How Many Men Does It Take to Make a Barbie Video Game?

(Image source: Google Earth)

When Stephan Butler returned to California from serving in the Air Force in Japan, he continued his Armed Forces duties as a firefighter in a 24-hour shift, which allowed him to ski every other day at Boreal, by Truckee, in snowy Tahoe. That was where he earned a little extra income as an instructor on the mountain trails.

One day in his skiing class, he met an older Japanese woman. Having taken foreign language classes at the University of Maryland before his deployment, he decided it would be fun to teach her in her native tongue, and the two hit it off straight away.

As night descended upon the tall spruce trees, another teacher approached Butler and told him that an Asian lady had been looking all over for him. Remembering his class earlier, he thought that she might want additional private lessons or possibly hand him a tip for his services. But when they reunited, it wasn’t the slopes that were on her mind. Right then and there, she offered him a position with a new video game startup company. He accepted on the spot.

The first real gaming project that Butler worked on was at LucasArts, where he produced the critical hit Pipe Dream in 1989. He then left for Disney and had a few more successes in Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, which was later remade for the PlayStation 3, Xbox Live Arcade, and PC, Fantasia, and The Little Mermaid, all for the SEGA Genesis.

Out of all his games, he is most proud of an early childhood development title called Mickey’s Jigsaw Puzzles, which received a positive write-up in the Los Angeles Times. While walking to Taco Bell for lunch with a group of other Disney producers one afternoon, Butler explained that the game was only the beginning of his dream for more meaningful learning software. He had much bigger plans to widen the scope of teaching through interactive educational tools.

“I saw [Mickey’s Jigsaw Puzzles] as an introduction to spatial relationships, which would lead to the Earth’s geography, and countries, and states, and all the way down to their local areas.”

As a producer, he felt it was his job not to accept any limitations.

“We were supposed to be the ones that changed the game.”

Unfortunately, the business side of things soon took over, and he felt that Disney was on a downfall. His ambitions were being hampered. He wanted to get more involved in the development side and royalty opportunities. After assisting one San Francisco-based developer for six months, and a Thousand Oaks developer for another six months, he made the decision to start Tahoe Software Productions (“TSP”).

“I knew the Truckee area was where I wanted to live.”

Now back in Tahoe, not as a ski instructor, but as the head of his own software company, Butler made what he called a “pretty good little engine for spitting out map-based games,” which resulted in Rollerblade Racer for Hi Tech Expressions, a publisher he had known from his Disney days, beginning with Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers: The Adventures in Nimnul’s Castle for the PC.

“When Barbie came up, we were a natural fit. Most of my work at Disney was dealing with intellectual property, so we would be well prepared for Barbie.”

Although confident in his branding experience, the fact remained that only one of the 20 people who worked on the 16-bit versions of Barbie: Super Model was a woman.

“It’s true most of our team were men,” Butler admitted, “but I think Barbie is more of an age thing than a gender thing.”

Cindy Walker, an artist on the game, was the single female staffer.

“There is a plant in one of the rooms, and if you look at it close enough you can see she painted a wolf into the leaves. You won’t see it unless you’re looking for it. She did stuff like that a lot, and I really appreciated it.”

When asked how a team made up of men came up with concepts for a game marketed to girls, Butler responded, “Our focus was more on bugs and deadlines. Most of the ‘girl’ related stuff was handled in design meetings.”

He, however, then went on to say that those “Barbie design meetings almost always focused on getting our engine to work right on the cart formats. It was our Achilles Heel.”

“We had an engine that would allow us to make game levels quickly and efficiently. It was a PC environment, and making the transition to cart proved to be more than the engineering side could handle.”

Butler did recall one time when some local children were invited into the studio.

“One of the things we did was involve the local community, including elementary school kids coming for a field trip. They got to see Barbie coming together, and they were all interested, both boys and girls. It was a trade off because more boys were into games at the time, but the girls were interested that there was a Barbie about to be out.”

In the end, the company was able to finish Barbie: Super Model, but the game showed the peak of the TSP engine’s performance.

“We had several projects in the works that any development company would salivate over, but one by one they saw the limits to our technology. One by one, they pulled back. We crashed hard. So hard that, out of 14 employees, only one of them will talk to me today. It was the single most painful moment I’ve experienced. We closed the doors. I dabbled in consulting for a bit, and the story faded.”

