Her influence has inspired generations of gamers, developers, and artists who continue to draw from her ideas and creative spirit. Her personal journey is equally inspiring. Later in life, Jennell embraced her identity as a transgender woman after decades of inner conflict and private struggle. Her transition at age 54 became a turning point, allowing her to fully align her personal truth with her public life. Through honesty and courage, she has become a role model not only for transgender women but for anyone seeking to live authentically, even when that path requires reinvention. Her advocacy extends into her professional work, as she has spoken and written about the importance of respectful and authentic representation of transgender characters in games, highlighting how gaming can be a powerful medium for inclusivity and empathy. Today, Jennell continues to create, inspire, and mentor through her company Olde Sküül, a women-led studio founded with other veteran game developers. Their projects honor the spirit of classic role-playing games while embracing new technologies and audiences. Beyond her current work, she remains a storyteller at heart, sharing insights from her decades-long career and her life experiences with honesty, warmth, and wit.
Monika: Today I have the great pleasure and honor of speaking with Jennell Jaquays, a pioneering American designer of role-playing and video games, best known for her classic Dungeons & Dragons modules Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia for Judges Guild. Hello Jennell!
Jennell: Hi Monika, thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to have the chance to share a bit about myself and my story.
Monika: Could you share a bit about your early life and how you first discovered your passions?
Jennell: Well, in a few words, I’m an artist and game developer who, late in life, accepted that she was also transgender. I was born and lived most of my early life in the American Midwest near the Great Lakes and had a fairly ordinary childhood. For the most part, sports didn’t interest me, though I became a baseball fan one year when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. I was very much into comic books of all kinds, drawing, and building imaginary worlds with my younger brother. I have, and still have, a younger brother and sister. We moved just about every three years, so friendships rarely lasted beyond each move, and my brother ended up being my best friend. Until I was in high school, most of our adventures were shared together.
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| One of the covers she painted as much as 20+ years ago. |
Monika: When did you first realize that your interests and identity might be different from those around you?
Jennell: I was always drawn to girls’ things as a child, but with puberty, that interest intensified, and I began experimenting with regular cross-dressing, though only in private. Somehow, this private exploration stayed with me throughout my life until just a few years ago, when I could no longer say I was actually male.
Monika: How did you handle this part of yourself as you grew into adulthood?
Jennell: I tried to suppress that part of me and live a “male” life with wives and kids while pursuing success in a male-dominated field as an artist and designer. I succeeded in my career and made a name for myself in several areas. I married twice before transitioning and have two fantastic, talented children, but I never quite figured out how to make the “male” part work. Okay, maybe that wasn’t a FEW words.
Monika: Can you tell me how your journey into game design began and what first drew you to this world?
Jennell: Initially, I saw it as a way to get my fantasy and science fiction art published. That was back in the mid-1970s when role-playing games were just getting started and the video game industry really didn’t exist. But it actually goes back to my childhood. My younger brother and I used to make our own wooden toys, simple board games, write and draw comic books, build fantasy worlds out of blocks and plastic figures, and fight epic miniature war battles on our dad’s pool table.
Monika: What childhood experiences do you think shaped your creativity and interest in games?
Jennell: As a child, I imagined working for a toy company to be the most amazing job and wondered why one of my friends' dads would ever leave his job working for one, though I think he was an accountant. It is probably not surprising that I found my way into some form of toy and game-making as a career even while still in school.
Monika: How did these early interests translate into your first professional opportunities in game design?
Jennell: I began my career by making art and adventures for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, publishing my own fan magazine with several friends. That led to my first job writing and illustrating game adventures for Dungeons & Dragons and other games, including Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia that you mentioned. And with that, I never looked back. I never had a “real job” after that. I would be making games for the rest of my life.
Monika: Your career spans decades and includes some of the most iconic games and companies. How do you view your professional journey?
Jennell: I suspect that, seen from the outside, it looks impressive. For me, it has always just been doing what I do and being in the right place at the right time with the right skills. I went from that first job making role-playing game adventures at the beginning of the hobby game industry with Dungeons & Dragons to being a designer for electronic and video games in the earliest years of the video game industry at Coleco and the ColecoVision. I put together one of the first mixed-discipline teams combining art and design for video games when I became the head of that group.
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| Another cover. |
Monika: What kind of projects and teams did you work with over the years?
