GayBlade – The Original Dungeons and Drag Queens
Ever wondered what it would be like to rescue an empress from neo-nazi skinheads and a parody of Pat Buchanan? Of course you have and in 1992 GayBlade set out to provide players with just that.
GayBlade is a point-and-click dungeon crawler RPG created by game developer Ryan Best. Inspired by his love of RPGs, the game came out of Best’s experiences programming another game that didn’t really go anywhere commercially, prompting him to take the 40,000 lines of code he had already written and repurpose them for an altogether queerer experience.
The game starts with having you assemble a rag-tag team of queer adventurers, equipping your lesbians, queers and drag queens with handbags and condoms, before setting out with them to explore the 13 dungeons of GayKeep Castle. Here, you navigate the narrow corridors and tight corners, all while overcoming the combined threat of right-wing grifters and scabies.
If your party gets injured though, you only need to head back to the clinic at GayKeep Castle to heal up before popping into the local gay bar for a few. Once rested, you can then return to adventuring, continuing to traverse the dungeon levels until you finally defeat parody-boss Pat Buchanan and rescue the Empress.
For reference, Buchanan is a former American GOP presidential candidate and advisor to President Richard Nixon who published an infamous op-ed where he said the HIV/AIDS epidemic was nature’s retribution. As of writing, he is still very-much alive at 87 years old.
Upon its release, GayBlade experienced success both domestically and abroad, Best describing in Netflix’s High Score docuseries how he even received letters from players talking about how much the game meant to them. Released in the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the game put power in the hands of a community in mourning, encouraging them to fight back against the hate espoused by groups like televangelists, politicians and the FBI.
Above all else, Best describes how he hoped to offer those affected a brief moment of respite, donating copies of the game to charity:
“I really didn’t think anyone would ever buy the game, and then it started selling hundreds then thousands of copies! I donated a lot of copies to charities because I wanted to help the community. It was all about just—back then, it was during the AIDS crisis, and there wasn’t too much fun, too much good things happening. This was one of the small ways I hoped to lighten, even if just for a moment or two, the heavy burdens and sorrows of many people.”
Interestingly though, the game was lost for a number of years due to what could be described as annoyingly benign circumstances.
During a move from Honolulu to San Francisco, Best packed his masters of GayBlade into a box that was going to be shipped across to his new home. Unfortunately, the moving company never showed, and Best wasn’t in a position to go back and pick up the box himself. This led to a years-long search for the game, Best believing that the game was lost to the annals of history.
Thankfully, about 15 years later, Best was contacted by game-researcher Adrienne Shaw and her team at the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, who orchestrated a widespread social media campaign in search of the game. Eventually, just before he arrived at an exhibition on LGBTQ+ game history at Berlin’s Schwules Museum organised by Shaw and others, he found the original GayBlade game files.
Working with Shaw’s team, along with Berlin’s Computerspiele Museum and the Internet Archive, Best was able to get the game digitally archived. As of 2020 the game has been freely available to the public.
GayBlade is an RPG with an enduring legacy, showing us not only the early days of LGBT game development, but also how queerness has been around since the medium’s inception. Steeped in political activism and community support, the game offered respite to communities suffering from the impact of a disease being left to run rife through them by those in power.
The game also confirms something that all queer game players already knew: mages were gay from the very beginning.
GayBlade is available to play and download at the Internet Archive.
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