The game involved players choosing among three fighters on a quest to save the mayor's daughter, who was kidnapped by a criminal gang known as Mad Gear.
In a sign of Sega's more liberal policies, Poison and Roxy could remain in the international versions, but with less-provocative clothing,[6] and there could be no indication of their transgender status.
(Sega of America later removed a homosexual boss and unlockable playable character called Ash from the international versions of Streets of Rage 3.)
In the 2016 role-playing video game Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, there is an optional dialogue tree in which the cleric Mizhena mentions that she was raised as a boy, indicating that she is a trans woman.
This, along with a reference to the Gamergate controversy, attracted contention resulting in online harassment and insults towards the developers, especially against the game's writer Amber Scott.
[8][7][9] On an April 2016 post, Beamdog announced they would expand Mizhena's story, saying in part, "In retrospect, it would have been better served if we had introduced a transgender character with more development.
"[10] Paul Tumburro of CraveOnline termed this as "spineless and disappointing" stating that Beamdog's founder Trent Oster refused to acknowledge the transphobic criticisms leveled at the game.
[citation needed] The 2018 indie game Celeste had hinted and led to speculation by media and players that the player-character, Madeline, was a trans woman.
[16] The development team worked closely with LGBT charity GLAAD in order to ensure that Tyler's story was an "authentic representation of the trans experience".
[18] Bridget from the fighting game series Guilty Gear was first introduced as a child who was assigned male at birth, was raised as a girl due to the superstitions of her village, and was secure in her gender identity as a feminine-presenting boy.
By collecting clues, she uncovers that her sister has recently come out to her family as a lesbian which caused an issue between the protagonist's parents and the elder daughter herself.
In the 2015 action-visual novel Life Is Strange, you take on the role of Max Caulfield, an eighteen-year-old student and photographer who has discovered that she can turn back time at will.
[3] In the 2017 independent visual novel Butterfly Soup, you take on the respective roles of four queer Asian-American girls who attend their first year of high school and their local baseball club.
The character Damian who is a romance-able option in the game is also revealed to be a transgender male at the beginning of his playable content as evidenced by his dialogue and his use of a chest binder.
Monster Prom while more on the side of fantasy deals with themes like coming of age situations and a queer outlook on specific historical events, as well as Lovecraftian fiction and aesthetics.
In the town of Nulb, a pirate named Bertram begins flirting with male characters in the party and offers a lifetime of love and happiness in exchange for his freedom.
[46] During the game, depending on the route the player takes, may encounter a dating simulation in which the gender of both parties are unclear and a major plot line is the development of a lesbian relationship between Undyne and Alphys.
The Outer Worlds (2019) features companion Parvati Holcomb, an asexual homoromantic, who can develop a relationship with Junlei Tennyson, a fellow engineer, with the help of the player by means of a sidequest.
"[49] In 1988, a creature in Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. 2, the miniboss named Birdo, was described in the original instruction manual as thinking he was a girl and wanting to be called "Birdetta".
In 1992, Enix was ordered to remove a gay bar from Dragon Warrior III, among other content changes, before the game could be sold for a Nintendo system.
[50] The SNES version of Ultima VII: The Black Gate also had to be substantially altered from its original computer edition in order to remove potentially objectionable content, including ritual murders, and the option to have a male or female "bedmate" if the player paid a fee at the buccaneer-run island.
By the late 1990s, Nintendo had largely abandoned these censorship policies, as they felt the inclusion of ESRB ratings on the packaging would suitably communicate to consumers whether potentially objectionable content could be found in the game.
In 2000, British video game developer Rare released Banjo-Tooie for the Nintendo 64, featuring a gay frog bartender named "Jolly Roger."
[52] Since then, games with LGBT themes and expressions have been released on the console itself unchanged, with ports such as Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator and 2064: Read Only Memories listed on the eShop itself.
Nintendo's stance on this applying to their first party franchises however is currently unknown, though the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons made news over its genderless options.
In Phantasy Star II, a musician's homosexuality was edited so that the only acknowledgment of his sexual orientation was his practice of charging all male characters less money for his music lessons.
When Rise of the Dragon was developed by Dynamix for the Sega CD, a transgender bar patron was retained from the original computer edition, as was a gay joke relating to the playable character mistaking his girlfriend for a man with long hair.
[58] In the 1990s, the industry began to make some effort to market games to women by creating software titles with strong, independent female characters, such as those in Tomb Raider and Resident Evil.
[59] In Dragon Age II, this was taken even further by allowing all romance-able party members to be romanced by any gender (with the exception of a particular DLC-only companion), as opposed to the first game's requirement of choosing between two bisexual rogues.
A 2009 academic paper[68] explored the cultural production of LGBT representation in video games and found that factors that would lead to a significant increase in LGBTQ content included: the presence of motivated producers in the industry (those that are personally, politically, or commercially interested in LGBT content), how the audience for a text or medium is constructed (what the public backlash from both the LGBTQ community and conservative groups will be, as well as industry-based reprisals in the form of censorship or ratings), the structure of the industry and how it is funded, and how homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender identities can be represented in the medium.