Jennell: For the next thirty years, I worked on all manner of projects and was part of some of the most famous publishers and game-creating teams, including TSR, the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, id Software, the makers of Doom and Quake, and Ensemble Studios, the creators of the Age of Empires games.
Monika: What inspires your game design ideas, and how do you turn those inspirations into the worlds you create?
Jennell: As a designer, I’m often inspired by popular media. Other times, it comes from personal experiences, such as a location I’ve visited in my travels. I’m inspired by photos of places, people, and objects. Sometimes I simply combine random or dissimilar ideas to create something much greater than the sum of its parts.
Monika: Have you ever thought about including transgender characters in video games, and if so, how?
Jennell: I’ve thought about it, but only in the sense that a character might also be transgender in addition to whatever other traits they bring to the game. In the past, I have included transgender characters or potential play situations in some of my published role-playing adventures, though the references might not be obvious. I’ve never had the desire to play as a transgender character, preferring to present as female, though before my transition that made me uncomfortable as well since I was still keeping my feelings about my gender a secret, even from myself.
Monika: Are you currently exploring ways to represent transgender characters more thoughtfully in games?
Jennell: One of the things I’m working on at the moment is a presentation on creating authentic and respectful transgender characters in games for a major game-playing convention here in Seattle in late August. I’m a core team speaker for a group called PressXY.com, which focuses on transgender issues in gaming.
Monika: If you could create any game without limitations, what kind of project would you consider your ultimate dream?
Jennell: Someday, I think I’d like to be able to build a game world that feels like the adventures I used to design for tabletop role-playing, substantially different from the way current massively multiplayer online games are designed. In some ways, that is what drew me back into computer game development eighteen years ago and why I was interested in working on an MMO six years ago when I went to CCP.
Monika: It is remarkable to see so many talented transgender women thriving in the IT field, including Lynn Conway, Jessica Bussert, Danielle Hallett, Kate Craig-Wood, Rebecca Heineman, Megan Wallent, and yourself. Why do you think so many trans women are drawn to careers in technology?
Jennell: IT, or Information Technology, is a very common career path for transgender women. Just as many trans women choose to work in traditionally macho careers such as the military, police, firefighting, or construction to try to “fix” their transgender inclinations, others of us have chosen geek or nerd careers as a way to ignore or avoid confronting it. So many of us work in games, tech, and engineering that, in some ways, it is one of the better professional career choices for trans women in particular.
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| The magazine that really started her professional career. |
Monika: How do you view the current situation for transgender women in American society?
Jennell: Overall, it has improved in my lifetime. When I was young, it was unthinkable for people to transition between genders. Transitioning was pretty much a death sentence for any life or career one might have had. I have to believe that some of this progress comes from women who were willing to step forward and let the world know they are transgender. The efforts by the medical community to understand why people are transgender have moved us from being almost universally condemned as sex perverts into a state where rational people recognize that gender dysphoria is a medical condition affecting a portion of humanity.
Monika: At what age did you begin your transition, and what led you to make that decision?
Jennell: If I had been willing to be honest with myself, and if the information available on the Internet had existed when I was younger, I would have recognized that I was transgender at least by the time puberty set in. But times were different, and I did not. I began my transition at age 54, after struggling with my gender issues and attempting to suppress them for decades.
Monika: Was the transition process itself difficult for you?
Jennell: In my situation, I think it took being free from responsibilities to others, such as a spouse and children, to allow me to really examine my life. I would not describe my transition as difficult. The hard part was the struggle to accept that I was transgender and to decide whether I could go through with living as a woman. Once I convinced myself that transition and change were actually possible, it all just started happening.
Monika: When you were beginning your transition, were there any transgender role models whose experiences guided or inspired you?
Jennell: I had several whose stories I had been following. When I first got online in the late 1990s, I followed the story of Alexus Sheppard, a woman slightly older than I, whose journey went through some of the same stages that mine eventually would, from denial, through private and then public cross-dressing, which was not something I did, and then into acceptance of a transgender identity. When I transitioned, Rebecca Heineman was one of the first transgender women I reached out to.
Monika: Are there transgender women today whose courage and work you particularly admire?
Jennell: I have a great deal of respect for any transgender person, male or female, who transitions in the face of opposition from friends and especially family. There are too many to name who fit that description, and some would not appreciate being in the public eye if I mentioned their names.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Jennell Jaquays.
© 2015 - Monika Kowalska
