The Most Important Barbie Video Video games, Ranked

Earlier than Greta Gerwig exploded some males’s brains with her blockbuster Barbie film earlier this summer time, and a few a long time after toy firm Mattel exploded mother and father’ wallets with the Barbie doll in 1959, online game firms launched a bunch of Barbie video games.

The primary Barbie sport—Barbie, for the Commodore 64—launched in 1984. It strengthened essentially the most sexist concepts one may see embodied by the doll (extra on this later), and all through the years after that, male-dominated developer groups by no means decided precisely what the Amazonian blonde needed to do with gaming. Is she solely a cheerful homemaker, as 1994 laptop sport Barbie and Her Magical Home implies? Or is she devoted sufficient to journey that she’d courageous sharks and stinging jellyfish to go on a date, like she did within the 1992 Sport Boy title Barbie: Sport Woman (made with help from Useless House director Glen Schofield)? There are such a lot of conflicted, clashing Barbie video games, however none of them have been robust sufficient, even with the IP’s lengthy legs, to interrupt into big-budget, mainstream gaming. There are, nonetheless, sufficient B-list Barbies to satirically rank in a slideshow. So I did that.

In case you ask me, Amazonian blondes are extremely suitable with boulders and daggers, and I eagerly await Barbie: Tomb Raider (the toothless 2001 Tomb Raider clone Barbie: Explorer simply doesn’t reduce it). Till then, right here’s what we’re working with.