https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/22/i-saw-the-possibility-of-what-could-be-done-so-i-did-it-revolutionary-video-game-the-hobbit-turns-40

The developer of the text-adventure game on how, at 20, she overcame 1980s misogyny to turn a Tolkien book into one of the most groundbreaking titles in the gaming canon

As a teenager, Veronika Megler was intent on becoming a statistician. She signed up for a computer science course at Melbourne University, reasoning it would assist her chosen career. “I think there were four women in a class of about 220 people, and it was pretty misogynistic,” she recalls. Megler had already built her own PC, buying the motherboard, chips, capacitors and diodes from an electronics shop in Melbourne. “In the store they’d say ‘tell your boyfriend we don’t have these’,” she recalls.