Here are a few computer games that were marketed to girls in the 90s and early 2000s: Barbie as Princess Bride, in which the titular doll sits around “waiting for her future husband to come home” according to one reviewer; Fisher Price Dream Dollhouse, a game about a dollhouse; and Chop Suey, featuring snake charmers and “turtle boys” and narration by David Sedaris. Which one would you like to play?

Chop Suey, created by the late artist and writer Theresa Duncan and illustrator Monica Gesue, opens on a pair of girls lying in a field, giving names to the flowers that surround them. They don’t know the “correct” nomenclature, so they come up with their own titles; next, they find pictures in the clouds. After this brief introductory sequence—voiced by Sedaris, who had just published Barrel Fever—you’re set free to pilot the girls through a bright and hallucinatory version of their Ohio hometown, where Chinese food is bright pink, duck-footed fellows hang out with mustachioed supermodels, and a beatnik firefly in a beret recites a bug-centric version of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. (“I have seen the best flies of my generation...”)

In other words, when it was released in 1995, Chop Suey wasn’t quite like other “games for girls,”—or, for that matter, like other games at all. Playing it today, the closest available parallels to its surreal whimsy and open-ended storytelling lie in films of Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry—a comparison that Duncan received often during her life. And in 1995, Gondry was still making music videos.

Chop Suey was acclaimed in its time: in an article praising the game’s “funky folk art” aesthetic and magical realist storytelling, Entertainment Weekly awarded it “CD-ROM of the Year.” But since then, like most of the countless so-called “edutainment” games released in that era, it has fallen into relative obscurity. That might not be the case for long. This week, in an effort to preserve and recognize Duncan’s work, the digital arts nonprofit Rhizome will make Chop Suey and two other Duncan CD-ROM games free for anyone to play online. (Update: The games are live.) “These are art objects when it comes down to it. It’s the sense of perspective. It’s the sense of subjectivity. The sense of self—that they’re actually trying to say something. That makes them different from other games,” Rhizome assistant director Zach Kaplan told me.

Rhizome’s timing couldn’t be better. For the past year or so, of course, representation of women has been the most hotly contested issue in gaming, thanks largely to a group of misguided antifeminists who have waged war on the industry and the press that covers it under the banner of Gamergate. Rhizome director Heather Corcoran told me that the organization had been interested in showcasing Duncan’s work before Gamergate began making headlines, but the attacks on women developers and critics like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu “elevated the urgency” to begin working.

Curator Michael Connor elaborated: “One of the reasons we’re doing this is a kind of oblique response to Gamergate in that we want Theresa Duncan to be part of the retelling [of gaming history]. If people are talking about feminist games, these works need to be discussed. At a time when women’s roles were particularly circumscribed in games, and the understanding of what games for girls would look like was very limited, they had a very expansive idea of what that could be.

“It’s really important to tell young girl gamers that there’s a longer history of women in games, to keep reasserting that message. It’s not like there’s this intrusion of women into video-game culture, like Gamergate’s ridiculous narrative would have you believe. In fact, women have long played an important role, have done sophisticated work. And now there’s this effort to police that space for white men only, which we, of course, are opposed to.”

Among the women targeted by Gamergate early on was Jenn Frank, an award-winning critic who elected to retire from writing about games entirely rather than continue to suffer threats, hacking, and abuse at the hands of anonymous gamers who were riled about an article she published on The Guardian. A 2012 Motherboard essay Frank wrote about Chop Suey served as an impetus for the Rhizome project and is the best available summation of the appeal and importance of Duncan’s work:

Most in-game stories are delivered secondhand from a reminiscing grown-up, while Lily and June’s own imaginations illustrate those stories in happier, more magical idioms. The game never oversteps, never makes “regret” its central concern; after all, this is a children’s game. But an adult player might be surprised at how wistful the game actually is.

Were Chop Suey a literal, physical picturebook, it might resemble Richard Scarry’sBusytown as revised by Bratmobile. Alternatively, we might go along withEntertainment Weekly’s description: “a little like Alice in Wonderland as performed by the B-52s for NPR.”

In an industry glutted by worthless “games” for “girls” — the mid ‘90s begat a tide of titles like McKenzie & Co., Let’s Talk About Me!, and Barbie Fashion Designer — Chop Suey really did get it right.

If you recognize Duncan’s name, it’s likely not because of Chop Suey or Smarty and Zero Zero, the two other acclaimed CD-ROMs she released in the 90s. Cruelly, she is most famous for her death. In 2007, she committed suicide in her East Village apartment, and a week later, her boyfriend, the digital artist Jeremy Blakem walked into the Atlantic Ocean at Rockaway Beach and drowned himself. The story of their relationship is too long to recount here—here’s an account I wrote for Gawker last month if you’re interested—but suffice to say it is lurid enough to nearly eclipse the work of both Duncan and her partner—who, among other things, created art for Beck’s album Sea Change and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Punch Drunk Love.

With any luck, Rhizome’s archiving effort—together with an event celebrating Duncan’s work at Manhattan’s New Museum tomorrow—will put a new audience in front of Duncan’s games. “Chop Suey brings a whole new sensibility—quirky, poetic, almost bittersweet—to a medium that’s often lacking in such nuance,” reads a Wired article published after the CD-ROM’s release. Two decades and one disingenuous hate campaign later, we need Theresa Duncan more than ever.

[Images via Chop Suey/Rhizome]