Heavyweight Champ

Heavyweight Champ is a critique of stereotypical ways Black men have been depicted since the early days of video games.

The title of the work comes from what is considered to be the first game to feature a Black character, Heavyweight Champ. The arcade game, released by Sega in 1976, allows players to take control of one of two boxers. As the game is displayed in monochrome and the race of the characters is not explicitly stated it is debatable whether the darker grey boxer is Black, though general consensus is that the character is coded as Black.

The depiction of Black men as athletic or aggressive has long existed in popular culture and has sadly persisted in video games since Heavyweight Champ. The 2009 study “The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games” published by the University of Southern California studied the top 150 games of the time and found that, whilst Black characters appear in video games in proportion to their numbers in the 2000 US census data, they were mainly in sports games and titles that reinforced stereotypes of hyper masculine aggressive Black men.

Throughout my early years as a gamer the only depictions of Black men I saw were in fighting games such as Street Fighter, sports games such as NBA Jam, or beat-em ups such as Streets of Rage. In all of these games the Black characters were notable only for their aggression or sporting capabilities.

What was missing were Black men as wizards in RPG games, or super heroes in side-scrolling platformers, or in puzzle games.

Heavyweight Champ is my reckoning of this aspect of my upbringing and an attempt to counter it. By reimagining these same hyper masculine aggressive and athletic characters as protagonists in RPG, platform, and puzzle games I want to challenge the perception and stereotypes of Black men in video games.

Heavyweight Champ was commissioned by Ian Sergeant for Cut & Mix.