Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And as I've mentioned
Speaker 1: on recent shows, we are entering a new era of
Speaker 1: video game consoles and that has a lot of people excited.
Speaker 1: Though I have already started seeing reports of problems with
Speaker 1: optical drives, both for the Xbox Series X and the
Speaker 1: PS five, so that's not great, which serves as a
Speaker 1: good reminder that sometimes it pays to hang back just
Speaker 1: a little bit when new hardware comes out, just to
Speaker 1: see if there are any you know, bugs or issues
Speaker 1: that still need working out. That way, you can purchase
Speaker 1: version one point one or whatever and hopefully avoid those problems.
Speaker 1: You know. I'm thinking of things like the infamous Red
Speaker 1: Ring of Death, that kind of stuff where the early
Speaker 1: adopters bear the brunt of it. They end up getting
Speaker 1: the faulty hardware, and now you have to go through
Speaker 1: the whole process of getting stuff repaired or replaced. I
Speaker 1: like to skip that and kind of swoop in afterward.
Speaker 1: But still, if it weren't for the early adopters, none
Speaker 1: of us would have the consoles anyway. The consoles have
Speaker 1: video games on my mind, is what I was trying
Speaker 1: to say. And I thought it was a really good
Speaker 1: idea to jump into a new deep dive on a
Speaker 1: video game studio I had yet to tackle this time.
Speaker 1: I thought it would take a good long look at
Speaker 1: Ubi Soft or is it you be Soft? I'm kidding.
Speaker 1: I've actually watched videos of Ubi soft employees saying the name,
Speaker 1: and there is no standardized pronunciation even within the company.
Speaker 1: Some of them say you be Soft, some of them
Speaker 1: to be Soft. I'm going to go with uby Soft
Speaker 1: because well, to me, that sounds more French. The company's
Speaker 1: history has a lot of drama packed into it, from
Speaker 1: attempted takeovers to allegations of sexual misconduct, to a reputation
Speaker 1: for terrible production crunch times and more. In fact, I'm
Speaker 1: actually recording this just days after there was this confusing
Speaker 1: event in which employees at the company's Montreal branch had
Speaker 1: evacuated their buildings, some of them barricading themselves on the
Speaker 1: rooftop before authorities determined that there was no actual threat present.
Speaker 1: But we'll get to that in a future episode. Boobisoft
Speaker 1: is known for some prestige titles like Assassin's Creed and
Speaker 1: Far Cry. So it might surprise you to learn that
Speaker 1: the video game company was founded by a family business
Speaker 1: that supplied farming equipment to farmers in France. Yeah, farmers,
Speaker 1: I'm not making that up. It was the early nineties
Speaker 1: and five brothers, Eve's Michel, Gerard, Christianne and Claude Guilmant
Speaker 1: would rotate through various jobs at their father's store in Brittany,
Speaker 1: France as in the northwest section of France, kind of
Speaker 1: across the English Channel from England, and they carried all
Speaker 1: sorts of supplies, including machinery parts for like heavy farm machinery. Now,
Speaker 1: I say this so that you don't think of it
Speaker 1: as some sort of quaint, you know, mom and pop shop.
Speaker 1: This was big business. But by the nineteen eighties the
Speaker 1: profit margins for selling equipment like that, we're starting to
Speaker 1: get fairly narrowed, so it's harder to stay in business,
Speaker 1: and the brothers looked around to see how they might
Speaker 1: diversify the family businesses product line, perhaps by finding some
Speaker 1: products that have a much larger profit margin than say,
Speaker 1: tractor parts. At the time, the personal computer industry was
Speaker 1: starting to kick into a new year, and it had
Speaker 1: begun in the mid nineteen seventies, but at that time
Speaker 1: it was almost exclusively the domain of hobbyists. A few
Speaker 1: years later, there were a ton of different computer companies
Speaker 1: in this burgeoning industry. Here in the States were familiar
Speaker 1: with names like Apple and Commodore and Atari and maybe
Speaker 1: Tandy and a few others. In Europe, there were a
Speaker 1: couple of other computer companies at play, like Sinclair or Amstrade,
Speaker 1: both out of the UK. The Amstrade had just recently
Speaker 1: debuted in nineteen eighty four, and the brothers saw that
Speaker 1: it was starting to gain popularity in France. But they
Speaker 1: also saw something else that was unusual. If you ordered
Speaker 1: computers or computer software from a French distributor, it cost
Speaker 1: way more money than if you ordered the exact same
Speaker 1: stuff direct from the UK, and that opened up an
Speaker 1: opportunity their store could become a retailer for computer software
Speaker 1: in addition to you know, farming equipment. It's sounds like
Speaker 1: an odd commodation, but that's kind of how things unfolded.
