How magical girls and all things pink came to first-person shooters

Shooting games have become undeniably cute these days.

Your character can snipe people with a rainbow-wrapped gun while wearing a fuzzy shark onesie in Fortnite. In Valorant, you might cinch a close victory not by slicing an enemy with a sharpened blade but with a magical rod emanating glitter. In PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, you can play as a K-pop idol and wear a beanie with adorable pink bunny ears. Two recent Call of Duty games even allow you to dress up as Nicki Minaj in a chrome pink metallic bodice.

Gone are the days of shooters leaning into muted and military-inspired looks. Games like GoldenEye had people playing against camo-clad soldiers in sanitized government facilities. Halo leaned into sci-fi aesthetics, but the scuffed metal and bullets of Master Chief still made him a space marine. Other massively popular franchises, like Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike, solidified shooters as a genre attempting to emulate the grittiness of war.

Now, though, in-game cosmetic items are more inspired by the art of Lisa Frank, the magical girls of Sailor Moon, and fashion icons like Ariana Grande. To learn more about this trend and the creation of these items, Polygon spoke with the Valorant development team at Riot Games.

When Blizzard released Overwatch in 2016, its bright and cheery tone — buoyed by a comparably diverse cast of characters for the time — contrasted with other shooters. It became a hit and sold 50 million copies within four years. On top of that, games like Fortnite have helped popularize the free-to-play model in games, which monetizes the regular release of optional in-game cosmetic items.

Valorant continued the precedent set by games like Overwatch and Fortnite. Riot Games released the sleek first-person team shooter in 2020 as a free-to-play game where players could purchase in-game cosmetics that altered the look of its guns.

Ahead of Valorant’s release, the development team had to make some crucial decisions about its early cosmetics. Because they had to establish the unique aspects of the game first, the cosmetics couldn’t deviate too far from the tone of the core game. Associate art director of Valorant Sean Marino told Polygon via video chat, “very important to differentiate ourselves as a game from other shooters that lean a little more serious or ones that lean a little bit more silly, like we had to find our place.”

“One of the very first skin attempts was recoloring one of our base weapons, and we made it gold,” Marino said. “And that’s a thing every game does. One of the designers on our team, Nick [Wu Smith], he was just like, Ay, what about that rose gold? Give me a pink kind of version of this.”
“This was when the rose gold iPhone was popular,” added Valorant’s lead cosmetics producer Preeti Pinto. “Exactly,” Marino said. “And he [Wu Smith] was like, I would absolutely get this.”

For the Valorant team, creating cosmetic items that touch on a variety of media genres is the goal, Pinto told Polygon. Think steampunk, comic books, and — in the case of the Evori Dreamwings collection — magical girls and anyone who likes cute animals.

Pinto said that the team doesn’t categorize players geographically or by gender or anything “other than their taste.” Depending on the skin, Pinto would say, “This is for players who love super clean aesthetics, [or] this is for players who like really dark edge lord fantasies.”

Developers update games constantly to add new outfits, guns, and more.

“Now that the game [has been] out there for a while, I think we get a lot more free rein to experiment with a lot of things that you might not typically see in many other shooters,” Marino said.

Skins like Radiant Crisis allowed the team to introduce a comic-book-like look to Valorant without inserting a new art style into the game wholesale. Marino told Polygon that even if the team is playing with a different genre, it maintains the “core fundamental aesthetic” of Valorant.

“But we do get a lot of range [so] that we can play around with a lot of different things. I feel really fortunate working on cosmetics because we don’t have to feel so bound to just doing the same thing over and over again,” Marino said.

In the end, the rise of pink and feminine aesthetics in games seems to be an effort to give players a greater range of options. You can get dragons and you can get sakura blossoms. Master Chief is still a space marine — but with cosmetic items, he can wear cute little cat ears. Now players can try it all — military or not.