The Making of an All-Female Patch
By Guest Writer Loren Petrich

Article Discussion Forum
Discussion of your most and least favorite female-character patches, models, and skins

Background
The Making of a Sex Change Patch
Responses
Bungie Characters
Eidos Characters
Links

Background
I made a patch to some of the human Non-Player Characters in Bungie's Marathon series. This is a series of first-person-shooter games that came out over 1994-96, and not surprisingly, its graphics are more Doom-like or Duke-like than Quake-like or Unreal-like. However, the Marathon series has an excellent backstory that has seldom been equaled in similar games, whether FPS's or their third-person cousins like Tomb Raider. This story is told in of terminal displays that make those of Quake 2 or Unreal look like a total embarrassment.

Marathon 1 came out in late 1994, and in it, you had the unenviable task of fighting some Pfhor slavers who had taken over your colony ship, the Marathon. Furthermore, some of the Marathon's AI's had turned flaky and unhelpful. You get no help from the Marathon's population, those "Bobs", who wander around helplessly and say "They're everywhere!".

Marathon 2 came out in late 1995, and its storyline is that one of the Marathon AI's had taken over the Pfhor ship and dragged you halfway across the Galaxy in search of allies against the Pfhor, where you have the task of searching through some ancient ruins for anything on those would-be allies. But the Pfhor show up and make life interesting, while the Bobs are armed and more talkative -- and will turn against you if you attack them.

Marathon Infinity came out in late 1996, and it was essentially an expansion pack for Marathon 2 with some nice editing tools added on. It featured an extremely weird scenario featuring multiple timelines. Also in 1996 was the Win95 version of Marathon 2; all the other releases were MacOS-only. By then, however, Bungie had moved to some other projects, such as the Myth series and its upcoming games Oni and Halo.

The Making of a Sex Change Patch
I had gotten the idea of a sex-change patch from seeing some others' efforts in that area, and I wanted to do a dignified sex-change patch. Some of the others featured women in bikinis -- or less -- which I felt was an inappropriate sort of clothing for the part. However, one person's Babs were actually not too bad.

I decided to play it straight, since I was relatively inexperienced in such things, so I decided to model my female Bobs after the Marathon 2 originals. I used Poser 2's "Female Business Suit" model, and repainted some of that model's skin file to give it a "Bob" look. I then replaced the feet (originally high-heels) with flat-soled shoes, added boot sleeves, a wig, a gun, a belt, and a monocle, and I then composed the various poses (standing, running, firing gun, being hit, dying, dead). I took snapshots of these poses from various angles, and then painstakingly retouched them in an attempt to eliminate rendering bugs. I also added gunflare and blood splatters. The result was nearly 90 sprite frames, complete with correct views from all directions (the originals, like many of the other Marathon sprite sets, have mirror images for different directions, causing absurdities like handedness changes).

The wig I had selected because it seemed the most practical of a set of female wig models; most of the others I could find have long, flowing hair. I had originally wanted a ponytail, but I could not find a wig model with one. So this wig remains my main concession to stereotypical feminine fashion.

The results contain both some of the original Bob sprites and corresponding ones that I had created.

For the sounds, I asked several times for a female volunteer to record female-Bob sounds, but none stepped forward. So I resorted to the expedient of pitch-shifting the original Bob sounds.

Responses
The responses I've gotten have usually been positive, with some appreciating me for daring to create a non-bimbo patch. However, I got one response to the effect that I was hiding those characters femininity, and I even got a response from someone who claimed that using them made her feel like she was shooting her mother (!). I've gotten some criticism for some of the poses I had used; however, the poses I had used were an effort to imitate the poses of the originals, and also to get around some Poser model bugs, particularly in the shoulders. I had to spread the arms a bit for that.

Bungie Characters
I will now turn to a broader issue involving Bungie's games; Bungie has produced several games -- not only the Marathon series, but also Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, and the Myth series, and is now working on Oni and Halo. The games that Bungie has released so far have been very short on female characters, with one result being a colony ship seemingly having an all-male population. However, I doubt that that is much worse than games featuring insulting portrayals of women. Consider the case of the late Dr. Isaac Asimov, the famous science-fiction and science writer. He had been criticized for not including women in many of his earlier stories; his reason was that he was not sure how to write them in a dignified way. Most of the portrayals he had seen in his 1930's adolescence were of women being captured and placed in some great -- and unspecified -- danger by the villains, only to be rescued by the heroes. It seemed to him that the women were simply being transferred from one harem to another. Also notable of back then, thosee stories had had an abundance of ethnic stereotypes, which was perhaps a related phenomenon.

However, Bungie will be introducing a female lead character in Oni, and so far, Bungie has refused to dress her in scanty outfits or try to make her a sex symbol, despite the obvious temptation to do so in a third-person game. Not surprisingly, Konoko (that character) has gotten a lot of comparisons to Lara Croft, and it appears that Bungie will be avoiding doing that character's more obnoxious features.

Eidos Characters
About Lara Croft herself, I agree that those scantily-clad poses and other sex-symbol stuff are rather tacky and out-of-character; however, I will give Core/Eidos some credit for halfway good taste in clothing. Although Lara is often underdressed for the environments she visits, aside from that, her clothing is often fairly sensible. For example, she wears hiking boots instead of high heels, and her "classic" outfit of tank top and shorts is not very much different from what I've seen many women wear in hot weather.

The Tomb Raider series has another notable female character, but one that is IMO done correctly. The big villain of Tomb Raider 1 is Jacqueline Natla, who runs a technology business which she has started to diversify into the production of a race of mutants. She seems much like Elexis Sinclaire of SiN, but unlike Ms. Sinclaire, Ms. Natla is actually dressed the way one would expect a businesswoman to dress.

Unlike some other game companies, the creators of the Tomb Raider series have been unwilling to offer editing tools or details on its file formats. But that has not stopped the creators of the "Nude Raider" patches, which make Lara wear essentially nothing. In fact, there have been some sites that have featured Nude Raider patches and artwork, though Eidos/Core has sued some of them and has even shut one of them down (www.nuderaider.com). That seems rather curious given all the official Lara artwork that approaches Nude Raider.

About Lara Croft patches, I've thought of creating a Lara Croft Bob patch for the Marathon series, but my previous patch had been time-consuming and exhausting to make, so I probably will not do so. But if I ever do anything like that, these Laras will have a physique much like that of my female Bobs.

I've done some other patches, such as a "Nomad S'pht" patch that makes these Marathon-series aliens look more robotic, and a "Lh'owon Landscapes" patch that turns some of the landscapes into a realistic-looking rocky desert. However, my greatest success so far has been in writing various game utilities for the Marathon series and Quake.

Links:

Bungie itself: http://www.bungie.com

Some big fan sites: http://www.bungie.org
http://www.marathon.org

A place get the Win95 Marathon 2 demo: http://www.download.com

Marathon's Story Page: http://smd033.smd.tcd.ie
http://marathon.bungie.org/story

Oni pages: http://oni.bungie.org
http://www.onicore.com

Where to get these female-Bob patches: http://archives.marathon.org under "Tina Shapes" and "Tina Sounds". Be warned, however, that these patches only work in the MacOS.