Speaker 1: But then the brothers decided that their best course of
Speaker 1: action was to create a mail order business rather than
Speaker 1: just try to convert the shop into a true farming
Speaker 1: and computer software type business, you know, like you do.
Speaker 1: The brothers founded a new company in nineteen eighty four
Speaker 1: to oversee mail orders. They called it Guilmo Informatique. The
Speaker 1: business proved successful, and the following year they formed the
Speaker 1: Guillmant Corporation to expand into the area of computer hardware
Speaker 1: in addition to software. This also proved to be successful,
Speaker 1: and by night six the corporation was earning around forty
Speaker 1: million francs. So this was before the European Union and
Speaker 1: the emergence of the euro and so we have to
Speaker 1: factor in exchange rates and stuff into the value of
Speaker 1: the frank relative to the US dollar, which fluctuated a
Speaker 1: lot in nineteen eight six. So I guess I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say that they were bringing in somewhere between five and
Speaker 1: ten million US dollars in nineteen eighty six, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty princely sum. If we adjust for inflation, it
Speaker 1: would be somewhere between twelve million and twenty four million dollars.
Speaker 1: Because they were able to buy software and hardware at
Speaker 1: much lower costs from the UK than from other French distributors.
Speaker 1: They could also price their products at a lower cost
Speaker 1: to consumers without eating too much into the profit margin,
Speaker 1: so they were essentially undercutting the competition. In six computer
Speaker 1: games were starting to become a real commodity again. The
Speaker 1: market had crashed hard a couple of years earlier, mostly
Speaker 1: in video game consoles, but computer games were also affected.
Speaker 1: But the computer game industry made a pretty fast recovery.
Speaker 1: While people were a bit more cautious about consoles at first,
Speaker 1: computers had a totally different value proposition. You could do
Speaker 1: useful stuff on computers, right. You could have a word
Speaker 1: processor or something and could do workie work on a computer.
Speaker 1: It was just cool that programmers could also make games
Speaker 1: for computers, and the brothers saw an opportunity. They were
Speaker 1: already distributing video games as part of their software business,
Speaker 1: and they saw how popular it was. But they could
Speaker 1: also form a video game developer studio, a company that
Speaker 1: actually makes games. Part of the motivation for starting up
Speaker 1: a development company was that young programmers in France had
Speaker 1: approached the brothers with either completed games or ideas for games.
Speaker 1: The software industry in France was still very young and
Speaker 1: there were few opportunities for programmers at that time in
Speaker 1: the country, so the company decided that this was a
Speaker 1: risk worth taking, but it would require a new organization,
Speaker 1: a new company dedicated to game development. On March night six,
Speaker 1: the brothers Guilmant founded the UBI Soft Entertainment s A.
Speaker 1: And depending on the source you look at, the original
Speaker 1: name for the company was broken up into two parts,
Speaker 1: with Ubi and Soft being distinct words, though lots of
Speaker 1: other sources just pair them together as UBI soft. To
Speaker 1: be fair, their logo made it clear it was UBI
Speaker 1: soft to words, and for many years that's essentially how
Speaker 1: official company communications spelled the name of the company now
Speaker 1: Soft clearly comes from software, but what is UBI Well,
Speaker 1: that also depends upon which source you cite. Now most
Speaker 1: claim that UBI stands for ubiquity, meaning omnipresent or found everywhere.
Speaker 1: That's what uby soft. Montreal tweeted that the UBI stood
Speaker 1: for warhen someone asked them outright, so it seems pretty definitive.
Speaker 1: But other sources point to a more regional explanation for
Speaker 1: the origin of the company name, and that was that
Speaker 1: UBI stood for Union de Breton Independent, the Union of
Speaker 1: Independent Bretts, as in people from Brittany. Now, according to
Speaker 1: an interview that Christianne Guillamont sat in for back in,
Speaker 1: his brother Gerard Guillamont was the one who suggested UBI
Speaker 1: because he thought it sounded good, and Eve Guillamont had
Speaker 1: given the ubiquity answer in another interview, So I'm willing
Speaker 1: to go with ubiquity being the origin. However, I would
Speaker 1: not be surprised to find out that the sound of
Speaker 1: the name came first and then the meaning followed afterward.
