It was just another day at PC Gamer towers when a colleague posted a message in Slack bemoaning that they keep getting jump-scared after "accidentally pressing the button in Google Docs that causes an AI woman to start reading articles at me." I simply replied: "Clippy would never" to which they said "Clippy has blood on its hands."
And just like that, for the first time in my life, I wondered whether Clippy has a gender.
I went in search of answers and, sure enough, the truth is out there. Well, one version of the truth, but as it's from the guy who actually created Clippy I think it has to count as canon.
Clippy is a paperclip: but he's also a man. I found an old Motherboard interview with illustrator Kevan Atteberry (that's him in the lead image), which weirdly enough happened when a piece of fan art depicting Clippy as pregnant went semi-viral.
"It’s important to me that people remember Clippy because as long as they do, I have cachet,” Atteberry told Motherboard in 2017. Asked if the pregnant Clippy is the weirdest fan art he's seen, Atteberry clears up t...
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