Barbie: Super Model was TSP’s last game before going out of business. Butler eventually left the industry entirely and went on to become a home improvement contractor. Hi Tech tapped the all-male team at Bonsai Entertainment of New York to take over TSP’s remaining SKUs, including a Game Gear conversion of Barbie: Super Model. At the time, Joe Moses, the president and CEO of Bonsai, was quoted as saying, “We are very excited about working with Mattel on the Barbie: Super Model project. Barbie is a tremendous license and we know Barbie will be a huge success on the Game Gear” (link). The portable game went unreleased, though a prototype was found and preserved in 2007 (link).

 

When You Wish Upon a Star

Darlene Lacey first became active in game design as a writer and designer on the groundbreaking interactive fiction games Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. She went on to craft the ambitious Star Trek III: The Search for Spock LaserDisc game for Paramount and SEGA, then worked on experimental projects for the CD-i before joining Disney, where she championed unusual game designs and “games for girls,” which she defines as “games for people who fell outside the realm of hardcore gamers.”

Self-described “sole hipster of the game business” Darlene Lacey at her Disney office wearing a thrift store Girl Scouts Brownie tie. (Image source:  Know the Score, a book “that was written to inspire boys and girls to go into the computer game business.”)

It was at Disney’s Buena Vista software division where she produced and designed Dog Eat Dog, the first game to attempt to use an AI neutral network. The pop art gaming experience was entirely conversation-driven and open-ended, with multiple successful endings, which were based upon the player’s goals and relationships with other characters. Players could be male or female, straight or gay. Her work caught the attention of Popular Mechanics and other media outlets.

She continued to push the boundaries at Disney, producing and designing a 1960s hitchhiking adventure comedy game called Route 66, in which the player becomes a hippie, and a farcical adventure game take on the Disneyland Jungle Cruise ride that contained controversial features such as a “children’s mode” in which the sex and violence increased.

“It took everything I had politically to keep these games in development, as they were so progressive and outside of the normal comfort zone for Disney.”

She also holds a patent for an innovative approach to learning called the Learning Map, which she designed for McGraw-Hill.

“Regarding being a woman in a male-dominated business, I have told people over the years that it was always a pleasure working with the guys in the game industry. My first job at AMS (Advanced Microcomputer Systems) was filled with college-aged people, and we had so much fun coming up with ideas for games that had never been done before. There was a saying back then that ‘nobody here grew up dreaming of being a game designer’ because the industry was so new, and we had a great camaraderie. This type of camaraderie continued over the years that I remained in the industry, and I think this was partly due to me never having a chip on my shoulder about being female or looking for trouble.”

Lacey understood that particular games were meant to appeal to certain audiences.

“If we were designing a game primarily targeted at guys, why not design it that way? I believe in equality among the sexes, but that doesn’t mean that every single game has to appeal to guys and gals equally. That being said, my personal game designs were always intended to be not only fun for either gender, but I was particularly interested in creating fun games for people who normally weren’t interested in games because that kind of person, in fact, was me.”

Mainstream games at that time rarely engaged her, so she was looking to make new experiences that she would personally enjoy.

“For years, the industry, as far as I could see, continued to focus primarily on designs for the male market with the idea that if any females wanted to play them, that was fine, but that was not a priority… During my time in the industry, people often approached me, asking my opinion as to whether anyone could successfully create a monster hit game for girls and, essentially, ‘what made girls tick.’ I could never understand why they were so baffled. Girls and women love all kinds of entertainment, so why would anyone think they couldn’t like a computer game? I remember going to a convention where a startup had a booth touting that they had done extensive research into this matter and had come to the following revelation: girls liked 1.) purple, 2.) ponies, and 3.) mysteries. They needed extensive research to notice this? It really made me laugh. I’ve always thought that the business looked at this riddle from the wrong way, from extremes. It seems like the toy industry still does. They thought that the only thing girls liked were super-girly things like hair and makeup. Many girls do like hair and makeup, but this hardly means this is all they’re interested in. I always maintained that designing adventure games with involving stories and engaging media–art and music–would go far in attracting a new audience. However, it was difficult to develop games of this nature because the economies of the time mandated that every title in development had to have a strong chance of being a monster hit, so designing entirely new and different games was not encouraged. Despite this, I had three games in development for Disney Software that aimed to achieve this goal, and management supported me. Unfortunately, the unit went through a major restructuring and all my games, along with most everyone else’s, were cancelled.”

