Here are two screenshots. One is of John Madden Football 1994, and the other is of Madden NFL '95. In every Madden game up to Madden '94, all the players were white; Madden '95, meanwhile, featured a number of Black athletes (including placing Erik Williams and Karl Wilson on the cover). This was, by and large, due to the work of Gordon Bellamy: a Black, gay game developer who worked to make the game better represent the demographics of real-life football.
There's a Netflix miniseries that interviews him about this experience (and other game developers about their own experiences), called High Score. You can check out the trailer here.
This is far from the only thing he's done: he was the head of the IGDA from 2010 to 2012, helping to expand the group's scholarship program, and has held a number of leadership roles throughout the games industry. When I met him a few years ago, he was a college professor: a position which he holds to this day.
His most striking attribute when we met, aside from his relentless positivity, was this... galactic big-picture perspective. A rare clarity of vision. A design choice in a game wasn't an end in itself to him, nor was it a means to an end; it was a means to another means to another means. Every game was building to the next one; every business decision was setting up the future.
To quote him, from the trailer to High Score: "Video games afford you the opportunity just to start over. In games, we all start at the exact same place, to play together, because we're all playing by the same rules."
We met during the midboss years, I lived under an hour away from him (not awful amount of distance in LA) and I remember the first time I visited, he literally had a closet full of incredibly rare, unique and utterly random game goodies, of which he just ust let me pick whatever like I was given the wish to pull from the one piece
He has SO much positive energy and charisma, it's hard to not get swept up! He's the first to make you smile as often as the guy who makes you think!!
If you ever run into him at a game con or like gdc, go say hi if you can you'll have made a friend by the end of it 💪🏻
