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GayBlade
GayBlade is an action role-playing video game developed by Ryan Best and released in 1992.[1] Among the earliest of LGBT-themed video games (preceded in 1989 by Caper in the Castro), and long considered lost, a lone copy was found and exhibited at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin and a recovery effort by the Computerspiele Museum (Computer Game Museum) in Berlin, the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, The Strong National Museum of Play, and the Internet Archive[2] resulted in a playable emulation in 2020.[3] Premise The player battles hordes of homophobic enemies, including pastors, police, rednecks, and skinheads as well as other enemies such as giant crab louses in order to rescue Empress Nelda and return her to Castle Gaykeep. The final boss of the game is paleoconservative political commentator Pat Buchanan, the era's most notorious opponent of gay rights.[4] LegacyAs Best was a hobby-programmer and had conceived the game as a form of protest, it never saw an official release. Instead, he gave it away for free to friends and acquaintances, and only few copies existed. The 2020 Netflix documentary series High Score featured Ryan Best and GayBlade in its third episode, about early RPGs. At the time of production in 2019, Best had lost all copies during a move from Hawaii to San Francisco years before and had been looking for any since then, which he had told the show's producers. As part of their research, the production team searched online, including contacting the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, to seek out footage and copies. During post-production, they heard that a copy of the game had resurfaced during the closing events of Rainbow Arcade, an exhibit at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin, as was noted briefly in the episode and expanded up in news reports the day of the series' release.[5] Best had thus found a long-lost copy before Rainbow Arcade closed in May 2019 and subsequently worked with an archivist from the Computerspiele Museum (Computer Game Museum) in Berlin, the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, The Strong National Museum of Play, and the Internet Archive to preserve the game and provide the game in both an emulated form and as a downloadable version.[3][6] Bibliography
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