In an interview with CVG, Remember Me's creative director Jean-Maxime Moris pulled no punches in expressing her feelings on what is considered to be the status quo of video games: straight, white male protagonists, and lots and lots of violence. The original question from the interviewer doesn't even seem to be about stereotyping when it comes to characters; it's more about the choice to make a game that makes the player think rather than just run and gun. But Moris leaps at the chance to explain how Nilin is combatting that concept in not just what she does but who she is:
How f**king stupid is this industry to only bet on those stereotypes? It's the only thing you give people, they get accustomed to it and don't want anything else. So yes, our character, Nilin, is mixed race, she is female, her sexual orientation is her private life, so I won't go there. She runs around, climbs, leaps, kicks guys' asses, remixes their memories, only kills a few people – and does it all in a game with no blood. We made those choices to say: 'look you can have something that's kick ass, something that's powerful, and you don't need it to be ultraviolent'.
Whether Nilin is anything other than heterosexual – and whether Moris mentioned her sexual orientation to get people talking or if it just slipped out – just having a mixed-race, female character (let alone a main character) is novel enough. These differences between Nilin and most other video game protagonists (Aveline is obviously a notable recent example) echo Moris' earlier suggestion that games need to break the mould:
Videogames have become such a formatted medium, but it's the most powerful medium in the world and it has the most potential in the future. Yet everything is formatted. We just wanted to do things differently.