Speaker 1: That's also possible. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying it wouldn't surprise me. Now. The brothers had
Speaker 1: also made an interesting decision when it came to the
Speaker 1: headquarters for this company. There are other businesses were located
Speaker 1: out of Paris at this point, but Ubisoft would be different.
Speaker 1: After a few months, and originally they worked out of
Speaker 1: the same sort of Parisian offices, but shortly thereafter, the
Speaker 1: brothers decided to establish UBI Soft, the video game development company,
Speaker 1: in a chateau in Brittany. And when I say chateau,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the real deal. Think of something that
Speaker 1: sits somewhere between castle and mansion, and you're on the
Speaker 1: right track now. According to the founders, this was largely
Speaker 1: a marketing strategy to attract programmers who wanted to work
Speaker 1: in a different setting than your typical office building. You
Speaker 1: could work in a chateau La la, and according to
Speaker 1: Ubisoft's executive director of Worldwide Studios, Christine Burgess Gernard, there
Speaker 1: was another motivation for putting the HQ in a chateau,
Speaker 1: one that might in retrospect be viewed with some disapproval.
Speaker 1: Perhaps In an interview with Game Informer, Christine said, we
Speaker 1: also thought it would be great to have a place
Speaker 1: where we could actually lock all of our developers together
Speaker 1: so that they could develop games and finish them. It
Speaker 1: was not always easy when you had a bunch of
Speaker 1: eighteen or nineteen year olds to realize that when you
Speaker 1: start a game and you start talking to the press
Speaker 1: about it and you start investing into it, you have
Speaker 1: to deliver. So the first aim was to make sure
Speaker 1: that everybody was under the same roof, so we could
Speaker 1: have everybody contained in a way in the quotation, so yikes,
Speaker 1: with the benefit of a more heightened awareness of things
Speaker 1: like development crunch and autonomy, which I'm sure we'll touch
Speaker 1: on again as we go through this history, that kind
Speaker 1: of perspective takes on a much more sinister meaning. But
Speaker 1: I want to be fair, it's not at all an
Speaker 1: unusual tactic for tech companies in general to kind of
Speaker 1: go this route. Uh not, maybe not this extreme, but
Speaker 1: it's not unusual. Microsoft was famous for doing stuff like
Speaker 1: buying pinball and arcade machines to put in the employee
Speaker 1: break room so that the developers over at Microsoft would
Speaker 1: find reasons to stick around the office for longer hours.
Speaker 1: Google kept chefs on hand to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner,
Speaker 1: thus removing the need for people to go home to
Speaker 1: have meals. The tech world is no stranger to finding
Speaker 1: ways to discourage workers from, you know, having a life
Speaker 1: outside of work. The company hired on programmers and a
Speaker 1: leadership team for all the usual stuff like marketing for example,
Speaker 1: and at first the focus was purely on the French market,
Speaker 1: so keep that in mind when I talk about sales
Speaker 1: figures in a second. So the company got started in
Speaker 1: March and by the end of the year they had
Speaker 1: published several titles, including Zombie z O, m b I, Sineclap, Fair,
Speaker 1: eflam Mosque, and a developer tool called graphic City. Which
Speaker 1: was designed to help programmers edits sprites. A sprite is
Speaker 1: a two dimensional bit map image that can integrate into
Speaker 1: a larger scene. So a lot of early computer and
Speaker 1: console games used sprites to represent, say the player character,
Speaker 1: and you would be able to move around within the
Speaker 1: larger background world of the video game, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: Zombie gets the credit for Ubisoft's first in house game.
Speaker 1: In that game, you control a group of characters who
Speaker 1: are exploring a shopping mall that is infested with well zombies.
