Muriel Tramis is a Martinique-born French game designer and producer whose work at Coktel Vision in the late 1980s and 1990s helped expand the narrative and political possibilities of video games. Across roughly a dozen titles such as Méwilo, Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness, and Gobliiins, Tramis brought historical memory, Caribbean culture, and social critique into a medium then dominated by fantasy and abstraction. Drawing on Créolité literature, Martinican folklore, and the legacy of colonialism and slavery, her games treat interactive storytelling as a space for cultural transmission as much as entertainment.

After leaving Coktel Vision in 2003 following its merger with Vivendi Universal Games, Tramis stepped away from the public eye, working instead in 3D modeling, educational technology, and writing. Now, three decades after Méwilo first appeared, she is returning to games with a spiritual successor to the title, REMEMBRANCE: THE JARS OF GOLD OF "LA PELÉE. Renewed interest in her work through retrogaming and shifting cultural conversations around history and memory. Her reemergence reframes her career not as a historical footnote, but as an ongoing project: one grounded in the belief that games, like literature or film or music, can provide itself as a vessel of memory open to reinvention.

This interview was conducted by Ryan C. Clarke over email between June 2023 and November 2025. The correspondence was translated by Catherine Gans.

Dweller:

What specifically do you appreciate about the adventure genre? Freedom, Méwilo, and now Remembrance are all narrative adventure and exploration games.

Muriel Tramis:

I don’t like punitive games. I prefer games where you never die. The challenge is to find the solution if you want to make it out alive. Our survival depends entirely on our logic and powers of perception, navigating the environment by finding and using clues and objects.

D:

Please share any reflections you can recall working alongside Patrick Chamoiseau and how you navigated imagining Martinique in the digital world. With Saint-Pierre in Méwilo, you gave time and attention to a city that was hours from being wiped away by an eruption in 1902. Do you consider Méwilo as an act in remembrance? Something Black studies professor Sadiya Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’ or, a method of writing that uses storytelling and speculation to fill in gaps in historical records. What story were you trying to tell that was previously buried by the ash?

MT:

Yes, undoubtedly, Mewilo is an act of remembrance. PC (Patrick Chamoiseau) was a revelation for me as a teenager, an awakening of my political consciousness. We were in a “dominated country,” a remnant of colonization. I learned that through him. Literature had to be different from what we had learned. It’s not surprising that I expressed this in this new medium that was now my own. CV (Coktel Vision) had released historical games, set in the Middle Ages, etc. I wanted to tell my own story, little-known at the time. It’s the story of the first Creole society to emerge from slavery, renowned throughout the Caribbean for its wealth of economic (sugar, coffee, cacao, tobacco) and cultural resources (its theaters hosted the great performers of France, and people also came for its healing hot springs…).

I asked PC (a friend since my teens), whose emerging style I liked (he had written Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows and Solibo Magnificent but hadn’t yet won awards), to write the dialogue because I wanted the game to be a literary work as well.

There was no critical intent, we simply wanted to describe the realities of Creole life, its lifestyle, its humor. It was important to us to feature a variety of characters from different social classes (the colonizer, the banker, the washerwoman, the notary, the farmer, the merchant, the cockfighter, the lender), but there’s also a mythic element: the game was based on a Carib legend of pots of gold. Colonists would have their most loyal slave dig a hole for their treasure and bury them with it so that their ghost would eternally stand guard.

D:

For your 1988 game, Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness, I love the idea of a slave rebellion placed into the framework of a strategy game. The level of premeditated thought that had to happen before such a unified act of resistance makes sense in that context to me. Also, the savage, or the ‘other’ is rarely positioned as a central, intellectual force driving the narrative. What was the impulse introducing revolution within the context of a strategy game with multiple enslaved protagonists? How did you see the ways in which computer games could present stories of rebellion in a more urgent, yet considered manner?

