The Cutprice Guignol

“It’s 3.05am. You have just been awakened by a phone call from your old friend, Tessy LaFemme. She sounded frantic and asked you to meet her in front of the Gayme Room…she started to say something about getting the goods on the Dullagan Straightman, but before you could ask Tessy what she meant…

…she was cut off.”

So begins Caper in the Castro, a 1989 point-and-click mystery game – and, by all accounts, the very first widely-distributed video game centred on themes and characters drawn from the LGBTQ community. While LGBTQ representation in video games and gamer culture is still a matter of great contention for vast swathes of the industry and its audience, Caper in the Castro represents a touchstone in video game history – even if it was almost lost to the annals of time in the process.

After dabbling in computer programming for a few years, American artist and designer Ralph began developing the game (their first) after they and their partner moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was intended as a love letter to the gay and lesbian circle they had found there, designed using HyperWare for MacIntosh over the course of six months as a way to give back to the embattled community (who were, during this time, grappling with the devastation of the AIDS epidemic which disproportionately impacted the LGBTQ community). Using the proto-forums of the Bulletin Board Systems, Ralph was able to distribute the game via a small collection of LGBTQ-centric forums across a small handful of countries. Releasing Caper as charityware, they made accessing the game free, but instead requested that players make a small donation to an AIDS charity.

Exactly how many people played Caper in the Castro upon its first release is hard to guess; by November 1989, journalist Cynthia Yockey, in a piece covering the game, claimed that only she and a fourteen-year-old boy had actually managed to finish it. Though Yockey mentioned copies of the game being available online via the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau (the delightfully-acronymed GLIB) and in the form of a shareware disc sold at the Pink Triangle Computer Alliance, hard copies of the game were exceptionally rare – an issue that would leave the game almost entirely lost in decades to come.

Ralph re-worked the game shortly after release as Murder on Mainstreet – and by re-worked, I mean de-gayed. The game was stripped of all references to the LGBTQ community, the main character re-imagined as “Tracker MacDuff”, their friend a “model” named Tessy LaRue, the villain a “Dulligan Strongarm” as Ralph aimed to reach a more mainstream audience. The game was picked up for distribution via Heizer Software, which sold indie games via catalogue. But, despite the hetrosexualized retelling, Caper in the Castro remained an iconic, if underground, piece of LGBTQ media, with Ralph estimating downloads at around a quarter of a million of the game’s original version.

But, despite those impressive numbers for the time, in the years to come, Caper in the Castro would soon slip out of playability. The Mac system it had been designed for was replaced by more modern reinventions, the bulletin boards where it had once been distributed were no longer functional, and a lack of physical copies sent it sliding into frustrating obscurity. And that’s where it might have remained, had it not been for a lucky break by Ralph themselves who, when moving house in the summer of 2017, stumbled upon floppy disk versions of both Caper in the Castro and Murder on Mainstreet. With help from Adrienne Shaw, a professor and archivist of LGBTQ video games, and Andrew Borman, director of digital preservation at the Museum of Play, the game was eventually rescued from obscurity and released on the Internet Archive in 2020. Borman’s account of this process can be found here, and is well worth a read if you’re interested in the archiving of classic media.

But what about the game itself? Well, I felt it only right to take a look at Caper in the Castro – which you can play in its entirety here – so let’s put on an appropriately high-necked trench coat, light out cigarettes, and get real noir with it, shall we?

The game (or, rather, “Gayme”, as it announces itself in a cheerful title page) itself takes classic noir tropes and reimagines them through the lens of the LGBTQ culture that so inspired Ralph in the San Francisco Bay Area (the Castro of the title refers to a popular gay neighbourhood of the same name in San Francisco): “you are a world famous lesbian private detective, Tracker McDyke,” announces the game’s introduction. “You are searching for a kidnapped drag queen Tessy LaFemme. What you didn’t count on was stumbling on a larger and more treacherous crime…”.

I’ve got to say, for a game made more than thirty-five years ago, Caper in the Castro still plays pretty damn well. The point-and-click style and era-limited graphics might not leap out as particularly noteworthy, but Ralph’s witty dialogue and LGBTQ twists on noir storytelling really kept me engaged – Tracker McDyke might be one of my favourite leads in a video game ever, if only for her constant asides about the people she meets. “I bet she makes sure she always spells it “wimmin” instead of “women”, she ponders of one side character, while another receives a blunt “sheesh, what a dyke!”.

You wander through various locations – from The Gayme Room to the Red Herring Cafe to the offices of the villainous Dulligan McStraightman – and pick away at a cryptograph until you can get to the bottom of Tessy’s vanishing and the nefarious goings-on at McStraightman and associates. While shooting your way into and out of pretty much every situation you encounter. It’s well worth a play-through, and not just because of its historical value – it’s a legitimately fun game with a fun noirish tone and an intriguing mystery at its heart.

But its historical value really can’t be overstated, and it’s such a joy to be able to access a game like this as it was intended to be played. It really does feel like the labour of love Ralph describes it as in the “about the game” section, and, in that spirit, if you enjoyed this article or gave the game a play – please consider dropping a donation to an AIDS charity (this is the one I chose). If you know of any other early games with LGBTQ themes, I’d love to hear about them below – or even just your encounters with LGBTQ characters or stories in games you’ve loved. Let’s talk gay-ming!

If you enjoyed this article, check out my other longform articles here or my writing on film here! If you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me by buying my books or dropping me a tip via my Support page.

(header image via Internet Archive)