According to Lacey, the industry was not overwhelmingly homogeneous at the time, as Disney Software employed several women.

(Image source: Darlene Lacey)

“We had quite a few: Shelley Miles was our VP and leader, our Director of Product Development was initially a woman, a woman was also in charge of Marketing in the early years, and she had a staff of women. The original three producers were comprised of me and two males. So, I was never isolated in a world of men. I contracted Quicksilver Software as a developer, with Bill and Katie Fisher playing key leadership roles, and on it goes. Bottom line: a lot of women were in the business at that time.”

She, however, noticed the tide beginning to change.

“Powerful consoles geared toward optimum game engine performance were getting ready to knock PC games out of contention, and along with this, ambitious CD-ROM adventure games were on the way out. The focus was on making games with incredible animation, action, and effects, not on storytelling or contemplative games like Myst. It was also during this time that I noticed job descriptions changing to include requirements such as ‘Must be completely addicted to games! Must know everything there is to know about games and live and breathe for games!’ Now the industry was changing from creative-minded people who could have worked in a variety of industries to gamers making games for gamers. This, I believe, began to weed women out of the business. I certainly could not apply for a job and meet that requirement.”

Lacey was friends with Butler at Disney. The two were both big Laker fans.

“I have known very few men who have had an interest in making ‘games for girls.’ They exist, but they’re not the norm. Even when I was producing educational games and print kits for Disney, developers were generally not interested in building them for me because the subject matter didn’t interest them, and titles such as these would not lead them toward making hugely successful traditional games. These were also budget titles, so the interest was lackluster. For what it’s worth, two of those titles earned SPA Gold, selling well over 100,000 units apiece.”

 

Come on, Barbie, Let’s Go Party

In early January 2014, Detroit resident Christine VanHammond auctioned off roughly 30 SEGA Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy prototypes that her father acquired as an electronics buyer for the Troy, Michigan-based retail store chain K-Mart. According to VanHammond, these pre-release copies were brought home to be given a test drive by her and her siblings when they were younger. The most expensive of the cartridges was an August 4, 1993 version 0.1 build of Castlevania: Bloodlines for the Genesis that commanded an impressive $1,889.

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Browsing her entire listings, one game stood out by not being marked with a proper headline. While the others contained the keywords “demo” and “prototype” in their titles, this one had the generic description of “SEGA GENESIS GAME COMPLETE,” despite the photograph clearly showing a beta version. It appeared that the cartridge was bound to slip through the cracks, not only because of this error, but because of the name of the game, Barbie: Super Model.

Most of the auctions ended at a hundred dollars or more, but this one sold for less than the price of a new Barbie doll. After the holidays, it was all I could afford.

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Prototype Specs:

171-5694-01
8MEGA 4EP-ROM M5
IC1 EPROM (Sticker Added)
IC2 EPROM (Sticker Added)
IC3 EPROM (Sticker Added)
IC4 EPROM (Sticker Added)
IC5 PC74HC139P / 826950T / Hnn9228PB Y

After speaking with Butler and Lacey, I stared at my interview transcripts, processing their words. Two thousand miles away from Tahoe, in Northeast Philadelphia, the evening’s snowfall glistened against the pale red-yellow glow of a streetlight outside my window. What had started out as somewhat of a lark, slapping salad stickers over the prototype’s bare EPROM chips, had suddenly brushed against two lives and issues considerably more complex than I had ever imagined.

They both shared with me their passions of achieving something greater. But whether it was companies opting to put gamers in a cage of their own making based on sales figures and self-fulfilling marketing research, or their simply biting off more than they could chew in an increasingly constrictive business, neither saw those visions come to fruition.

I could sense a great frustration from Butler that he had much more to offer. He lit up while talking about his long-forgotten lofty proposals for game-changing edutainment software. He seemed to treat Barbie as a stepping stone to stabilize his small studio and inch him closer to reaching his higher goals. He was trying to work within the system, to make the system work for him.

I could tell that Lacey’s unrealized designs also still burned in her, as she described each one in detail. In fact, even after all these years, the ideas never stopped coming.

“The whole quest to make games for girls got off on the wrong foot and stayed that way for a long time. I’m not sure if the industry has truly gotten its footing yet. I’m always thinking of irreverent-to-serious game ideas for girls and still have a vision for games that are more melded to cinema and pop culture, but I doubt if I’ll ever see that vision come to light. However, my ability to predict is not very reliable, so I remain hopeful.”

