The video games of the 90s, although not that old in the grand scheme of things, are a world away from the video games of today in many ways. One of those ways is diversity.
It has now been four months since Apex Legends dropped in on the battle royale obsession. It felt great to play, with a brilliant ping system, an interesting environment and foundations in the Titanfall franchise. It was also a surprise that instead of a standard one-size-fits-all player where all customisable features were purely aesthetic, we got a character shooter instead, with eight, now nine including Octane, diverse personalities filling our screens.
Bangalore, your standard soldier with an attitude to boot, and Lifeline, everyone’s favourite medic who can pull off a peace sign better than you, were standouts for me. Two black women? In a cast of nine? Never! I had never seen a game show off black women like this before. I know, I know – I played the Uncharted games. Yes, I am aware of Clementine and Riley. And no, Orisa certainly does not count. Apex Legends really is different, and even a cursory glance at the not-too-distant past shows why.
My brother is seven years older than me. He grew up through the ’90s, and so my first games were older than I was. Out of the ’90s, how many characters were black? I had a look at this data, which shows sales of most notable games in the last few decades, and then looked into the top five selling games worldwide and in North America to get a good look at trends through the years. As I investigated more and more, the representation of black characters in the ’90s seemed to get worse, with odd creative choices by developers and straight up laughable attempts at diversity, including a personal favourite, Dee Jay.
According to the worldwide data from the chart referenced above, between 1990-1994 there were about 137 characters who be considered at least humanoid and have a ‘race’ as it were. Three of them were black, which is only two per cent. These characters were Balrog from Street Fighter 2, Jax Briggs from Mortal Kombat 2 and the aforementioned Dee Jay from Super Street Fighter 2. That was it for representation during this time period. Despite the opportunity for diversity elsewhere, fighting games were the only genre to create black characters, and I suspect that’s only due to the abundance of black fighters in real boxing and martial arts. Sadly, so many characters fitting in the mold of scary, might reveal themes on violent stereotyping, too.