Barbie Fashion Designer
Design an outfit on screen, print it onto a fabric sheet on the family inkjet, and dress a real Barbie in it. Mattel Media's 1996 CD-ROM sold more than a million copies within a year and became the proof that a game aimed squarely at girls could sell big.
The idea came from a kitchen table. In 1992 designer and inventor Andy Rifkin watched his daughter Elizabeth Joi make clothes for her Barbies out of markers, paper and staples, and thought about the printer. He pitched Mattel on a program that would let a kid do the same thing on a computer. Digital Domain built it in a year, and Mattel Media, the software arm backed by Mattel president Jill Barad, published Barbie Fashion Designer for Windows and Macintosh in November 1996, with Chris Anthony voicing Barbie.
The trick was the fabric. You picked pieces, patterns and colors on screen, then printed them onto special fabric sheets that came in the box and fed through an ordinary inkjet. The printed pieces were assembled with seam stickers and hook-and-loop tape and decorated with the packed-in shoes, ribbons, glitter paint and sequins, and the result went onto an actual doll. MacHome Journal gave it five stars out of five and AllGame three and a half; reviewers liked the hybrid of screen and hands-on play and grumbled about fiddly assembly and a limited set of patterns.
None of that slowed it down. PC Data counted 351,945 copies and $14 million in revenue in 1996 alone, making it the sixth-best-selling PC game of the year, and other estimates put the first-year figure past 500,000; by the end of 1997 it had passed one million units. It is now described as the first successful virtual dress-up game and one of the first commercially successful games made for girls, and critic Mary Kenney later argued it was "as much of a video game as Doom."
Digital Domain followed with Barbie Cool Looks Fashion Designer in March 1998, and in 2023 the original was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong museum.
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