Blaze Fielding is, canonically, a former police officer turned street fighter. In Streets of Rage (1991), she wades through waves of armed gang members in a mini-skirt and go-go boots. Nothing about that outfit belongs on someone whose job is close-quarters combat with knife-wielding enemies. It belongs on someone who was designed to be looked at first and fought as second thought.
That contradiction isn’t unique to Blaze. It’s close to the industry default for the era, and it’s worth asking why.
The Room Where It Happened
Precise numbers from the early 90s are hard to pin down — even the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has admitted it can’t cleanly track game industry demographics. But the surveys that do exist tell a consistent story. The International Game Developers Association found in 2005 that just 11.5% of industry respondents were women. Go back further, into the era Streets of Rage and the original Tomb Raider were made, and every indication is that the number was lower still. Programming in particular stayed male-dominated even as other roles slowly diversified — one 2015 industry survey found only 5% of programmers were women.
That matters because character design in this era wasn’t handled by a diverse committee weighing multiple perspectives. It was, overwhelmingly, young men designing characters for an audience they assumed was also young men. Lara Croft’s original design is the most documented case: her exaggerated proportions have been described by the developers themselves, in later interviews, as an accident that the team leaned into once they realised how much attention it generated. A polygon-count miscalculation became a marketing strategy.
That gap is worth sitting with on its own. ESA data shows female players climbing from around 38% of the US audience in 2006 to a fairly consistent 45-48% through the 2010s and into the 2020s — genuine near-parity in who’s playing. But that growth in players never translated into a matching growth in who’s making the games, or making the decisions about how characters look. Half the audience, for most of this period, was designing for the other half.
Exaggeration Cut Both Ways — Just Not the Same Way
It would be dishonest to pretend male character design from this era was restrained. It wasn’t. Zangief is a wardrobe away from a bodybuilding poster. Bob and half the cast of Fatal Fury look assembled from spare shoulders. Final Fight’s roster reads like a catalogue of physically impossible neck-to-waist ratios. Beat-em-ups and fighting games in particular were never subtle about either sex — this was comic-book maximalism, and it applied across the board.
The distinction isn’t that men were designed practically and women weren’t. It’s that the exaggeration served different purposes depending on who was being drawn. Male characters were built to look powerful, dangerous, physically dominant — which, however cartoonish, at least maps onto the job the character is meant to be doing. A wall of muscle makes narrative sense on someone whose role is to punch things. Female characters, across the same genre, were far more often built to look desirable first, with the actual job description an afterthought. Axel Stone’s design serves the plot. Blaze Fielding’s serves the poster.
Chun-Li splits the difference and is worth noting for it — a fighting game at least gives athleticism a functional alibi, even if the design is still idealised. Lara Croft in her original incarnation gets no such alibi: an archaeologist who spends her time crawling through collapsing tombs, dressed for a photoshoot rather than an expedition. The tell isn’t exaggeration itself. It’s which direction the exaggeration points.
What Changed, and Why It’s Worth Being Honest About
By 2013, Tomb Raider got a full reboot, and the redesign is the clearest before-and-after in the medium. The new Lara is dirtied, injured, dressed for the environment she’s actually in, and built more like someone who survives a plane crash than someone who poses for one. It’s a genuinely different design philosophy.
Worth being honest about why it happened, though: the industry didn’t wake up on principle alone. Workforce diversity did shift — IGDA figures put women at roughly 23-24% of developers by the late 2010s, up from around 11-12% a decade earlier, and the 2025 GDC State of the Industry report puts women and non-binary developers combined at 32%. But commercial pressure moved just as hard in the same direction. Audiences got more vocal, review culture got more critical of designs that read as purely decorative, and studios noticed. Progress and profit motive arrived at the same conclusion at roughly the same time, and untangling which one led is close to impossible from the outside.
Where That Leaves Things Now
Modern examples — Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn, Ellie in The Last of Us, Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey — are designed considerably closer to “what would this person actually look like doing this job.” Male character design has shifted too, if more quietly — the sheer wall-of-muscle template is rarer outside genres where it still makes narrative sense, like fighting games. It’s not a solved problem industry-wide for either sex, and plenty of counter-examples still exist. But the gap between role and appearance that defined Blaze Fielding and original Lara Croft has genuinely narrowed, and it narrowed roughly in step with who was in the room making the decisions.
That’s really the whole argument, stripped of nuance: design tends to reflect who’s doing the designing. It’s not that exaggeration disappeared — men are still drawn like tanks in plenty of genres, and that’s fine, because a tank makes sense on a soldier. It’s that the exaggeration finally started pointing at the job instead of the audience. Worth remembering that the next time a “weathered, capable protagonist” gets praised as a bold creative choice — it’s also, quietly, a demographic one.