Publishers Declined Remember Me Due To The Game’s Female Protagonist

In a Penny Arcade interview Remember Me's creative director Jean-Max Morris claims that some publishers rejected the title as it had a female protagonist named Nilin.

Commenting on Remember Me's heroine Morris said "It was not a decision. It was something that just felt right from the beginning. It's one of those things we never looked at from a cold marketing perspective because that would have endangered the consistency of the whole game."

However certain publishers turned down the title due to Nilin's sex.

"We had some that said, 'well, we don't want to publish it because it's not going to succeed. You can't have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,' Morris revealed.

"We wanted to be able to tease Nilin's private life, and that means for instance, at one point, we wanted a scene where she was kissing a guy. We had people tell us, 'you can't have a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that's going to feel awkward'."

The developer continued "I'm like, 'if you think like that there's no way the medium's going to mature'. There's a level of immersion that  you need to be at, but it's not like your sexual orientation is being questioned by playing a game. I don't know, that's extremely weird to me.

"It just made sense to us that it would be a female character. You can identify with people of the other gender in movies, why could you not in games? The fact that our core market is males 15-25 is not an excuse. We need to be able to create, and respect the audience enough to believe that they can be smart enough to identify with that type of character," Morris concluded.

Earlier this month the game's co-art director Michel Koch commented "of course Nilin is still beautiful, thin and we had to make her attractive, but we really tried to avoid the sexualised route." 

Remember Me, formerly known as Adrift, is a cyberpunk themed game set in a futuristic Paris in 2084. The title is being published by Capcom and coming to PS3, PC and Xbox 360; originally Remeber Me was due to be published by Sony as a PlayStation 3 exclusive. The game is being developed by DontNod Entertainment and is set to be released on June 4th in North America and on June 7th in Europe.