Speaker 1: In this way, it was taking elements of other popular
Speaker 1: computer games of the time, like Bard's tail Or Wizardry,
Speaker 1: where you would control a group of characters exploring a
Speaker 1: fantasy setting, and then combining that with the setting from
Speaker 1: George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead movie. There's also
Speaker 1: a little bit of Oregon Trail kind of going on here,
Speaker 1: because you would control crosshairs. After you would hit a
Speaker 1: use icon to activate your gun, assuming you had one
Speaker 1: in your inventory, and then you would aim at zombies
Speaker 1: that were walking across your field of view from one
Speaker 1: side of the screen to the other, and you would
Speaker 1: fire to take them down before they would stop and
Speaker 1: turn and attack you. It wasn't quite at the level
Speaker 1: of a first person shooter, but you can see elements
Speaker 1: that would evolve into that genre. One great addition is
Speaker 1: that should one of your player characters lose all their
Speaker 1: hit points and die, they would become a zombie and
Speaker 1: would become an enemy to the surviving characters, which I
Speaker 1: think is kind of nifty. And the developers included posters
Speaker 1: on the walls that said things like are you a programmer?
Speaker 1: Contact ubi Soft, so that was cheeky. Ubi Soft developed
Speaker 1: the game for platforms like the armstrad CPC and the
Speaker 1: z X Spectrum computer, among others. By January seven, Ubi
Speaker 1: Soft had sold around five thousand copies of Zombie. So
Speaker 1: here's where we address the differences in scale from the
Speaker 1: mid eighties to today. If a video game development studio,
Speaker 1: even a relatively modest independent studio, were to see five
Speaker 1: thousand titles sold after a few months of launch, it
Speaker 1: would be a pretty big flop. But this was back
Speaker 1: in the early days of programming, when it was possible
Speaker 1: for a small team of three or four people to
Speaker 1: put together a full game, and these were games that
Speaker 1: were coming from big, established studios, so kind of the
Speaker 1: equivalent of what we would think of as a triple
Speaker 1: A title today. Also, at this point, Ubisoft was only
Speaker 1: selling games within France, which meant they were hitting a
Speaker 1: pretty small potential market. After all, only a relatively few
Speaker 1: number of households owned a computer in the first place,
Speaker 1: and Ubisoft was only focusing on their own home country.
Speaker 1: But the early success encouraged the leaders of Ubisoft, who
Speaker 1: became determined to expand into other markets. At first, they
Speaker 1: took aim at Spain and West Germany. To keep in mind,
Speaker 1: this is before the reunification of East and West Germany
Speaker 1: into Germany. In addition, Ubisoft began to form partnerships with
Speaker 1: other developers, and so it became an official distribution partner
Speaker 1: within France. When we come back, we'll talk more about
Speaker 1: the early days of Ubisoft's existence, including some very early
Speaker 1: road bumps, But first let's take a quick break. So
Speaker 1: in Ubisoft was developing games like a spy hunter like
Speaker 1: vehicular combat game called Asphalt. You controlled a giant truck
Speaker 1: that had a turret gun mounted on it. They also
Speaker 1: had a pingo like game called mange Quelu, in which
Speaker 1: you've controlled a red bird that could push rocks around
Speaker 1: a maze to avoid enemies. By the way my French pronunciation.
Speaker 1: I know it's terrible. I realized that I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: my best, but it will be bad. Ubisoft was also
Speaker 1: distributing games from other companies around this time, and some
Speaker 1: of those games ended up being really big titles like
Speaker 1: Akari Warriors and Commando, which were pretty popular, and those
Speaker 1: would end up selling thousands of copies within France. Eve
Speaker 1: Guillmant would become CEO of the company in short order,
Speaker 1: and one other big change was also coming. The company
Speaker 1: determined that the chateau in Brittany, while impressive and working
Speaker 1: like a treat as a way to entice people to
Speaker 1: come and actually, you know, work as a developer for Ubisoft,
Speaker 1: it was just playing expensive to maintain. Too expensive. It
Speaker 1: turns out that really old buildings require a lot of maintenance,
Speaker 1: and that heating a building that wasn't designed to accommodate
Speaker 1: modern heating methods is pretty expensive. So the company decided
Speaker 1: to let the lease on the property expire at the
Speaker 1: end of it, and they decided to shift operations back
Speaker 1: to Paris, and from what I can tell, the initial
Speaker 1: plan was to kind of share space with some of
Speaker 1: the other Guilmalt brother companies now this it and go
Speaker 1: over great with all the developers. Paris is an expensive
Speaker 1: city to live in, and some programmers balked at the
Speaker 1: prospect of moving from relatively inexpensive Brittany to extremely expensive Paris,
Speaker 1: and it would mean many of them would have to
Speaker 1: secure an apartment in a less desirable part of the
Speaker 1: city to stay within their budgets. A few of them
Speaker 1: declined to make the move, and Ubisoft would just kind
Speaker 1: of keep the door open for collaborations, allowing some programmers
Speaker 1: to even work remotely. Now, in those cases, it wasn't
Speaker 1: like the remote programmer was a full time employee, but
Speaker 1: rather that Ubisoft would look at any work that the
Speaker 1: programmers produced to see if anything might warrant an investment.
