More at Pop-Gamer.com
Written by: Miss Ris
A 14-year-old New Yorker asked a profound question, “Why aren’t there girls in the NHL video game?”
Lexi Peters, 14 of Buffalo, feels slighted that her gender isn’t represented in sports games. Her father encouraged her to write a letter to game publisher Electronic Arts.
Now the 4-foot-eleven hockey player of 4 years will star in their NHL Franchise game showing that this one’s for the girls.
In her letter, she wrote: “It is unfair to women and girl hockey players around the world, many of them who play and enjoy your game. I have created a character of myself, except I have to be represented by a male and that’s not fun.”
She continued, “My younger brother got to create a character that looked just like him. I had never been able to experience that.”
After weeks of no response, Peters accepted that she would have to play as the male characters and give them ‘hockey hair’ as she calls it. When she finally heard back, the news was bad.
“I heard back a few weeks later and they told me it couldn’t happen because it has to go through the NHL,” she said. While the NHL may not approve of women players, EA heard the plight.
“Lexi’s letter was a wake-up call,” David Littman, Lead Producer told the Globe and Mail. “Here’s a growing audience playing our NHL game and we hadn’t done anything to capture them.”
He told Peters that not only would there be female players in future editions of their NHL games, but she would be the model for the default character.
Something Manon Rhéaume (pictured), the only woman to ever play in the real-world NHL, is proud of.
“It’s a big change and it’s exciting to see, because so many girls play hockey now,” she said. Rhéaume was signed to the Tampa Bay Lightning as goalie in 1992.
Now she runs a foundation to give scholarships to young women in sports, including hockey.
As for Peters, her favorite NHL star is Alex Ovechkin. Would she take him on? No. “I’ll put us on the same team,” she said.
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