What do you do if you want to get Mattel's Game Developer Barbie for your wife, but the doll is available only as a white doll with red hair?
For Marcus Montgomery, the answer was quite simple. As a pro problem-solver, being a game designer himself, he bought a black Barbie and dressed it up in the Game Developer Barbie's clothes before carefully repackaging it in the box and presenting it to his wife for her birthday, BuzzFeed reports.
His wife, Lisette Titre-Montgomery, who is also a game designer, was, needless to say, delighted.
In a brief video showing the big reveal, Titre-Montgomery could be seen standing in the doorway laughing before asking, "What is going on?" and picking up the doll.
"I love my husband because he's thoughtful and generous," she told ABC News in a separate interview. "The thought of him struggling to put those tiny clothes on that little Barbie with those big hands cracks me up. It makes me love the gift even more."
Montgomery said that his wife's take on the original doll was “better to have a Game Developer Barbie than not have one at all." But he knew he could do one better.
“My ultimate goal was to make my wife smile,” he said, according to BuzzFeed. “That’s really what I wanted. It was a birthday present and I just wanted to make sure she was happy.”
"She works hard, and like all of us, she feels unrecognized at times," Montgomery told ABC. "A developer Barbie acknowledged her career of choice. It's exciting. It's cool, but both my wife and I realize the importance of representation, and it's something we experience every day."
And Montgomery is giving props for the brilliant idea where props are due. “Let’s be real,” he said. “It’s not something other mothers haven’t done before.”
Both he and his wife have been working to promote diversity and let the importance of representation be known in an industry that too often can be homogeneous.
Montgomery is the creator of We Are Game Devs, a website that highlights people of color, women and other nontraditional members of the industry: "We Are Game Devs is about celebrating the diversity within the video game industry, which is somewhat unnoticed because of the lack of numbers, so it's a chance to spotlight their talents and also give role models to people who are trying to become aspiring game developers," Montgomery told The Root. "Representation is something that is very important to my wife and myself; it is one of the things that drives us to work with organizations like Gameheads in Oakland." The mission of the program, based in Oakland, Calif., is to prepare young people for careers in the industry.