14 DAY TRIAL // Remember Me, the upcoming action adventure game from French studio Dontnod Entertainment, was proposed to different publishers before its current one, Capcom, and the game's creative director, Jean-Max Morris, said lots of companies denied funding because of Nilin, the female protagonist.
Remember Me is one of the few all-new intellectual properties that will appear this year and already the sci-fi game has caused a lot of eyebrows to be raised with its female protagonist, the special cyberpunk futuristic Paris setting, and its novel premise.
While the game does a lot of new things, one feature in particular caused it to lose a lot of potential publishers – the female protagonist.
According to Dontnod's Jean-Max Morris, the studio was in talks with many companies but a lot of them wanted Nilin to be turned into a male hero.
"It was not a decision," Morris told PAR about the game's female protagonist.
"It was something that just felt right from the beginning. It's one of those things that we never looked at from a pure, cold marketing perspective because that would have endangered the consistency of the whole game."
"We had some that said, 'Well, we don't want to publish it because that's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that.'"
Turning Nilin male would have caused a lot of issues and already most of the game was done so it meant big and expensive changes. Throw in the artistic direction desired by the Dontnod team and the studio decided to continue searching for a publisher that liked Nilin and the game.
"The fact is that we're doing a cyberpunk game, and there are cyberpunk games out there that are about physical augmentation and transhumanism, and those are very male worlds in a way," Morris said.
"The world we were building was much more about emotion, intimacy, identity, and the way technology would intersect those. It just felt like the other side of the coin, the yin and the yang, and it just made sense to us that it would be a female character."
Remember Me will be released on June 4, in North America and June 7, in Europe, for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 platforms.