Washington – You may think of Nancy Drew as a quaint relic of the Depression era, and associate her with dusty attics, old clocks and magnifying glasses.
If that’s the case, you clearly need to revisit Nancy Drew. Nowadays, the original girl detective not only drives a car, but uses a cellphone and is preparing to star in a thirty-second video game. Not bad for someone who, despite commemorating her 85th year this week, has never turned 19.
Nancy – and surely the world is on a first-name basis with her by now – has a classic can-do attitude and stunning reserves of pluck that make her a role model for any time, said Jenn Fisher, president of the series fan club, the Nancy Drew Sleuths. “Her forwardness, her independence and her zeal to solve everything, no matter how baffling – she inspires.”
(The Sleuths are holding conventions at several Nancy-related sites throughout the Midwest this week to celebrate this latest birthday.)
That characterisation is exactly what makes Nancy such a good video game protagonist, said Penny Milliken, the chief executive of HerInteractive – the studio that’s been making Nancy games exclusively since 1998. It’s sold 9 million Nancy Drew games to date.
The newest, Nancy Drew: Sea of Darkness, will debut on May 19 for Mac and PC, and is set on a ghostly ship in the Netherlands. The company has also experimented with putting Nancy Drew on mobile devices.
Milliken said the studio got oodles of letters from fans who said they loved seeing their childhood hero on the screen, and others who had learned about Nancy Drew from the game series.
Fisher said she liked the games because they put players in Nancy’s shoes. Video games, like books, give you first-person perspective and help revamp the older, fussier image of Nancy.
Milliken also likes the fact that the Nancy Drew games give young girls a series all their own – she estimates that about 90 percent of the games’ players were girls. HerInteractive’s fan mail also includes a lot of letters from girls who say they’ve been inspired to make their own games; Milliken finds that encouraging at a time when there’s a lot of concern that girls just aren’t interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As a result, the studio is looking at ways to provide more internships and scholarships for girls interested in those fields.
“We’re inspiring girls… in the importance of Stem – and I like to think of it as Steam, adding art to that – and we’re looking at ways that we can increase our presence in that area,” Milliken said. – Washington Post