by Roberta F.

Readers – I just had to jump in and volunteer my input on another tall female in games that many may not know about.

With the recent hype about our height in the videogame community with the teasing of Resident Evil 8: the village, did you know that we have another big moment in videogame history?

Back in 1989, you had Mario running castle to castle to save the princess from fire breathing turtles, Simon Belmont hunting Dracula, and putting in the Konami code to buff your overly jacked Contra dudes.

During the 80’s, videogames were young and filled with herculean men and ninjas, but we had one tall female secretly saving the world from an alien threat and space pirates.  Yup! I’m talking about a tall female named Samus Aran of Super Metroid.

Samus Aran come in standing at 6’3” (190 cm) and is accredited as the first heroin and human female in video game history.

Not only was she tall, but she was filled with badass butt kicking action that kept up with the likes of Megaman and snake from metal gear.

Brief background behind our fictitious heroin, she was a galactic bounty hunter who acquired a power suit.

This suit allowed her to confront the conditions of space as well as gave her an array of weaponry. She would assist in the Galactic Federation in bringing the notorious space pirate, Ridley and his gang, in the meantime saving the world from the biological hazard and parasitic organisms the Metroid’s.

But, what makes this game so ground and wall breaking was how they introduced her to the players!

The game was your average platform style game, but for the first time allowed the players to traverse the map revisiting rooms they had already been in and further unlocking more secrets. Due to videogames being a dominated by male players at the time, the idea of marketing a female protagonist was extremely difficult.

Little boys could not identify with female characters, let alone a tall independent woman in a world of saving short princesses. This was the 80’s and to these players girls still had cooties.

Disguised as another epic space themed robot shooter Metroid took players on a 2D pixelated Horror, adventure, shooter game. While these little boys were thinking they were just playing another run of the mill character, it wasn’t until the end of the game, that our hero, Samus Aran was revealed to be a galaxy saving woman.

You know how when we come home after along work day, the bra is one of the first things to come off to relax around the house, well could you imagine spending hours trapped in a sweaty metal exo-suit for who knows how long?

Once the game was beat there was a cut scene where Samus return home and removed her suit showing the players what they believe to be a guy, was really a tall female all along!

Whenever you’re doubting your height, you can remember Nintendo didn’t choose to break video game barrier for women with a short delicate damsel in distress, but with one 6” + bad mutha…”Shut your mouth” (Shaft reference) female.