Image: ASCII art of a hand with long pink nails holding a 3.5" floppy. The label on the floppy is the trans pride flag.

Shareware Made Me Trans is my most recent (April 2026) zine of non-fiction writing. It's a personal history of growing up on personal computers in the 90s, finding unexpected avenues of expression and self-discovery in Shareware games.

Told in three case studies, the zine explores the Shareware Movement's milieu of commercial, hobbyist and outsider games, as well as the opportunities they afforded for me to find myself and why modern queer youth are losing access to similar spaces.

Excerpts from the zine are reproduced below.

Foreword

The year is 2026. The American empire is dying. Let me tell you about some of the games I played as a child.

I am a trans woman in her mid forties, but even worse, an xennial: the cusp between disaffected Gen X and too-online Millenial. I was born into a world without an internet, raised on cartoon-length advertisements, learned to write HTML and connect to IRC, watched the dot-com bubble first build and then nearly destroy the commercial web; now I am sick and growing old in the modern dystopia of sports betting, mass surveillance and generative AI. In some ways, my whole generation grew up trans.

At the dawn of the nineties I went with my parents to a store called CompUSA and we went home with a PC. We were a middle class family in an America where those still existed. The computer ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and sat on a desk in the living room of our house. I first went online using a subscription service called Prodigy, where your name was a set of seven random letters and numbers. When you dialed into the network it tied up the one landline your house shared. Like the phone company, you measured your time online in minutes. These PCs were not built to play games, but games colonized them nevertheless, transforming personal computing and transforming the little kid — me — who used her allotment of time on the family computer to explore whatever free shareware games were within my limited reach. We took turns on the computer; I often played games muted because I didn't have headphones.

This zine collects the stories of three of those games. It is a kind of sequel to my 2014 book, ZZT for Boss Fight Books. If you want a more complete story of ZZT the shareware game, what it was and how it worked and the community that grew up around it, read that. My coverage of ZZT in this zine is primarily focused around the games I myself was making as a kid.

Shareware remains a sadly under-documented branch of the history of games. Unlike your Super Marios or Minecrafts, very few of these games were commercial successes. DOOM's (1993) success made it an outlier; most shareware games simply didn't dent the industry enough to have books written about their development.

The full, "registered" versions of many of these games have become lost media: too few people bought them to preserve them. Without some of these weird little shareware games, I might not have turned into a game designer; I might not even have become a woman. In recognition of these games and the pull they exerted on me as I careened through childhood like a confused little star, here are their stories.

On the Amazon class in Sorcerer's Cave

In D&D, a character who collects enough experience points will advance to a higher level, learning new spells and abilities. In Sorcerer's Cave, there isn't any equivalent to this — mostly. If you choose a Dwarf for your party (they can disarm traps), they will be a Dwarf the whole game. However, several of the characters can be "promoted" by a special item, a delicious Potion, growing into more powerful character types. There are essentially two mutually exclusive paths for character promotion, and would you believe me if I said they were gendered?

The pool of characters you can choose from includes a generic Man and generic Woman, and as with most RPGs that track gender, they're rife with ideology. The Man has a combat score of 3 and can carry up to 2 items. The Woman, on the other hand, has a combat score of 2 and can carry only 1 item, but makes up for this with 1 point in magic. Women aren't as strong as men, right? Yeah? But they have some inherent sense of emotional intuition that men simply don't, represented by a 1 in magic. This is Gender.

If you manage to find a Potion, you can use it on a generic Man or Woman to upgrade them to a more powerful, appropriately gendered character. (You could also use it on a Squire character to upgrade them to a Man. There are no girl Squires.) A Man becomes a "Hero," a big dude with a big sword who has a combat strength of 5. Women can't be Heroes in Sorcerer's Cave: the Woman's equivalent is the Amazon.

In those carefree days before Jeff Bezos' online bookselling venture really took off, the Amazon was primarily a creature of fantasy. (And a river.) She was a woman warrior, nominally inspired by Greek legend but the modern version drew equally from the "white jungle queen" trope of racist 1940s pulp, a benevolent colonizer who protected The Jungle and its indigenous inhabitants. In contemporary fantasy, she might appear as the prototypical Strong Female Character, as a feral femme with a loincloth, spear and titties, or as some potently messy combination thereof. Xena: Warrior Princess. Jill of the Jungle. Your quintessential Tall Girl.

Shall I tell you of the weight the Amazon held in the imagination of a 12-year-old me? The individual amazon implied the existence of the culture that would have produced her, a society of women warriors existing outside of patriarchal society, with their own laws and traditions and erotically charged internal struggles. An amazon might spar with her rival using a blade she forged herself, not to gain power or position, but simply to see the other woman humbled. Although she lays humiliated on the ground, the loser grins; both women are covered in dirt and blood. Later they will kiss.

The Amazon in Sorcerer's Cave is a gal in a sleeveless leather top and matching miniskirt with a visible midriff. She has a huge sword and a blonde pony updo, a kind of violent Barbie doll. This is perhaps one of the most trans characters I've ever seen in a video game. I bet she's six feet tall and the Priest complains to the Dwarf about her vocal fry.

On making fetish games in the shareware game-making tool ZZT
CW: Mention of disordered eating

Despite the simplicity of ZZT's graphics and sound (beeps, whirrs and chirps, a PC's native language), the ZZT editor has a surprisingly robust scripting system, allowing for characters who recite dialogue on contact or even extended "cutscenes" like in a console game. It requires an amount of buy-in: if you tell your player a collection of scripted objects is a cutscene and they sit and watch until the end, that's as real as it gets. Given this, the possibilities for genre, subject, and theme in a ZZT game were beyond the simple key-collecting and enemy-shooting of the four official episodes.

As a pre-teen author undergoing the incorrect puberty, my own ZZT games circled the same themes again and again, at first with a layer of distancing irony that slowly eroded like the mountain being pecked away by that bird in Hell: they were fetish games. They revolved around captured princesses, with bare feet and torn dresses, chained in ASCII dungeons, punished and degraded, threatened with torture and hardship and peril. These were, in essence, all manifestations of the submissive woman, the painslut and pillow princess I would eventually become, but could not yet admit to wanting to be, could not yet admit that such a thing could be wanted.

"It was a terrible month... Chained here in this... this... DUNGEON! Being tortured every day... Being treated like a slave... Not being with you... Every morning, waking up in chains... Not being able to move... In these uncomfortable clothes... The pains in my hands and feet from the stone walls and floor... I could never thank you enough for rescuing me!"

This dialogue is from a damsel to her rescuer, her in-game fiancé and the player character. Though these games were about the damsel characters, the bulk of the game's text devoted to them and their trials, invariably the player would actually inhabit some male rescuer: an outside agent who would ruin the fun by freeing them from captivity. These men were handsome, strong, and utterly paper-thin — the same image I saw when I tried to imagine the adult man I would someday grow into, the man that would somehow happen to me.

The damsels all had names like "Crystal" and "Tiffany," names you'd find in Babysitters' Club books. In game, they were represented by ASCII smiley faces, but in "art boards" — full-screen images built from the game's colorful elements — they invariably had thin figures, the opposite of myself, who spent my childhood being shuffled from one diet to another. At some point, I hit a crest in my development where the princesses were replaced by women police officers and secret agents captured by masculine Bad Guys: I was not immune to copaganda as a child.

It would be a long time before I could confront the possibility of making one of these damsels playable. What would it mean to be the captive being objectified, instead of the one objectifying her? Would it be too close to the truth?