Van Mai: A female video game pioneer was lost to history — until now #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth #APAHM #AAPIHM
Almost lost to history, Van Mai created the first human female protagonist in video games. Great story from Polygon:
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.
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