Barbie Fashion Designer was, indeed, both criticized and celebrated even back when it was first released: Jesyca Durchin, a Mattel producer on the game, recalled being told the game was corrupting little girls, even while it was also being praised for supporting computer literacy for girls. On the other hand, it’s also a game that’s been criticized for being prescriptive, encouraging a gendered style of play and unrealistic standards of beauty. Regardless of the millions made off of it, Barbie Fashion Designer is still a game for girls in an industry that struggles to fully support its women. For every one of these, there’s 10 that we’re never going to know about.” There’s another timeline where that never happened, and it just stayed in obscurity. “How amazing that we collectively completely forgot about it, and then it was able to rise back up into the collective consciousness, where it is today. “ 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. The game topped charts and outsold several games considered to be for boys, like Quake. 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. 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. But its hot-pink box stuck out in the software aisle, a place marketers had figured girls didn’t venture into anyway. Yes, it was Barbie, but it didn’t make sense for a computer game to sit alongside actual dolls. Over in the software aisle, retailers pushed back against the title, unsure of where to put it. 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. Float into our DreamHouse: Barbie World is Polygon’s dive into everything Barbie, from her legacy as an iconic toy to her presence in games and movies.īarbie 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.

Human body template for fashion design