Six incredible women who made the best games of 2023 possible

It’s International Women’s Day, and as all gamers know, it’s the time of year when many make their own lists of the most popular female characters in video games.

There are dozens of amazing female characters, but we’re sorry to tell you that Tifa Lockhart isn’t real. Plus, if Tifa Lockhart were real, we don’t think we’d need to remind anyone how amazing she is, seeing as she saved the world from terrorists and pictures of her in a bikini fill our social media.

How we celebrate women today —

If paying homage to female characters is nice, even better is remembering and respecting the real women who create the video games we love so much. It’s easy to create a shrine to celebrate how badass Bayonetta is, but we sadly don’t see many teenagers with posters of Roberta Williams in their bedrooms.

These six amazing women are some of the many who have created the incredible video games we’ve loved over the last 12 months or so. If you’ve enjoyed one of the great games on our list, now you know who to thank.

Tilly Steele

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most important games of last year and, among the dozens of awards that have been given to it, there are also several awards for the performances of the actors. Neil Newbon won the award for best performance for his role as Astarion at The Game Awards, the most important awards in terms of popularity, and five actors from Baldur’s Gate 3 were nominated for their performances at the BAFTAs of this ‘year. This brings us to the incredible Tilly Steele, the voice and performance director of Baldur’s Gate 3, the woman who brought all these beloved characters to life. She made Astarion sexy, Darkheart mysterious, and Lae’zel ferocious. If you fell in love with one of the many excellent characters in Baldur’s Gate 3, now you know who brought them to life.

Yoko Shimomura

Hopefully by now you all know the name Yoko Shimomura, one of the most prolific composers when it comes to video games. She’s probably best known for her work on the Kingdom Hearts series, which boasts some of the most iconic soundtracks in all of gaming. And then, last year the video game industry brought back a large number of classics and players could fall in love with Shimomura’s music again: only in 2023, remakes of Live-A-Live (launched a year earlier on Switch) and Super Mario RPG brought Shimomura’s incredible music back into the spotlight. Shimomura’s soundtracks never miss the mark and her catchy songs stick in our minds even after the credits roll. Music is one of the main ways that developers bring their stories to life, and we have Shimomura to thank for the countless songs she has given us over the decades.

Brigitta Rena and Galuh Elsa

A Space for the Unbound is one of our favorite games of last year, and when we learned the truth about Atma and Raya’s story, we found ourselves in tears. A Space for the Unbound is firmly set in the supernatural, in a country we have never visited, yet we were able to empathize with Raya’s kindness, her difficulties, her tormented inner world. Despite all the elements that put a great distance between us and the world of A Space for the Unbound, the universal human experience is what connected us so closely to the characters. It’s the writing that makes the whole story so strong, so relatable, and for that we have Brigitta Rena and Galuh Elsa to thank. Mojiken Studio has a history of making excellent games, and we hope this writing duo brings us much more in the future.

Abby Howard

Before becoming a video game developer, Abby Howard was best known as an artist in comics and made the leap into video games when she co-founded Black Tabby Games with her husband. While small independent studios like this don’t always get the spotlight they deserve, Black Tabby Games sure did, with one of the best-rated games of the year by critics and gamers alike, Slay the Princess. In addition to upending every kind of established social convention, Slay the Princess stood out from the crowd in a number of ways. The black and white comic book art style betrays the tragic story behind it, and this interesting choice made players look deeper than they initially expected. Creating the artistic side of her herself, Howard stands out as one of the best developers of the year and we can’t wait to play her next project.

Hana Takeda

In Japan, voice actresses are as famous as their on-screen counterparts and much more prolific. That’s why Hana Takeda gave us a series of interpretations that made us fall in love with our favorite games even more, such as several entries in Starfield, but there is one interpretation that we appreciated more than all the others. It’s a recent release, but Takeda’s performance as Seonhee in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is one of our all-time favorites and one of the reasons why the leader of the Geomijul and Liumang “sounds” so powerful. The vocal performances in the Yakuza series are known for their excellence, which is why the saga forgoed an English dub for most of its run. Thanks to Takeda for giving us Seonhee – we’ll never want her any other way.

Written by Georgina Young for GLHF