Speaker 1: One of those people was a guy named michel Ansell,
Speaker 1: who was quite young and whose family had moved from
Speaker 1: Montpellier to Brittany in order for him to work at Ubisoft.
Speaker 1: Paris was not a feasible option for the family and
Speaker 1: they decided to relocate back to Montpellier. But on sales
Speaker 1: talent was undeniable, and the Guillman brothers convinced him to
Speaker 1: keep communications open. Should he have anything to show them
Speaker 1: on sale, got to work on some general concepts and
Speaker 1: later partnered with a programmer named Frederic Howd to create
Speaker 1: a sort of proof of concept game and the two
Speaker 1: would present their idea to be soft and it definitely
Speaker 1: got the company's attention. They could see a lot of
Speaker 1: promise in the concept, but it would require a great
Speaker 1: deal more work and several more years to bring it
Speaker 1: into existence as a fully fledged game. Will come back
Speaker 1: to that. In the meantime, Ubisoft continued to develop, publish,
Speaker 1: and distribute games. In company published a port of its
Speaker 1: first game, Zombie, to the Atari st computer system. While
Speaker 1: the company was turning out game titles, most of these
Speaker 1: wouldn't be familiar to people outside of France, and definitely
Speaker 1: the familiarity drops off once get outside of Europe, as
Speaker 1: they were still catering primarily to those markets. Also, just
Speaker 1: as a side note, there is a Wikipedia page that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be a list of Ubisoft games, but I
Speaker 1: can tell you that a lot of the entries, at
Speaker 1: least for the years between n six and nine, are
Speaker 1: just playing wrong. Ubisoft is listed as developer for games
Speaker 1: that it did not develop, though in some cases the
Speaker 1: company would develop a later game in a series based
Speaker 1: off the one that shows up on that list. Anyway,
Speaker 1: just a reminder that Wikipedia is a great starting point
Speaker 1: for research, but you should always go beyond that because
Speaker 1: sometimes the information there is just playing wrong. Anyway, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna go through an exhaustive list of all these
Speaker 1: early games, as most of them have faded into obscurity
Speaker 1: in the passing years and there wouldn't be much value
Speaker 1: to that. That being said, I'm immediately going to break
Speaker 1: my own rule to talk about one game I learned
Speaker 1: about while researching this. I had never heard of this
Speaker 1: game before. This game is called Fred. You play as
Speaker 1: a big, strong night named Fred, who at the very
Speaker 1: beginning of the game gets transformed into a tinier version
Speaker 1: of himself, and then you must face enemies like gnomes, who,
Speaker 1: for the life of me, like garden gnomes. And there
Speaker 1: are other batties in there too, like spiders and ravens
Speaker 1: and stuff, but it's the gnomes that sell this for me.
Speaker 1: The gameplay is interesting. It kind of reminds me of
Speaker 1: ghosts and goblins, or ghouls and ghosts if you prefer.
Speaker 1: That's another title in that same series, but one cool
Speaker 1: thing is that the levels have a cheat to them
Speaker 1: to give them a little bit of depth. The game
Speaker 1: is a platform or and it's a side scroller, so
Speaker 1: you're looking at everything in profile, and enemies typically travel
Speaker 1: along specific planes of depth, but there are multiple planes
Speaker 1: in every level, so in other words, you can travel
Speaker 1: left or right on a plane that's closest to the
Speaker 1: screen that would be the one you know, closest to
Speaker 1: the player, or one that's maybe slightly further back, or
Speaker 1: maybe one that's even further back close to the background. However,
Speaker 1: that also means they can be kind of tricky to
Speaker 1: figure out which plane of depth and enemy is on.