After the video game crash, Nintendo arguably not only revived the industry, it fundamentally reinvented it. More and more, through aggressive advertising, video games became a very genderized form of entertainment. There were the few occasional “girl games,” or titles with strong female leads such as the obscure The Guardian Legend, and then there were all other video games–essentially, everything else stocked on store shelves. If you were to look back at the massive library of Nintendo cartridges, you would be hard pressed to find many starring a female protagonist–unless you count the surprise bikini reveal of Samus Aran at the end of Metroid as the Feminine Mystique moment of the control pad crowd.

SEGA’s marketing campaign was even more extreme than Nintendo’s, with one infamous Genesis print ad going so far as to show a hairy hand over a joystick and the caption “THE MORE YOU PLAY WITH IT, THE HARDER IT GETS.”

There’s been a lot of debate and discussion about why female characters have overwhelmingly been regulated to the roles of captive princesses and end-game rewards instead of being actively controllable heroines, why games touting masculine qualities of dominance and violence have overshadowed the rest, but there’s no denying the overt male-centrism in the home console industry that began ramping up in the late 1980s.

Growing up, however, the “girl gamers” in my life enjoyed the Final Fantasy series and the Zeldas for the same reasons I loved them: Satisfying, well-made games don’t necessarily have gender restrictions. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that the targeted audience of this era was always boys.

Donald Coyner, advertising manager for Nintendo of America, told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, “We continue to see the boys as the primary player group”  (link).

George Harrison, director of marketing and corporate communications at Nintendo of America, repeated this refrain three years later, “We tend to do what most publishers do–follow our nose to where the business is. It has been less of an exclusion of women than it has been following our nose to where the business is” (link).

That same year, in an April 22nd, 1994 press release entitled “Video Games For Girls?! Equal Opportunity Video Games!,” Henry Kaplan, chairman and chief executive officer of Hi Tech Expressions, estimated that the opposite sex accounted for 25% of “primary video game players.”

He was vying to win over that number, one way or another.

“Now, however, because video game play is expanding beyond the scope of the male youth-oriented market segment, more software developers in general and Hi Tech Expressions in particular are finding a solid niche in developing gameware for girls.”

He continued, “When it comes to play time, there are significant differences in the way that young boys and young girls play. These differences are inherent, and while we don’t play up to male/female stereotypes, we do recognize that each have their own interests and design our titles to reflect the desires of the respective market segment.”

Kaplan’s Hi Tech had previously released Barbie on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991, which was the second Nintendo game to directly appeal to female players (the first being Capcom’s The Little Mermaid). Now he was ready to usher her into the next generation of consoles.

On Barbie’s 35th birthday, Hi Tech Expressions delivered the unwrapped present of Barbie: Super Model, “the world’s first 16-bit video game devoted exclusively to girls!” Hi-Tech Expressions Vice President of Marketing Martha K. Bradt announced. “In the boy-dominated game market, Barbie is a welcome alternative for girls, who today comprise from one-quarter to one-half of all game players.”

The press release went on to say, in a statement containing no less than seven exclamation points, “Young girls can now interact with Barbie in her quest to become the hottest of super models in Hollywood, N.Y., Aspen, and Hawaii. Challenges, surprises, and bonus rounds await Barbie, and young girls, in each location!”

Just as the “girl gamers” at my school embraced the “boy games,” my mind was open enough to appreciate what Barbie might have to offer, even if I were decades older than its original intended audience.

When I sat down to Barbie: Super Model, the shame came not from playing a piece of software designed and sold specifically with young girls in mind but from knowing that this piece of software was designed and sold specifically with young girls in mind.

For starters, Barbie’s entire in-game existence is portrayed drearily materialistic and isolating. She’s defined and driven exclusively by how she’s told to look. Rather than asking for input from the player on how to style her creatively, the mini-games reward conformity by forcing one to engage in simplistic and quite frankly demeaning picture matching exercises, where an ensemble is shown on a static screen of a magazine cover first, which then must be slavishly reassembled onto the stick figure’s digitized plastic body. Deviating in any way results in lower “fashion points.” Beauty is solely in the eyes of the programmers.

