Sgt James Heller from Prototype 2 is not a white guy. He’s a black guy. But he didn’t begin his life that way.
“We started off with an amalgamation of Hugh Jackman and Clint Eastwood, and the resulting render looked remarkably similar to James Marsden — so we were like ‘OK, scratch that one out,’” Ken Rosman, head of the studio that developed Prototype, told the Oficial PlayStation Magazine.
“As we were going, there was something about a concept sketch of some ethnicity or other that wasn’t just the the generic Caucasian guy and we were all drawn to it,” he continued. “We started riffing on that character and ended up with Heller.”
According to Rosman, it had nothing to do with race. What’s more telling, however, is how the default for this character (and so many video game characters) was a white dude.
Check out Kotaku‘s previous Prototype 2 coverage.
Prototype 2 hero’s race tricky to talk about, “nobody wants to touch it” [OPM]
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