Speaker 1: It might look like you're both lined up, but one
Speaker 1: of you is actually a little further back than the
Speaker 1: other with respect to the you know, your point of view,
Speaker 1: and so in those cases your attacks won't hit them,
Speaker 1: and most of the time their attacks won't hit you either,
Speaker 1: And you have to each beyond the same plane of
Speaker 1: depth in order to fight each other, and that's not
Speaker 1: always apparent. However, the attempt at adding death would be
Speaker 1: another indicator of game elements that were coming down the
Speaker 1: line in the future. Just as Zombie was hinting a
Speaker 1: little bit at first person shooter elements. These were decent
Speaker 1: ideas that were executed upon and let's say limited success.
Speaker 1: That's a kind way of putting it. Fred from what
Speaker 1: I've seen, does not look like it was a particularly
Speaker 1: playable game. Around would be Soft established its own internal
Speaker 1: studio in Paris, by which I mean the company established
Speaker 1: a real face for programmers to come and work in
Speaker 1: a studio. In addition, the company would open its first
Speaker 1: studio outside of France, establishing a space in Bucharest, Romania.
Speaker 1: This gave the company access to more developer talent. So
Speaker 1: remember Michel on Sale and Frederic Howd. They presented their
Speaker 1: work to be Soft with an early build of what
Speaker 1: would evolve into the game Rayman, a platformer style game
Speaker 1: with a super cute protagonist. Now, those of you familiar
Speaker 1: with Rayman know that it would go on to become
Speaker 1: an enormous franchise, spawning more than forty games that were
Speaker 1: either sequels or spinoffs or tie ends. It would become
Speaker 1: the big early hit for Ubisoft, and it would put
Speaker 1: the company on the larger video game map through most
Speaker 1: of Europe. And it started off so small. The very
Speaker 1: earliest concept for Rayman was to be destined for the
Speaker 1: Atar E S T. That was what it was originally
Speaker 1: going to be programmed for, but that was back when
Speaker 1: on Cell was just working on it by himself. Once
Speaker 1: Frederic joined that changed. The pair of developers worked on
Speaker 1: their project for Ubisoft with the goal of producing a
Speaker 1: game for a system that would never actually emerge. They
Speaker 1: were working on creating the title for the Super Nintendo
Speaker 1: CD Peripheral system, which was originally a cooperative project between
Speaker 1: Nintendo and Sony, but in Nintendo famously dropped a bombshell
Speaker 1: at C E S and announced that it would instead
Speaker 1: partner with the Dutch tech company Phillips to develop the
Speaker 1: CD peripheral and it would be dumping Sony in the process.
Speaker 1: And it was really this event that encouraged Sony executive
Speaker 1: Ken Kutaragi to take the progress that he had made
Speaker 1: for the proposed Nintendo C D system and pivot that
Speaker 1: toward the internal development of Sony's own video game console system,
Speaker 1: which would evolve into the PlayStation. And you can hear
Speaker 1: more about that story in the episodes I'd did about
Speaker 1: the history of the PlayStation. Those episodes published earlier this year,
Speaker 1: and it's a crazy story anyway. At this stage, Phillips
Speaker 1: was still supposedly working with Nintendo to develop this CD
Speaker 1: peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Only no peripheral
Speaker 1: ever came out. Nintendo never announced that development for the
Speaker 1: system had been canceled. The company never gave a release
Speaker 1: date or a proposed price, or even a list of
Speaker 1: games that were in development for the system. It just
Speaker 1: kind of faded from public consciousness because the next generation
Speaker 1: of video game consoles was starting to creep forward, and
Speaker 1: really it was a matter of a lost cause at
Speaker 1: that point. It just made more sense to shift resources
Speaker 1: to developing the next Nintendo console as opposed to a
Speaker 1: peripheral for an older console, and so the developers would
Speaker 1: need to change direction for Rayman. They need to go
Speaker 1: to a different platform. The Nintendo CD system was a
Speaker 1: no go around. That same time, Ubisoft made a huge investment.
Speaker 1: They opened up another in house studio in Paris, and
Speaker 1: they hired on more than one hundred programmers. The little
Speaker 1: project of Rayman grew into a fully fledged next generation
Speaker 1: studio title on Cell. Would continue his animation design and
Speaker 1: the developers were building a game around it, and thus
Speaker 1: we got Rayman a cute character who has a body.
