Photo: Official GDC / CC BY 2.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
I think of Zoë Quinn primarily as a developer who expanded what games can do. Depression Quest was not fun in any conventional sense, and that was the point: it used interactivity to build empathy for mental illness. That such a modest, sincere project became the pretext for one of the ugliest harassment campaigns in internet history says everything about the harassers and nothing about the work. What earns my respect is the response, channeling that experience into Crash Override to help other targets of online abuse. Turning personal trauma into infrastructure that protects others is a rarer achievement than shipping any game.
Overview
Zoë Tiberius Quinn (born 1987) is an American video game developer, programmer, and writer. Quinn developed the interactive fiction game Depression Quest, which was released in 2013. In 2014, a blog post by their ex-boyfriend sparked the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, during which Quinn was subjected to extensive harassment, including doxing, rape threats, and death threats.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Zoë Quinn
- Name (Japanese)
- ゾーイ・クィン
- Reading
- ぞーい・くぃん
- Born
- August 13, 1987 (age 38)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Leo / Rabbit
- Origin
- New York, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- computer scientist / game programmer / game designer / video game developer / television producer
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- Private
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
5. Works & records
| Category | Title | Role | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notable work | Depression Quest | — | |
| Notable work | Crash Override | — |
6. Links
- Official sitehttps://unburntwitch.com/
- Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/zoequinn/
- Xhttps://x.com/UnburntWitch
- Wikipedia (Japanese)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo%C3%AB%20Quinn
Computer scientist — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-10
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.