MT:

It was a refusal of cultural shorthand. There’s a tendency in historical narratives to present Black slaves in a passive role in the face of adversity. We’d heard about maroons, and we knew that the plantation (historians speak of the “settlement society”) or settlement was structured and hierarchized: a battleground with conflict zones, protagonists to convince to join the rebellion, enemies to fight, including their dogs, warehouses and fields to set on fire, factors of noise, agility, and persuasion. It was perfect for a wargame.

D:

There’s something about video games and their duration with respect to slave revolt that works so much better than a movie speaking of these uprisings. The time it takes... the pieces that have to be put in place feels like it makes more sense as a game than in cinema, for instance. In terms of storytelling, what have you seen that video games can achieve or express that films or other mediums cannot?

MT:

The facts were carefully suppressed over time by colonial historians. The film industry was late in its attempts to revise a history long written from the oppressors’ point of view.

For a long time, movies were tentative or biased in their on-screen portrayals of slave revolts. But over the last few decades, the industry has increasingly taken it on, from reenactments of historic events to homages to forgotten resistance fighters and more symbolic readings of the colonial and slave-owning past. These films are part of resurrecting and restoring figures long erased from official history.

It was in 1997 that Amistad, the Spielberg film about a slave revolt, first appeared on screen. So, in 1987, we were ahead of the times. I understood the advantage of a game’s interactivity. Namely that the player isn’t passive in front of a screen the way you are at the movies but rather is prompted to make decisions that advances the story. Because players were immersed in a scenario that they experienced at their own pace and from the inside, I knew that they would be affected. I remember that a selling point for video games was how long it “lasted,” less than ten hours ceased to be engaging. I was aware that the game also had pedagogic value. Playing is also learning!

D:

What types of questions and themes do you explore in your upcoming game, REMEMBRANCE: THE JARS OF GOLD OF "LA PELÉE ?

MT:

I describe the foundations of Creole society whose rules were established by the colonizer during slavery. Even after abolition, the rules didn’t change. Society is just as segregated today.

The game explores the colorism that stratifies people on the basis of skin color, privileging light skin over dark. We see how the colonized integrated into this quasi-institution by developing strategies to work around it in the face of trauma.

REMEMBRANCE also addresses the issuance of a “certificate of individuality” at the time of abolition, which gave last names to these new citizens who previously had only a first name and number.

D:

What’s it about?

MT:

At the start of the game, two teenagers find a cassette of their grandmother, a scientific journalist who tells the story of an adventure she had at 25. They represent the next generation (they’re actually filmed with real camera footage), commenting on their grandmother’s experiences. They’re shocked by certain mindsets of people she describes: the white landowners certain of their superiority, the Black plantation workers convinced of their inferiority. This structure allows me to address the way the past informs the present. And this is how transmission takes place symbolically in the game.

After playing REMEMBRANCE, the player should understand the harms of this false typology, which causes widespread discrimination, from getting hired to finding housing.

D:

You once said, “I wanted to extend the Creolity movement to video games too.” Being one of the first people to introduce a certain folklore into a new medium can feel like a massive undertaking. What choices can you remember did you make to apply the values of the creolite movement into a new medium like video games? Do you know if someone like Glissant or other artists in the Creolite movement ever checked out Mewilo or Freedom?

MT:

No. They weren’t into video games. I don’t even know if Chamoiseau played Mewilo or Freedom. I hope that with my game REMEMBRANCE, there will be more players from the Afro-descendant diaspora.

D:

Was there a particular moment when your eyes opened to recognizing there was a Black consciousness movement of creolity or negritude going on and you wanted to be a part of it?

MT:

Years ago.

Then I was fully Creole.

As I mentioned, meeting PC when I was 15, pivotal! I’d already developed a taste for reading and writing. My academic study of Creole at GEREC (Groupe d'Études et de Recherches en Espace Créolophone et Francophone), which was working to establish the recognition of Creole as a real language, along with historical works on slavery and colonization made me aware that I belonged to a people. I discovered Césaire’s négritude, then Glissant’s antillanité, then the créolité of Confiant and Chamoiseau. I was 30 when we designed Méwilo.

