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Remember Me is a third-person adventure action game
set in 2084 Neo-Paris,
in a world where memories have been digitized
by a social network called Memorize.
In this universe, the player is Nilin,
an elite memory hunter with the power to steal your memories,
to change them in order to change who you are,
and maybe change the world.
At the beginning of the game, Nilin has her memory erased at the Bastille prison,
and her whole quest will be to retrieve her memory, her identity,
in order for her to know, to rediscover, who she was.
The desire to do this project originally came from Hervé and Oskar.
We were ready, we were “mature,”
As Oskar says, we had a discussion on a balcony one day, when he asked,
“So, you wouldn’t happen to have a new project, would you?”
To which I replied, “Actually, I would.”
It was a project that seemed appropriate for the times we lived in: aimless times.
The project code name was “Adrift.”
It came from the concept of the aimless drifting of a family man.
For me, the trigger was when Oskar called me and said,
“Come over, let’s talk about a new project!”
I hesitated at first, but not for long, since I ended up deciding to go for it.
That’s when Alain Damasio joined in, since he knew Aleksi.
I asked him what the theme was. He said, “It’s set in the future, in flooded Paris”
The idea of being adrift was interesting to me,
and I wanted to push the idea of augmented reality further. I told myself,
“Okay, so if we create reality, we must record it."
and wouldn’t it be more interesting
to start from the concept of a technology able to record every single moment?”
…To create memories, little files that could be exchanged.
At the beginning,
we were taking notes on this piece of cardboard with Jean-Max,
and he told me, “Remix… Memory Remix!”
That’s where the key idea started:
“We’re gonna remix memory".
That’s what the gameplay will be.
Let’s imagine living in that kind of universe, in that paradigm:
what would happen if each of my memories could be digitized?
What kind of economy would we have? What kind of society, what sort of rebellion could this cause?”
That’s how we started to compile what we called a narrative bible,
a big document of about a thousand pages.
The time frame is 2084, in a completely flooded Paris
where Nilin could move around on her wakeboard,
a sort of surfboard attached to her feet.
In the beginning, our whole gameplay consisted of vehicule pursuit
very different from what the game is now.
In the meantime, thanks to our investors, we were able to build some prototypes.
In the summer of 2009, we finalized a video
showing our main gameplay, which was combat.
It lasted about a minute and a half.
We saw that Sony was the editor
who was the most interested in what we were doing.
We were working on an adventure action game,
and they asked us to lean more towards RPG,
so we said, “More RPG? Cool!”
More game designers rapidly came along, new programmers also came on board
and after six months, we were 30, 40 people.
After we signed, Sony asked us to put a whole game level together.
The goal was to have 20, 30 minutes worth of game time.
And the level which was to demonstrate our RPG-Action techniques
was one we called “St Michel” amongst ourselves.
It was a mission during which you had to go steal a memory
from inside an architect’s head.
You could then get secondary missions and get memories from inside anybody’s head.
At that point, we pushed some issues in production,
but we were quite happy with the results, with this mix between the old Paris,
with typical small buildings,
and a projection towards modernity.
Certain modifications will be made later on Nilin,
but as of today, Nilin is as she was meant to be
and accepted by our editor at that stage of the project.
What we tried to accomplish with Nilin,
was to make her a glitch, some sort of bug in Memorize’s matrix.
She’s the grain of sand which will come to disrupt
the well-oiled machinery that is Memorize,
the organization she is fighting against.
This notion of “bug” is something we applied to all aspects of the game,
particularly in graphics, with on-screen “glitches”
found all through the visual effects,
as well as in music.
What we did was, we added glitches in the music,
which means that instead of having a violin sound on a pedal like this
[violin sound]
we’ll get this:
[glitched violin sound]
The way we designed her was mainly influenced by two things:
her universe and her gameplay.
The character has to be strong visually, but her looks have to match
her abilities and what she does in the game.
If we go back to the genesis of the project, she was well suited with the wakeboard,
but in one of the more advanced drafts,
she still had elements that made her look too much like “Space Opera.”
She was wearing some kind of futuristic combat outfit.
It lacked real, contemporary elements
and it looked like a shell-type spacesuit made of unrecognizable material.
Actually, we wanted reality to appear as a recognizable interface,
and we wanted to break away from the boring
graphical codes which tend to be all the same.
So the idea what to flush out all the stylistic effects from the 80s,
with 0s and 1s, the “geeky side”,
and to go back to what was truly essential,
to think in terms of ergonomics and readability.