Despite visiting various exotic destinations, there is never any sense of progression, which makes the experience feel like running errands with occasional changes in scenery. Imagine a Super Mario Bros. where Mario knocks out hordes of enemies and leaps over pits to reach the castle. He enters inside, not to save the kingdom, but to powder his nose. Then, when he exits, he doesn’t head onward to the next adventure, he faces backwards to navigate the same terrain again and finish where he first started. Now remove the ability to defend yourself and jump, and you have Barbie: Super Model‘s imaginative core in a nutshell.

The gameplay is so shallow, her world so empty, that Barbie doesn’t play or even exist in it as much as she floats through phases of its meaninglessness, where on the way to her next puppetry session she is perpetually pushed across a path of oncoming cars or indifferent joggers, all the while colliding with pink hearts and more fashion points, the former of which are depleted if her misanthropy is threatened by any non-player character contact. Avid readers of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy will feel right at home with the automated apathy and a pile of rope.

Barbie reaches her nihilistic zenith in the runway routine at the end of each level, as the task consists of nothing more than memorizing and repeating a preordained set of button presses. She is essentially a pretty wind-up toy, with the player merely being instructed to keep her from falling off the edge of the stage and breaking. Some zoos teach chimpanzees complicated sign language to communicate their thoughts and emotions. This game instructs players on how to twirl and raise Barbie’s leg in front of a crowd of ogling male photographers. Kids would be better off with a visit to the monkey house.

Having 5,000 or more fashion points after exhausting the game’s five locales results in a 10-second scene of Barbie on another runway at another vapid fashion show, only this time with dead-eyed Ken standing aloofly to the side like a lifeless corpse propped up in a two-piece tuxedo. If the player should dare to explore outside of the box and come up short on points at the finale, on account of practicing the sin of self-expression, the player will receive a “Try Again” message. Try again until you learn to follow orders and lose your sense of identity. Try again until your soul is swallowed up and spit out by La Prairie and Gucci.

It’s hard to believe that Barbie: Super Model was pushed to girls as old as nine. Without exaggeration, the game can be completed in 10 minutes.

Worst of all, everything takes on a disturbing dimension when you consider that it was created almost entirely by men–even the instruction booklet. The following is a direct quotation from the manual: “It’s going to be a lot of hard work–after all, a Super Model has to look her super best all the time. You never know when a photographer is going to take your picture!” The implication there being that to live up to Barbie’s high standards requires maintaining a perfect body image all of the time. They have a psychological term for that. It’s called body dysmorphic disorder.

(Image source: RetroMags.com)

In its 100th issue, Nintendo Power listed its picks for the best 100 Nintendo games ever made. As a bonus, the magazine included a special aside for the “10 Worst Games of All-Time.” The Super Nintendo port of Barbie: Super Model came in at number two. “It’s an insult simply to be on the same planet as this game,” the staff wrote.

For Nintendo’s propagandistic media arm to single out a game for girls in its list, a rarity on any of the Japanese company’s systems, while simultaneously having a long corporate track record of denying that an entire gender of players actually exist, and that they may want something slightly better than Bébé’s Kids, which landed the number one spot, makes its statement look more than a little disconcerting.

(Image source: RetroMags.com)

The magazine’s original February 1994 review of the game is packed with charged language, nudging at the reader by sarcastically noting how every “red-blooded American game player” dreams of modelling, and more seriously listing as a negative that “the typical player” won’t find anything to like here. Even the game type that the title is filed under, “High fashion doll simulation,” is another attempt to pander to a decidedly male readership, and twist the doll’s head off just a little bit more for their sadistic pleasure.

“Look into a mirror,” the write-up quips as one of Barbie‘s exciting elements.

One could say the same to you, Nintendo Power.

Nintendo’s official take on Barbie: Super Model is no different than most of the other media outlets and online critics. I was clearly no admirer, either. As part of my research, though, I wanted to search out the people who had played this game when they were younger and hear from them. Sifting through the pages of whore jokes and the many declarations of how Barbie shouldn’t be considered a “real game,” I found them. The now grown kids who rented the cartridge every weekend at Blockbuster, those who had great nostalgia for every last dayglow outfit, they existed. They loved Barbie. At least for them, at that time in their lives, the title hit its mark.

