Playable Girls in Ancient Worlds: Athena (1986) Opens the Door

After half a century of existence, digital games now regularly portray women in and around the ancient world, but this situation took time to evolve. In this chapter, I propose the transformative years 1985–7 as a point of origin, when the first playable woman from classical antiquity appeared in a digital game. In that period, many developers created fantasized versions of Greek mythology, just as female protagonists began to gain popularity. This chapter examines SNK’s 1986 arcade game Athena, the intersection of these two trends, which would both have lasting effects on how classical receptions in gaming evolved.