When Tomb Raider launched in October 1996, Lara Croft was sold to the world as the first proper female action hero in gaming. The marketing leaned hard on it, and a generation of players who came in with the original PlayStation took the claim at face value. The truth is more interesting. By the time Lara was leaping over chasms in Peru, the medium had already produced more than a decade’s worth of female protagonists, fighters, and cult favourites who had carried games on their own terms.
Some were lead characters. Some were the most popular pick on a fighting game roster. Some only became female through a plot twist hidden behind a fast clear time. All of them existed before Lara, and most of them shaped the kind of character she eventually became. Here are ten of the most significant Female Gaming Icons Before Tomb Raider:
1. Ms. Pac-Man (1982)
The original Ms. Pac-Man cabinet started life as an unauthorised mod of Pac-Man before Bally Midway negotiated to release it officially. The bow and the beauty mark were minimal additions, but the design was sharper than the original. Four mazes instead of one, smarter ghosts, and bonus fruit that bounced around rather than sat still. She became one of the highest-grossing arcade games of all time and the first female video game character to enter mainstream pop culture. For a decade afterwards, if you asked anyone outside gaming to name a female video game character, Ms. Pac-Man was the only answer most people could give.
2. The Valkyrie (Gauntlet, 1985)
Atari’s four-player arcade dungeon crawler let groups pick a class and brawl through monster-filled mazes together. The Valkyrie, named Thyra in later entries, was one of the four playable characters alongside the Warrior, Wizard, and Elf. Her stats favoured armour over raw strength, which made her the most survivable choice in long sessions and a popular pick for anyone who actually wanted to finish a level.
What mattered wasn’t the lore. It was that Gauntlet treated her as completely equivalent to the male classes. No special storyline, no rescue plot, no commentary from the narrator other than the famous ‘Valkyrie needs food, badly.’ She was just another hero feeding coins into the cabinet, which in 1985 was a surprisingly progressive default.
3. Samus Aran (Metroid, 1986)
The reveal at the end of Metroid is one of the most discussed moments in gaming history. Players spent the entire game assuming the armoured bounty hunter under the Power Suit was male, partly because the manual referred to Samus with male pronouns. Finish the game quickly enough and the armour came off to show a woman in a leotard.
The framing has aged badly, but the precedent mattered. Samus was a competent space mercenary with no rescue plot, no romantic subplot, and no need for backup. The development team voted on the change midway through production after one team member suggested it would be a shocker. They had no idea they were creating the template for the next thirty years of action heroines.
4. Princess Toadstool (Super Mario Bros. 2, 1988)
The Super Mario Bros. 2 that western audiences played wasn’t the original Japanese sequel. Nintendo of America thought the Japanese version was too punishing for US players and reskinned a Famicom game called Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters. The result was the first time Princess Toadstool, later known as Peach, was a playable lead alongside Mario, Luigi, and Toad. Her gimmick was a floating jump that let her hover for about a second and a half. It made her the easiest character to use on tricky platforming sections and a popular choice for anyone who wanted to actually clear the game. Two years before the SNES launched, Nintendo had quietly demonstrated that the princess didn’t need rescuing if you let her run the level herself.
5. Tyris Flare (Golden Axe, 1989)
Sega’s beat-em-up gave players three characters to choose from. Ax Battler the barbarian, Gilius Thunderhead the dwarf, and Tyris Flare, the Amazon warrior who used the most powerful magic in the game. Her dragon-summoning fire spell was a screen-clearing nuclear option, and players who managed her magic potions could melt boss fights that the other two characters had to grind through.
The chainmail bikini was very much a product of its era and there is no defending the design choice on modern terms. But the gameplay was unambiguous. Tyris was the strongest character in Golden Axe, and skilled arcade players gravitated to her for tournament runs. She also got the same revenge backstory as the other two heroes, which was more equality than most games of the time bothered with.