Pulling from my own gaming background, I remembered how my cousin was one of those little buggers who used to “borrow” Nintendo Entertainment System games from his friends in the neighborhood, indefinitely, until he passed the cartridge contraband down to me after moving on to the Super Nintendo. One of his hot goods was a copy of Jaws, which, despite its lack of depth and short length, for some reason hooked me again and again. I used to challenge myself to see how many seashells I could collect, if my scuba diver could somehow store more than 99. It was also one of the only titles that centered around the ocean, and exploring the 8-bit depths transported me back to Jersey July beaches brimming with washed up jellyfish on the shore and catching rays beneath the bridge while fishing for bottom-feeding flounder. Many years later, in 2001, I published the Internet’s first (and still only) online guide for the game. I learned then that many gamers absolutely despised Jaws, and especially its publisher, LJN, which turned my adoring digital tribute–and me–into somewhat of a laughing stock.

We’ve all had things that we locked onto and found solace in while we were younger that we still hold dear. We’ve all had different individualized experiences that form our memories and inform our interests even to this day.

Another family member was fixated with Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends for the Super Nintendo. He later pursued a career in engineering. His sister, who couldn’t get enough of Spice World, a Spice Girls music and rhythm game on the PlayStation, is now employed as a computer programmer.

Non-traditional, or causal, games give spaces for more players to explore and become involved and ultimately have a hand in directing the trajectory of this wide open creative field. Art, after all, is the democracy of the people, and the greater its reach and representation, the richer it becomes.

Again, as if my harsh treatment of the game weren’t clear enough, it is important not to ignore the highly problematic elements of software like Barbie: Super Model. Lacey, who had nothing but nice things to say about her former colleague, called the concept of teams of men creating games for girls “dysfunctional.” Like television or movies, games have the power to shape malleable people’s early thoughts and ideas about gender roles. Products like Barbie may have been made simply to cash in on a demographic. Adolescent consumers, of course, deserve far more respect than that, but beneath the money and the marketing, these games may, at the very least, in their own troubling stereotype-enforcing way, have introduced new faces to another world of play and possibilities.

Jaws was my Barbie: Super Model. What was yours?

 

Before and After

Prototype

If this prototype is any indication, Butler wasn’t overstating when he said that most of TSP’s meetings revolved around fixing the game engine. The binary plays best in the KEGA emulator, but there are still plenty of bugs to work through. The code reveals that this build, which was simply called “Barbie” at the time, is dated March 1993 (the game was finished in September [link]). There’s some more ASCII text in the header that reads “MileStone 1.”

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

In addition to not having a SEGA splash screen, the prototype also doesn’t include any legal information on the Hi Tech Expressions screen.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The TSP logo hasn’t been finalized yet, either.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

Here’s where the changes start to become interesting. Besides the missing “Super Model” subtitle, the trademark symbol being moved,  and the unanimated sparkles on Barbie’s dress, we can see that she’s had a facelift on the title screen–the leftside of her face looks as if it’s been devoured by that giant head of hair. Her awkward-looking hand gesture was also nixed, and her high heels were made to look even more uncomfortable.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

There are more major changes on the next screen. Apparently, the game was at one point designed for two players, and there are also options to shut off the music or sounds, though neither plays in the prototype. Visually, the background is different, but, again, Barbie has had some work done, including a nose job and a new synthetic weave. Her dangling earrings are even larger, and the “Players” text doesn’t flash.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

After pressing Select, we see Barbie’s greatest transformation yet. Her face is full and smiling in the prototype, which was changed considerably to show her skinny cheekbones and patented super model grimace in the retail game. Various outlines of objects, scenery, and other people were removed or altered, perhaps so as to not take attention away from the real star. In her thought bubble, Barbie appears to be driving her pink convertible directly over the Hollywood Walk of Fame and into a traffic light. There’s no additional screen to explain the different items that she can collect off the street.

 

Prototype

The driving gameplay is largely unfinished. Instead of being continuously moved forward, the player can actually stop and go with the D-Pad. The other cars on the road are white as ghosts, though, and Barbie can drive right through them if she should so desire. Even more sinister than that is the fact that Barbie can run over pedestrians on the sidewalk (the innocent bystanders were taken to safety in the final version).

