While numerous video games feature queer content these days, that certainly wasn’t the case back in 1989, when female developer C.M. Ralph created Caper in the Castro, the first-known LGBTQ+ video game.
The game was a point-and-click mystery in which players controlled Tracker McDyke, a none-too-subtly-named lesbian detective investigating the kidnapping of her transgender friend, a drag queen named Tessy LaFemme. True to its title, the game was set in the very queer Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, California.
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At the start of the game, LaFemme frantically calls McDyke at 3:05 am to share some information she has about “notorious fiend and villain” Dullagan Straightman. But when McDyke arrives, she finds LaFemme missing, blood on her friend’s car, and a drunken bar owner lamenting a ransom note threatening to burn his bar down.
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McDyke’s investigation — conducted with nothing more than a lockpick, lighter, notepad, magnifying glass, and gun — uncovers a sinister plot involving a murdered undercover cop, a white supremacist bar owner, and a deadly plan to wipe out the gay community.
The game’s opening screen included a note from Ralph reading, “I wrote this game as a labor of my love for the Gay and Lesbian Community.” Calling her game a form of “CharityWare,” she asked that anyone who enjoyed it please donate to an AIDS-related charity. The game also included a pretty snazzy electronic jazz score that gave it a “noir” detective vibe.
At the time it came out, 21,626 people in the U.S. had died of HIV without any substantial assistance from the federal government. Ralph, who grew up at a time when homosexuality was seen as a mental illness and a criminal offense, said she created Caper in the Castro as a way of giving back to the community that embraced her.
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“In 1988, I had moved from Southern California (behind the orange curtain) to the San Francisco Bay Area,” Ralph said in a 2014 interview. “1988 was a lot different than 2014 when it came to how LGBT people and issues were viewed and treated. I was so impressed and grateful for the freedom of the LBGT community here as compared to what I had lived in down in SoCal.”
Ralph initially marketed the game to the queer community with taglines like, “Finally… a game for the rest of us!” and, “It’s not just a game, it’s a gay-me!” It was distributed mostly through a small, LGBTQ-themed bulletin board system (BBS), a largely text-based forum accessible only through a dial-up modem and computer terminal.
She said the game was “embraced and enjoyed [and]… seen as quite an innovative breakthrough” since no one had allegedly ever attempted creating a game with LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
She later adapted the game to a straight-washed version called Murder on Main Street which was marketed to hetero gamers who might not want to play an LGBTQ-themed game. In that version, she changed all the character names and other details, and it was distributed by Heizer Software, a publisher who offered independent software through mail-order catalogs.
For a time, the original game faded into obscurity and was considered lost. But in 2017, Ralph found a version on an original floppy disk. The LGBTQ Game Archive helped Ralph send the disk to Andrew Borman, who was the Digital Games Curator at the Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. There, Borman helped preserve the game for future generations to enjoy.
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The game is now playable for free through the Internet Archive. Clever gamers can beat it in about half an hour (if they take good notes and aren’t shy about using the gun.)
While Caper in the Castro is a charming throwback and an important part of queer gaming history, it also provides a wonderful illustration of just how far LGBTQ+ games have come.
These days, LGBTQ-themed games aren’t just marketed to a small subset of queer gamers through small, hard-to-find forums. Major video game companies offer explicitly queer titles with full-color graphics, complex storylines, and three-dimensional voice-acted LGBTQ+ characters to gamers of all sorts.
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