Seven years after pioneering game designer Theresa Duncan committed suicide at age 40, nonprofit digital arts organization Rhizome is working to relaunch three of her early feminist videogames. They eschewed the frilly, pink “girl game” norms of their time with inventive storytelling and complex female characters. In the wake of Gamergate –last month’s misogyny-filled online battle about the role of women in gaming–it’s a statement-making effort.

Since their release on CD-ROMs in the mid-’90s, Duncan’s seminal point-and-click adventure games–Chop Suey (1995, co-created with Monica Gesue), Smarty (1996), and Zero Zero (1997)–have become inaccessible to the new generation of X-Boxers, Wii-ers, and online gamers. If their current Kickstarter campaign is funded, Rhizome, in partnership with the New Museum, will make the games playable in any modern browser via emulation, available for free online for a minimum of one year.

“Gamergate has led to a retelling of the history of women in videogames,” Rhizome’s curator and editor Michael Connor tells Co.Design, “but Duncan’s work has been left out of many of the conversations, in part because her games just haven’t been accessible.”

Smarty, 1996

Designed for–and starring–adventurous girls, this trio of games stood apart from a glut of frilly pink CD-ROMs, the only type designed “for girls” (think Barbie Fashion Designer).

“Duncan was not doing Barbie,” Connor says. She refused to reinforce gender stereotypes. “Duncan’s games were not about celebrities or superheroes, but about the richness of a child’s imagination,” he elaborates in a statement. “These games encouraged their users—particularly the young girls who would have identified with her protagonists—to be disruptive, adventurous, and smart.”

The games feature poetic narratives, some inspired by Duncan’s midwestern childhood, and textured, alternative-radio-inflected soundtracks. Their feminist messages weren’t in-your-face, but implied by the casting of strong female leads in irreverent, complex storylines.

Author David Sedaris provided voiceover for Chop Suey, which Entertainment Weekly named “CD-Rom of the Year” and described as “a little like Alice in Wonderland as performed by the B-52s for NPR.” Gaming writer Jenn Frank, whose writing about Chop Suey helped inspire Connor to revive the games, described its gameplay as “a loosely strung system of vignettes; a psychedelic exercise in ‘let’s-pretend’; a daydream in which the mundanity of small-town Ohio collides with the interior lives of its two young protagonists.”