The whole adventure takes place in the same city, Neo-Paris,
and so one of the main development challenges
was to offer the user a broad experience,
with very different types of environments.
Thinking of the virtual spaces used for storing all these memories,
enabled us to open a new door
and to create environments in which our physical reality had even less of a hold.
Somehow this allowed us to go wild, to go further and offer some really amazing things.
Finally, in order to follow through with our gameplay and development choices,
we focused on combat,
since it is a key element of the game design.
That's why there are a lot more combat scenes in those spaces,
where you can fight various avatars and digitized representations of other enemies.
One thing that makes us unique is that we have a “combolab,”
which is the ability for the gamer to create his or her own sequences and moves.
There are 4 combos, which are like 4 weapons you’d find in any action game.
And you can personalize those combos as the adventure progresses.
What I wanted to achieve as far as the music went,
was to make it change with the way the user handled combat,
so it would follow his or her choices.
Then, if the player decides to do an “overload”,
he’ll grab the guy
this illustrates what’s going on
and he’ll go back to combo.
In our design constraints, we had the basic function of the character,
and the fact that in the beginning, they were only supposed to fight using their fists and feet.
Basically we had some sort of futuristic boxers.
(Michel Koch ) > There was something weird about it.
The fact that they were only fighting with their fists and feet
in spite of being part of special intervention forces was a bit unrealistic.
So you’ve worked on the graphics, you’ve seen your characters a thousand times,
and suddenly someone comes over and points out
to something that looks like a bra!
Once you’ve noticed it, that’s all you can see.
they are enemies which really have a huge importance in Remember Me
and who have gained significance throughout the development.
We call them the Enforcers, they’re the private police of Memorize,
the company against which Nilin is fighting.
in February 2011, Sony came to see us
and announced they had decided to pull the plug on a dozen projects worldwide,
ours included, unfortunately.
We had a nervous reaction, we started laughing like idiots and we said,
“All right, guys, that’s it, it’s over with Sony. We’ve just been nuked.”
When we found ourselves without an editor,
first there was potentially less money, so we had to make reasonable choices.
But then, this was an opportunity we had to grab quickly:
we could go back to our original vision,
even if the RPG wasn’t something we felt had been imposed upon us.
I feel that this crucial time of momentary budget constraint
generated a lot of things!
All of a sudden, we didn’t have a choice,
there was no space to say “we have time… we’ll think about it… we’ll see…”
No! We had to be precise, and not hesitate to make blunt decisions.
As you can see, we weren’t satisfied with the feel we got from that version.
So we decided to bring in strong contemporary elements
that would allow to identify with the character.
And the idea was: a pair of jeans and a simple t-shirt.
Jeans were created at the end of the 19th century and are still worn today,
so we applied the same reasoning to the game:
even if we are in 2084, Nilin could be wearing jeans,
even if slightly modified, with details making them a bit more...
hype or “design” in their structure, in the seams, for example.
And the same applies to the world we create:
if your world is too baroque, too disconnected from reality,
there is a strong possibility you might lose your audience and lose your connection to it.
So we decided to use CyberPunk codes.
We had some Blade Runner elements in mind, inevitably we had elements from the city of Paris,
and we had all our photographic references. So we asked ourselves:
“How do we mix the Parisian look with prospective science-fiction?”
We did a lot of research, whether it be on the material to be re-used later,
iron curtain material or door designs, for instance.
Here, for example, we have a series of windows which match the general geometry,
and a raw geometry which, if turned in any direction, turn into different building facades.
With this object here, I could create entire sceneries.
Everything you see as far as scenery is concerned, is made from a single Favela module.
Basically, we’ll say that those living in the slumps didn’t necessarily choose to.
They ended-up there because the city was almost entirely destroyed.
It is in the process of being rebuilt, and there isn’t enough room for everyone.
In the more residential areas, which we call “Mid-Paris,”
we mainly have people leading stable, quiet lives.
Finally, “High-Paris” is the Paris of the future, with places like the Memorize Tower,
where we’ll bring-in what could be future companies linked to memory.
We spent 6-7 months without an editor,
but we had a lot a material to show for: videos, gameplay phases...
We decided to go to Gamescom
with all of those elements so we could show them to editors.
We signed with Capcom and we are all very pleased.
As you can see, it’s going to be Christmas
and we were able to break the news to the team last week.
It was like “Whoaaa!”-- huge excitement!
But all the while, we still had to finish the game.
We are preparing for E3 in June,
and we’re going to present the “dropship” sequence.
We have to show a huge portion of our game.
