“When all hope had died and the hour of doom seemed at hand … a young girl in forest green appeared as if from nowhere.”

So proclaims the intro to the classic Nintendo game Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker that Mike Hoye is playing with his 3-year-old daughter, Maya.

Maya, naturally, plays the hero.

Only in the original version of Zelda, the hero Link is a boy, not a girl, who must save both his little sister and Princess Zelda from the bad guys.

So, the East York-based software entrepreneur took a few hours and dug around the code of the game, changing the game dialogue to make Link a girl who has to rescue her little brother. Which is apt because Maya has a little brother, too.

“I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers,” wrote Hoye in a blog post explaining how to duplicate his hack to other code-savvy gamers.

“When we had kids, one of the things that I wanted to be able to do was introduce them to my own hobbies. That’s kind of a problem if you play video games and have a daughter. In the gaming industry, women, frankly speaking, get a raw deal,” Hoye said in an interview. “It seemed like a problem for Dad’s favourite hobby to treat women as second-class citizens.”

The long-time Legend of Zelda fan had started to play the game with Maya three weeks ago (she loves the sailing portions of the game, and interacting with other characters). She also immediately decided she was the hero of the game.

When Hoye read out the captions to her, he swapped the pronouns on the fly. But since Maya is starting to learn to read, he wanted to go further.

“The art style is relatively cartoonish — and the character is young — it doesn’t make it seem awkward. My daughter is pretty enthusiastic about it — she knows what she’s going to be for Halloween next year.”

There are some more recent games that have strong female characters, he notes, though most are hardly age-appropriate for Maya. In particular, Hoye was impressed by the approach of role-playing action game Mass Effect 3 to including female and diverse characters. The dialogue doesn’t change, he said. “Your character is respected or feared regardless of how you choose to represent yourself in the game.”

He says most of the feedback has been positive (including several “Dad of the Year” nominations), but he has been criticized for tampering with a beloved and classic game.

And a vitriolic response to those tackling female representation in gamer culture is nothing new.

In one instance earlier this year, a Toronto feminist was the subject of threats when she defended Anita Sarkeesian. The pop culture critic became the target of a violent online game after launching a Kickstarter campaign to produce a series of free online videos on female stereotypes in video games.

Still, Hoye is optimistic with the direction the video game industry is heading.

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Making video games as accessible to girls as they are to boys is just one part of that.

“The (change to Zelda) is a small thing,” says Hoye. “The lesson I ultimately want Maya to take from this … is that the culture around software is not carved in stone, any more than the software is. And if you’re a little smart and a little bit disciplined and a lot tenacious, you can make actually make the changes you want and make them stick.”