“Almost all my titles were inspired by the tropical zone,” she said. “It’s not him who plays the camera or who directs the actors, everything rests on the director.”) “It’s like when you call on a scriptwriter or a dialogist in the cinema,” Tramis said. (Despite the unfamiliarity of the medium, she didn’t consider it that different than working with a writer on any other creative project. She brought him in to write both Méwilo and Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness. One of those foundational Créolité authors was Patrick Chamoiseau, who Tramis had admired since she was 14 years old. “Any novelist or filmmaker connects with the desire to speak about oneself, one’s own history, one’s place in the great history.” “As a teenager,” she said, “I discovered the very special writing of West Indian writers (Joseph Zobel, René Maran, Roland Brival, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Edouard Glissant, etc.) and I saw the birth of the literary movement of Créolité.” And she was also inspired by Martinican literature. I found it well adapted to the atmosphere of Méwilo, symbolic of Creole society.” Tramis drew the plot of Méwilo from the Saint-Pierre legend of gold jars, a horror story about plantation owners burying their riches and murdering a faithful slave so their spirit would protect their fortune. “I like their original use of the violin, a European instrument, in the Caribbean rhythms (biguine, salsa, mazurka Creole…). “Malavoi is and will remain my favorite band,” Tramis said. The game came with a recipe for callalou, a Creole leaf stew, and a cassette tape featuring a song by the Martinican band Malavoi.
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Méwilo draws from a plethora of Martinican influences. To solve the mystery, you explore the history of Martinique and confront the legacy of French colonialism, how slavery and rebellion shaped the island. You play as a paranormal psychologist summoned to Saint-Pierre to investigate a zombie – the spirit of slavemaster who haunts his plantation. The game takes place in Saint-Pierre, Martinique on May 7, 1902, the day before the town was destroyed by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Pelée. The path was not marked, it was necessary to invent everything.” In that spirit, Tramis “proposed to program a game that I thought totally original. “The counterpart was that I had to give the best of myself. “Roland Oskian, director at the time, was convinced that to leave the freedom to the authors was a guarantee of quality,” she said. She attributes it in part to Coktel’s co-founder Roland Oskian. Tramis describes the company as having a “start-up atmosphere” that encouraged experimentation, autonomy, and risk. She started at the small company as part of a marketing study on palettes in advertising but quickly became a game designer. So in 1986, Tramis went to Coktel Vision. “I wanted to create games with the same ingredients as cinema, a universe, characters, dialogue, intrigue.” I wanted to create games with the same ingredients as cinema, a universe, characters, dialogue, intrigue.”
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“I felt it was an innovation in digital technology. By contrast, it was my new orientation to video games that was rather strange.” Around this time, some of the earliest graphical adventure games were being released – Tramis calls Lucasfilm Games’s Maniac Mansion one of her favorites – and she became interested in the computer as a storytelling tool. “It was rather normal when leaving an engineering school.
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“This was not an unexpected field,” Tramis said. Surprisingly, before joining Coktel, she worked in the weapons industry, spending a five-year stint with French manufacturer Aérospatiale programming military drones for missile testing. She grew up in Martinique but left for France at age 16 to study engineering at Institut supérieur d’électronique de Paris. Tramis’s interest in games came from a lifelong love for technology and science. To promote her return to gaming, Tramis unexpectedly contacted me a few weeks ago and, in one of her first interviews in English, shared more about her time with Coktel Vision, the importance of historical memory to her work, and what she’s been up to for the last 15 years. Tramis launched a crowdfunding campaign for the game last week. Now, Tramis is stepping back into games with a remake of Méwilo, her first game, for its 30th anniversary. Tramis left Coktel Vision in 2003 after the company merged with Vivendi Universal Games, and she’s kept a low profile since then. But she may be known best for her socially charged games inspired by her family’s history on the Caribbean island Martinique, such as the colonial mystery game Méwilo and the incendiary slave rebellion game Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness.
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As a designer and producer at French studio Coktel Vision starting in the late 80s, Tramis worked on about a dozen titles, like the puzzle series Gobliiins. Muriel Tramis has a quiet but powerful legacy in gaming.