Everything must be finalized:
backgrounds, special effects, animations
and all the lighting part must be included and finalized.
I’m in charge of lighting for Remember Me,
which consists in lighting the 3D backgrounds and environments.
This is the kind of scene I get, as is, and my job is to light it up.
This is raw,
and this is lit-up.
On top of that, we add artifacts, some volumes which will add depth to the image,
some fog…
and to finish, for example,
shimmering effects that will be found on water, on metallic surfaces, etc.
E3 was a bit like that. We had prepared everything,
we were ready and about to go
when we realized that one of the trailers that had been developed
wasn’t up to scratch,
and we couldn’t launch the game with that one.
That was way disappointing,
but hey, we still made it to the Gamescom right after that!
When we had the public’s reaction to our new license,
with a female character, with Neo-Paris,
with a crazy gameplay like the Memory Remix…
when we saw the buzz it all generated,
with our now validated “baby” being shown to the public,
it was simply amazing.
All the cinematic and all the Memory Remixes were done in motion capture.
Jean-Luc had the general vision of a scene,
we had Justin Viller, an English speaker, directing the actors,
and then Carole ensured that everything ran smoothly as far as technical constraints,
set dimensions and game environments went.
The idea of building a gameplay on memory remix was great, exhilarating!
You think you can immediately see what to do,
but in fact it’s really hard.
Once again, there were a lot of attempts.
We really started on the bottom rung, sorta thing.
For the first prototype, it was me and my dad...
and we had put together a pretty confusing sequence.
Hey, Ken, come on, let me climb onto the banister, please!
No way! You stay with me!
Well, if this is how you feel, I’m outta here!
It’s such a strong concept that,
in order to bring it to the harsh reality of
“how do you play this with a gamepad in your hands?”
inevitably there was a lot at stake, with and once again, a lot of different variations.
And I think that the underlying problem
was that we gave the impression we were reinventing the past.
And finally we made the last prototype,
where we took a bit of the best of what we’d done to-date.
A memory is a bit vague, you don’t remember everything,
so we decided to take away the polluting elements and show what’s important.
So by deleting the walls, the memory seems to appear on a small stage.
(Aleksi briclot) > A small, theatrical stage that allows us to focus on what’s essential.
Everything worked out. It was a real success.
Everyone we showed it to was really receptive!
The last months of production are really the time
when everything becomes concrete.
Everything we had imagined at the beginning can be shown
and becomes understandable, really tangible for everyone.
Jean-Max was waiting to get the music
and once it was integrated into the game, he told me,
“The vision I had of the game has finally come to life.”
Which means that in his original intent,
there was still a little something amiss, which was the music.
Personally I thought, “I’m not going to push it that far,”
meaning, hire an orchestra, go and record with a real orchestra,
and then digitally alter the music.
But when I told him that, he said,
“Well yes, we should do that, and do it with a good orchestra.”
I only suggested some ideas like taking an acoustical source
to capture the fact that in the game,
we start from an organic source-- the memory-- and then we digitize it.
I had told him: “We can record instruments, digitize them and then alter them.”
We really had an orchestral color in mind,
and the person who came for the recording was John Kurlander.
He recorded the music for The Lord of the Rings and,
more recently, Die Hard 5 and World War Z.
He really brought the best out of the orchestra
and hence gave the game the best music we could hope for.
We wanted to transport the player rather than tell them,
“Careful, you are about to see something serious"
"meaning ‘dark.”
That’s not what we’re about.
Take pleasure in visiting Neo-Paris.
Once again, we are so proud of the results,
and I wouldn’t change a thing if we could do it all over again.
What I really admired in Jean-Max,
is that he held on to the concept from beginning to end.
From the very start on the cardboard piece until the very end,
the same theme remains: Memory Remix, Memory Remix, Memory Remix!
He never stepped away from that.
During the 5 years until Remember Me launched,
we had frequent direction changes,
for commercial reasons, after we had signed with Sony
then the reshuffle towards new editors, to finally sign with Capcom.
So life isn’t a bed of roses in the game industry.
You have to be able to adapt and reconfigure your production at any time.
In a few months maybe, we’ll be able to see
the workload, the intensity and energy we put into it.
That’s really it!
This human adventure we shared during our five years together
was really something quite extraordinary.
When I was young, I thought that you could only accomplish
that sort of thing outside of France.
And now, the fact that we managed to create all this is a huge pride
On top of that there has been so many tales we could tel.
it was a true human adventure and we bonded like family.
It is particularly true with my associates,
with whom I connected and shared all the things we had to face.
Traduction : David Chasseriaud.