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

Some of the buildings and sections of Los Angeles have been modified, as well, for example, the famous Hollywood sign. There are no items or fashion points to pick up in the prototype; the driving simply ends after Barbie’s cruised around enough or when the player pushes the Start button. She also used to have “Health” instead of “Chances.” Finally, Barbie’s pink corporate marquee hasn’t yet been plastered on the center of the screen.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

 

Prototype

Instead of matching Barbie with a magazine cover, the player is immediately taken to a dressing room to put together an ensemble on the fly. Once again, we can see how much time was put into Barbie’s looks, as she underwent more sprite surgery. Her entire fashion wardrobe has different designs, too, including the dresses hanging on the closet rack behind her. Also, the privacy screen in the room leaves less to the imagination, the chair doesn’t yet have a shadow, and the mirror shows less glare.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The Practice Room is completely different. Barbie seems to be doing her best impression of Ralph Macchio in a dance studio while wearing plain old ordinary gray sweats. If you look closely at the wall mirror, you’ll notice a number of oddities, the most apparent being that Barbie doesn’t cast a reflection. Instead of pressing certain buttons, the player can only make Barbie walk around, and she’ll perform the moves herself when she arrives in the designated spots.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The second matching mini-game in Barbie’s makeup room also doesn’t display a magazine cover beforehand. Instead, the player will immediately see Barbie staring into the mirror. Not only have her makeup accessories changed, but her face, once more, has gone through some nips and tucks–in the released game, her jaw was moved up, her nose was shortened, and she was given soulless eyes reminiscent of a Stepford wife.

 

Prototype

Even so, the prototype allows the player to choose from some chilling hair styles that appear as though they cut right through her flesh. Another one makes her look somewhat like Paulie Walnuts.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

After styling her, the appearance that you choose for Barbie will be printed on the front cover of an unnamed magazine.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

Pressing Start afterwards will trigger the fashion show in the prototype. The set, however, is not the same Hollywood runway that you see in the retail version.

Retail

Rather, it looks more like the one shown during the final ending of the released game.

Prototype

Initially, Barbie’s left leg looks as if it’s teetering off the stage and her high heel is resting on top of a photographer’s head. She puts her leg up as her first move.

Prototype

She shows more leg as her second move.

Prototype

But when she reaches the spot to do her third and final leg turn, the game bugs out and crashes.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

If, however, you press Start before controlling Barbie, you can skip the fashion show entirely and move on to the next level, Hawaii. The opening cutscene shows Barbie with a fuller face, nose, and lips than in the final game. Some of the scenery has changed, including the addition of more beachgoers.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

There are no joggers in Hawaii acting as obstacles for Barbie, only beach balls and Frisbees.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

After the makeup room mini-game, the Hawaiian magazine cover shows another backdrop.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The opening to the Colorado level again demonstrates that Barbie was later retouched, although the changes are more subtle this time around. Her mouth and hair are bigger, and her skiing sunglasses look more like traditional eyeglasses. There are several scenic changes around Barbie, including the details of the people in the background and the foreground, but the most amusing difference is how the size of her drink on the table has shrunk.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

As in Hawaii, there are no other people for Barbie to avoid in Colorado. Snowballs and ice patches, which were once animated, serve as her only obstructions. The mountains in the distance aren’t as refined as the ones seen in the final game, and the sky is a darker blue.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The magazine cover that’s published in Colorado has Barbie wearing a brown turtle neck, with an odd red outline and a grisly-looking blue slit cutting through her neck and hand.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

There are no surprises in the opening of New York: Barbie sits in Central Park with a wider face, broader shoulders, and a longer nose, all of which later went under the knife.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The animated water effects in the Big Apple are more primitive-looking, as are some of the other graphics, like the dog playing on the grass. The bike path was once a winding trail.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

Barbie is sporting a blue workout jersey in her New York magazine cover photoshoot.

Prototype

Pressing Start to bypass the fashion show will empty the stage.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

Pressing the button a second time will bring up what appears to be the prototype’s ending, which in the retail version is the “Try Again” screen. True to all of the previous cutscenes, Barbie received further cosmetic work for the final game, most dramatically to her waistline, which was drastically tucked in, resulting in her notorious twig-bodied hourglass shape.

 

Prototype (left) / Retail (right)

The credits show four fewer staff names, with Cindy Walker still being the one and only woman.

Exploring this build, which, despite being dated six months before its official release, already has the game’s formula down pat, revealed no great mystery about where the attention was paid: on aesthetics, not playability.

It bears repeating that this prototype was disregarded by private collectors, and would have most likely disappeared. However, as a cultural artifact, Barbie: Super Model calls out to be archived, studied, critiqued, and discussed like any other title. It warrants nothing less by anyone who is serious about this medium and its multifaceted history.

Download Barbie: Super Model Prototype