continues to shape the industry to this day.
Sexual harassment is depressingly common in gaming, even today. A 2025 survey found that nearly 60% of participants had experienced some form of sexual harassment while playing online games - but only about half of them recognized it as such. Most commonly, these were in the form of sexual comments, feelings, or requests. Nearly 27% had experienced rape jokes or threats. Of the participants who did not identify their experiences as some form of sexual harassment or abuse, the most common identifier, at almost 18% of the study group, was "typical gamer interactions." In some sense, they're right. A 2019 study found that identification as a gamer is a significant predictor of people who commit sexual harassment in online games.
The gamer identity is heavily tied to maleness and misogyny. The perennial example, and something which hangs over every conversation about women and video gaming, is Gamergate. Briefly, the Gamergate harassment campaign started in 2014 when an ex-boyfriend falsely accused developer Zoë Quinn of sleeping with a journalist for favorable reviews (that said journalist did not write) of her 2013 free game Depression Quest9, along with publishing many private details of her life and relationships. The campaign quickly spread to target feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian and other women who came to their defense. Women were harassed, stalked, threatened, doxxed, swatted, and much more. It was fast, intense and violent.
Gamergate was a lot of things, but above all it was a backlash to feminism and women's participation. Gamergaters were aggrieved about women and queer people breaking into video games and threatening traditional masculinity. This can be seen most obviously in where Gamergaters ended up and the consequences it had and still has on political discourse and movements. Much has been written about the ways Gamergate shaped and was shaped by the then-growing far-right movement and the ways that online spaces and right-wing politics have picked up, legitimized, and developed Gamergate's ideas and techniques10, and a current of hegemonic masculinity runs through it all. Even now, "gamers" often decry and review bomb games for simply including depictions of queer people or realistic women.
You can also see how the gamer identity hurts and excludes women in the ways game companies treat them. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a wave of sexual harassment allegations and investigations against individuals and companies across the industry, both big and small. Among the worst was League of Legends developer Riot Games. Kotaku did a long investigation into discrimination at the company in 2018 and found a severe, entrenched culture of sexism. The problems were so broad and so many that a concise summary might simply be to say if you can think of a discriminatory hiring or labor practice, Riot was probably doing it.
Something telling about Riot is that at every level of oppression, the identity and culture of gaming was present. One woman was told over and over again that her female leadership candidates weren't "gamer enough." The company explicitly looked for gamers for nearly every position, even administrative ones. Women's League of Legends statistics were checked and hiring managers would interrogate them over and over again on what games they played. Riot even offered "cultural mismatches" money to leave within the first year. Riot wasn't hiring women and was committing horrific harassment against the women who were there because they didn't consider women to be "gamers."11
The sexism in the industry has had a demonstrable effect on women in it. A 2023 research study asked women developers about their experiences in game jams and game communities, important places for developers to network and share techniques and experiences. Most of the women said they were typically the only woman on a team, and often one of the only women in the room. Having women as programmers on teams is even rarer. Many women expressed thinking about quitting altogether. There was also a common feeling that if they failed, it would be seen as all women failing, yet they weren't taken seriously by their male colleagues.
It is very clearly misogyny that pushes women out of gaming and out of development. Men constructed an image of video games that explicitly and violently excluded women, and the industry actively participated. What happened to all the women? This happened to the women. Adventure games didn't decline on their own in the early 2000s - the women who made them and the women who played them were forced out of the industry, and the industry has never stopped since.
Roberta Williams built Sierra On-Line to be a company that respected and listened to women. Women were seen as leaders and many were rising stars not just at the company but in the industry in general. When the industry shifted and the Williamses lost control, not even the queen of adventure gaming could get a word in edgewise with her superiors. The pattern of women getting pushed out of what they create is a classic, tragic tale that can be seen across the world, in many different industries.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that simply putting women in more positions of power would fix these problems. Sierra will never happen again - the industry is too developed and too capitalized for anyone to be able to build up a powerhouse company from nothing, especially within just a few years. That 2019 study on sexual harassment suggests that women in an existing, entrenched sexist environment can be just as willing to join in on sexism to save face.12 And in any case Sierra obviously didn't prevent the industry from developing the sexist, hypermasculine culture it has now, and even at Sierra its flagship designers were all white, cis women. In a sexist world, men always have the option to use misogyny to take power from women, either through legal means as with CUC and Sierra or through social means as with Gamergate and Riot.
While one hopes Miyamoto couldn't get away with sexually harassing a woman on stage today, the culture of sexism is still too entrenched for individual women at individual companies to be able to change. If women are going to be allowed in gaming again, there has to be massive systemic changes at every level. Yes, women need to be given positions of power at companies and allowed to lead big projects. But developers also need to be legally punished for discriminatory labor practices. Individuals need to be removed when they commit harassment. Communities need to stop allowing sexism to flourish in their spaces. Women need to be sought out and actively invited in. Governments need to step in and ensure safe work and play environments for women. Women and other marginalized people need secure work and housing guarantees to have the ability to challenge bad actors in the first place. Domestic and industrial abuse and sexual harassment has to be taken seriously by society.
In short, the exclusion of women in video gaming is allowed and invited in because men have power over women not just in the industry, but everywhere in society. It is that power we must break, everywhere we can, for women to be able to flourish. And maybe, if we do that, the next generation of female leaders can stand on stage with a man, after a long and storied career, and be treated as his equal.
Several of these games have GOG and/or Steam screenshots uploaded, but I'm ignoring those since they obviously weren't anywhere close to contemporary.↩
Not to be confused with 1995's Phantasmagoria, and hereinafter referred to as Phantasmagoria 2 to distinguish it.↩
Finding articles discussing this directly was surprisingly difficult, though various papers suggest this should be true.↩
Not to imply that casual or hidden object games aren't "real games" - they are! Just that they're not big, flagship projects on the same level as Gabriel Knight.↩
Also not discussed at the time is that Phantasmagoria 2 is also notable for being an early game to feature a queer character - the main character is openly bisexual.↩
Strictly speaking, Sierra's other operations did continue to operate for a few years afterwards, but by 2004 all of their development studios were shut down (becoming strictly a publishing label for then-owner Vivendi Games) and the company was fully dissolved in 2008.↩
Arguably Dontnod's 2015 Life is Strange, featuring a lesbian main character, was the most important of the mid-2010s adventure games, though they certainly borrowed from The Walking Dead's model.↩
Note that many of Sierra's male designers also left the industry after it's shutdown. But then, why did the shutdown of a female-led studio kill their careers? There is a clear, gendered difference here.↩
The journalist in question never reviewed the game. No, really. A decade of harassment, supposedly over Quinn sleeping with a journalist who did not review their game to get good reviews for a game they released for free.↩
This is such an anodyne tactic now that people like Chaya Raichik have built entire careers off of making and disseminating harassment dox. This is also so often done to trans women on sites like X and Tumblr that we have a term for it.↩
Nobody was ever punished for this. Riot eventually paid out $100 million in a settlement, but they cleared the then-CEO of all wrongdoing and most of the leaders who allowed this to happen are still at the company today.↩
And really, any marginalized woman could tell you exactly how easy it is for women to wield misogyny against other women, especially marginalized ones, to gain some amount of power in a sexist world, even if she'll never be able to use it to be equal to men.↩