"Inspirational" Anita Sarkeesian Becomes Playable TowerFall Character

Anita Sarkeesian, the award-winning essayist who produces videos analyzing gender issues in games, is to be immortalized in a new content update for the PlayStation 4and PC editions of TowerFall.

The upcoming Towerfall Dark World expansion will introduce a range of new archers and gameplay maps, and is scheduled to arrive "early 2015." One of the ten new combatants earmarked for the update will loosely resemble Sarkeesian, and is intended as a tribute from development studio Matt Makes Games.

"Anita's work has been an inspiration to the TowerFall team," reads a statement from the studio.

"Her Tropes vs Women in Games video series gave us a valuable new lens through which to assess our character designs. TowerFall is about bringing people together, so it's vitally important that the cast of playable characters makes everyone feel invited to join in. Simply put, this wouldn't have occurred to me if not for Anita, and feedback from players has reinforced how important it really is. We're very excited to immortalize Anita in a small way."

TowerFall is a non-traditional fighting game that wowed critics when it first launched on Ouya in June 2013. The game's key offering is local multiplayer game which is a cross-pollination of Mario Bros, Bomberman, and archery. GameSpot's TowerFall review described the game as "a fantastic multiplayer game that offers a ton of variations on its enjoyable archery combat."

A year after its Ouya release, TowerFall expanded across PC and PS4, the latter of which became the biggest money generating platform for the studio.