6. Chun-Li (Street Fighter II, 1991)
Capcom’s Street Fighter II didn’t just revive the fighting game genre. It introduced Chun-Li, the Interpol officer hunting M. Bison’s Shadaloo crime syndicate to avenge her father. She was the only woman in the original eight-fighter roster, and within months she was the most popular pick in arcades worldwide. The Spinning Bird Kick, the lightning kick, and her speed advantage over the rest of the cast made her viable at every skill level.
She is widely credited as the First Lady of Fighting Games, and the trend of female fighting characters being faster, lighter, and more kick-focused than their male counterparts traces directly back to her. Capcom designer Yoshiki Okamoto initially wanted to give her a shorter health bar to reflect that women were physically weaker. He was overruled, and Chun-Li went on to become one of the most enduring characters in any fighting game franchise.
7. Sonya Blade (Mortal Kombat, 1992)
Where Chun-Li was Capcom’s contribution, Sonya Blade was Midway’s answer. The Special Forces lieutenant arrived in the original Mortal Kombat as the only female fighter in the lineup. Her motion-captured kicks and the Kiss of Death fatality, where she literally exploded her opponents with a blown kiss, made her instantly iconic in the wave of moral panic that surrounded MK’s release.
Sonya was also the centre of one of the most famous urban legends of the era. Players insisted you could uncover a hidden character called Ermac in her ending, despite there being no such character in the original game. The myth stuck around so persistently that Midway eventually added Ermac to Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to satisfy the demand. Sonya, meanwhile, kept showing up in every sequel.
8. Mai Shiranui (Fatal Fury 2, 1992)
SNK’s answer to Chun-Li arrived almost simultaneously. Mai Shiranui was a kunoichi who fought with a folding fan and flames, and she became the breakout character of the Fatal Fury and King of Fighters series almost overnight. She was loud, theatrical, and a regular tournament pick despite a reputation in casual circles as a character built mainly around fan service.
That reputation undersold her. Mai’s fighting style was technically demanding, with elaborate cancel chains and air combos that rewarded careful execution. The KOF series built her into a lead character for Team Women Fighters, alongside King and Yuri Sakazaki, in what was effectively the first all-female team in mainstream fighting game history. She is still in active rotation in modern SNK titles three decades later.
9. Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI, 1994)
Square’s Final Fantasy VI, released in North America as Final Fantasy III on the SNES, broke from the formula by giving the series its first female lead. Terra Branford opened the game piloting a Magitek Armor through the snowfields outside Narshe with no memory of who she was. Over the next forty hours, she turned out to be a half-human, half-Esper bridge between magic and humanity, and the emotional centre of one of the most ambitious console RPGs of its generation.
Terra wasn’t a sword-swinging warrior or a leather-clad mage. She was a quietly powerful protagonist with a complicated arc about identity, found family, and the question of whether she was capable of love. For JRPG fans, she remains the moment Final Fantasy stopped treating female characters as supporting cast and started building entire games around them.
10. Jill Valentine (Resident Evil, March 1996)
Capcom’s Resident Evil released in March 1996, seven months before Tomb Raider, which makes Jill Valentine technically the last major female protagonist before Lara Croft arrived. The S.T.A.R.S. operative was one of two playable characters in the Spencer Mansion, and her storyline was widely considered the easier and more interesting of the two thanks to her larger inventory and the lockpick that opened most of the mansion’s doors. Jill set the tone for survival horror’s relationship with female leads. She wasn’t sexualised in the way Lara would be, she was a competent operator with a tactical background, and she carried half of the original Resident Evil on her own. She remains one of the most consistently popular characters in the entire franchise.
What Lara built on
None of this takes anything away from Lara Croft. Tomb Raider was a genuine leap forward for the medium, and the cultural impact of the franchise dwarfs almost everything that came before it. But Lara wasn’t the start of the conversation. Toby Gard and the Core Design team designed her against a backdrop of Samus, Chun-Li, Sonya, and Jill, all of whom had already done the heavy lifting of proving that female-led games could sell.
What Lara added was the marketing budget, the 3D engine, and the global media campaign. What she inherited was a quietly substantial lineage that had been building toward her for over a decade. The next time someone says Lara was the first, the correct response is to start with Ms. Pac-Man and work forward from there.
