When I was seven, there was nothing more important to me than the following:

• Fashion Plates
• Drawing
• Tornadoes
• Barbie

Like millions of other little girls drawn in by glittery pink boxes and impossible perms, I was a slave to Barbie. I wanted everything. I had the Atlanta 1996 Gymnast Barbie, I had her white Ferrari – hell, I even had a Barbie branded playhouse that I got for my fifth birthday, where I had a Barbie themed birthday cake. One Halloween, I even went as a Barbie bride. It’s actually kind of creepy in retrospect. So when Christmas was rolling around in 1996, there was nothing I wanted more than Barbie Fashion Designer. This thing was flying off the shelves, though most PC sales charts published now seem to omit it from rankings. In its first three months alone, it sold 500 000 copies. This was in a market dominated by the rise of shooters such as Duke Nukem 3D and the newly released Diablo. It seems that people will scoff at this in hindsight, placing it somewhere among Imagine Babies in the pantheon of ‘lame games for girls’. There are very few girl targeted games that could still maintain anywhere near that now. Continue reading