D:

What feels important about video games to you as a method of art making that also teaches system thinking?

MT:

For me, video games are an essential art form because they allow you to have an experience firsthand rather than having it shown to you. Its interactivity places the player at the heart of a system, bringing them to understand the connections, consequences, and dynamics within it. It’s this unique capacity to combine emotion, narration, and systemic thinking that make video games a powerful medium for both transmission and reflection.

D:

Where did the idea of attaching the recipe for Guadeloupean Callaloo and the Lalayoi cassette with Méwilo come from?

MT: The callaloo recipe came from the Creole proverb: “There’s no callaloo without okra.” One character who was important to PC was a market woman who sold her callaloo in the port and who he called “the queen of callaloo." It became symbolic to slip in this recipe, little known outside the Caribbean.

The K7 audio? Malavoi was my favorite band. Hearing their violins in all different colors playing Creole music was an experience that stays with me to this day. I went to see them, the way you go to see your idols, and they agreed to give us the right to distribute the cassette with the game. It was one of the rare occasions that my publisher distributed merchandise like that. It’s 'Conversation,’ a remarkable piece of music because—listen carefully—it’s a dialogue between the violin and the piano, responding to each other in turn.

D:

By today’s standard, these games are incredibly hard to win. Is there a message in the difficulty of these games? For example, to successfully revolt in Freedom is quite hard…

MT:

We didn’t have the precise programming tools and performance measures we have today for gauging difficulty, what today we call “level design.” So the result was either too easy or too hard.

D:

You’ve said in interviews before that “the duty of memory has passed by.” As you approached your own games with ideas of historical remembrance, colonization and slavery are two things still very much going on, so why aren’t video games tackling these subjects as directly anymore?

MT:

I don’t know, maybe the fear of being seen as too “woke”? It’s pretty frowned upon in France, so I have to do it subtly, so as not to cause offense, especially if I’m asking for funding.

D:

Prior to video games you were an engineer for a private arms company before having a change of heart. What led you to working towards more generative expressions?

MT:

What I’ll say is that I left the arms industry because it wasn’t creative. I wanted to use my imagination.

D:

Are there any games or companies that interest you today or are reflective of your own ideas in video gaming?

MT:

I’m a fan of science fiction and am fascinated by time travel (a theme I use in “Lost in Time”). I should pay more attention to game production in Africa and Brazil, where, from what I’ve seen, they’re working to “decolonize” video games.

D: Your work recalls the hidden implications of colonialism inside of technology. As a programmer, do you have any reflections on how western structures are woven into the logic of even making a game? Beyond the aesthetic value we see inside white supremacy, have you recognized any colonial patterns within programming as a language itself? Can you ever see coding systems evolve to applying cultural/ indigenous contexts?

MT:

You can say whatever you want with language. It’s like in real life. Language allows us to express ourselves, communicate, and even create new words for concepts that have never been articulated before. On the other hand, yes, representations lock us in narrative patterns that limit Black people to stereotypes, violence, music, and “bad boys.” We were the first to design a video game, a wargame, with a Black hero with noble values, a slave fighting for their freedom. It’s still the only one today.

Now, to say the programs themselves are biased is an interesting, albeit bold, idea. I’d be curious to see studies on the subject. In any case, AI, which is based on a biased body of knowledge, warrants oversight and correction, and that’s our collective responsibility.

Follow REMEMBRANCE: THE JARS OF GOLD OF "LA PELÉE's Instagram profile to keep updated on the progress on the project

About the translator: Catherine Gans is a writer and translator living at the intersection of Desire and the Mississippi River. She received her BA in French through Vanderbilt University and New York University in Paris and her MFA in Image Text from Cornell University.