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Programmer Commits Suicide at the Urging of Online Trolls

Programmer Commits Suicide at the Urging of Online Trolls

Prominent transgender game developer Rachel Bryk committed suicide last week on April 23. Bryk suffered from chronic pain and was a regular victim of cyber bullying. However, it was the acts of group of anonymous harassers that eventually caused her to jump off a bridge. They pushed her, saying she was doing this for drama, going as far as to say that she “doesn’t deserve death.” Eventually several harassers simply kept telling her to do it, and she soon thereafter jumped off the George Washington Bridge. She was 23 when she died.

Rachel was known for her work on the Dolphin emulator, a Wii and Gamecube emulator that contributed to many game hacks, including the popular Project M. She was also an active member of 4Chan, where she apparently received a lot of harassment. Her colleagues describe her as always willing to help out, always willing to do the drudge work, and as a generally nice person overall.

The Dolphin team recently made a memorial post in her honor which reads as such:

It’s hard to believe that just two years ago, Rachel was reluctant to submit changes to the emulator at all due to being relatively inexperienced. But over the course of two years, she spent a considerable amount of time working on what she loved, becoming the tenth most active developer over the time period.

She often would do a lot of the drudge work that no one else would do and attempt features that no one else had time to work on. Much of her time in Dolphin was dedicated to giving TASers the tools they needed to be able to make ridiculous videos pushing games to and past their absolute limits. Without her dedicated work, it’s very likely that Wiimote TASing would not have become stable enough for general usage as it is now. She was also responsible for improvements in savestates, netplay, the user interface, configuration, and more.

Beyond that, she was a face constantly within our community, and bridged the gap between Dolphin and TASing communities. She regularly helped users in the IRC, forums, reddit, and beyond, and was one of the most helpful developers we’ve ever had.

Thanks to RachelB, Dolphin, as software and as a community, has improved a lot over the past few years. And she will be missed greatly by everyone. We are stronger, better people thanks to knowing her. We all share a common goal, best said by Rachel herself: “We generally don’t spend our time making Dolphin worse.”

Programmer Commits Suicide at the Urging of Online Trolls

For more posts in her honor, head over to the official commemoration page.

This is a horrible tragedy, and a horrible loss for the gaming community. Let this be a lesson to everyone out there who loves to use internet anonymity to be toxic to others. Someone might just listen to you, and then their lives will be on your hands.

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