Speaker 1: He's got feet, he's got hands, he's got a head,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't have a neck, he doesn't have arms,
Speaker 1: he doesn't have legs, so he has these sort of
Speaker 1: free floating appendages. And that meant the designers could give
Speaker 1: Rayman really interesting abilities, like throwing a punch with his
Speaker 1: fist traveling halfway across the screen potentially, so they made
Speaker 1: a creative platform or game based around this little fella. Now,
Speaker 1: initially the first platform the project would focus on was
Speaker 1: the Atari Jaguar. Now that you know the Nintendo thing
Speaker 1: had fallen through, they thought, let's look at this new console,
Speaker 1: the Autar Jaguar. Now a lot of you out there
Speaker 1: may not know a whole lot about that console because
Speaker 1: it didn't have a particularly illustrious or long lifespan. It
Speaker 1: launched first in North American and within just three years
Speaker 1: Atari would discontinue the system. The Jaguar was a cartridge
Speaker 1: based console, though Atari would try to extend a life
Speaker 1: of the flailing system later by releasing a CD ROM
Speaker 1: add on. But that means that any game for the
Speaker 1: system had to be hard coded onto a circuit board
Speaker 1: that was housed inside a cartridge that you would then
Speaker 1: plug into the console. If Ulbi Soft had only ever
Speaker 1: made a version of Rayman for the Atari Jaguar, there's
Speaker 1: a really good chance that no one would even know
Speaker 1: what Rayman was at this point, would be Soft itself,
Speaker 1: would not be the company that it is. It likely
Speaker 1: would have made little to no impression due to that
Speaker 1: small market size of Jaguar owners. But fortunately, both for
Speaker 1: the company and for gamers, that's not what happened. Mis
Speaker 1: Jail Guilmant recognized the potential of the game and had
Speaker 1: a hunch that Sony's PlayStation console, which was on the
Speaker 1: way but not yet on the market, was going to
Speaker 1: be a huge deal. So part of the work that
Speaker 1: those one plus developers were doing was to create a
Speaker 1: version of Rayman for the PlayStation that would be ready
Speaker 1: to go as soon as the console was hitting store shelves.
Speaker 1: The prevailing feeling was that to compete globally in the
Speaker 1: platform game market, especially to go up against established Japanese
Speaker 1: video game companies, they would need to time the launch
Speaker 1: to a console launch. They would need to tie it
Speaker 1: to that, otherwise Raymond would likely get left behind by
Speaker 1: the numerous games coming out of other places like Japan,
Speaker 1: and it totally worked. When Raymond shipped, there were only
Speaker 1: nine games available on the PlayStation. As Eve Guilmant would
Speaker 1: Riley observe, customers didn't have much choice but to try
Speaker 1: this one. The company would also publish the title for
Speaker 1: other systems like the Sega Saturn for PCs. This was
Speaker 1: at the tail end of the ms DOS days, just
Speaker 1: before Windows would really take over, and then much later
Speaker 1: on for more recent platforms like iOS and Android, but
Speaker 1: obviously those came much much later. The game was a
Speaker 1: big success in Europe, though it met with a more
Speaker 1: modest reception in the United States. In the same year
Speaker 1: Raymond debuted would be Soft established a new department within
Speaker 1: the company, the Editorial Department, with a man named Serge
Speaker 1: Ascue named as the head of that department. Says started
Speaker 1: with the company back in ninety eight, originally serving as
Speaker 1: a video game tester after applying for the gig through
Speaker 1: a newspaper. At As head of Editorial, Says would be
Speaker 1: the voice of authority on game development. If you wanted
Speaker 1: a game made, you had to get approval from him first.
Speaker 1: He could take a get your work and demand changes
Speaker 1: or even cancel a project outright, he would play a
Speaker 1: key role in the direction of the company, and more
Speaker 1: recently he was in the news that paint him in
Speaker 1: a truly negative light. Now I'll get to those in
Speaker 1: an upcoming episode, as the allegations of his behavior didn't
Speaker 1: really become public until this year, that is twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: The important thing to keep in mind is that he
Speaker 1: was effectively the gatekeeper of games coming out of the studio.
Speaker 1: If he didn't like it, it wasn't going to stick
Speaker 1: around for very long. Raymond's success marked a real turning
Speaker 1: point for Ubisoft. One year after the game's launch, Ubisoft
Speaker 1: would list on Paris's secondary stock exchange and raise more
Speaker 1: than eighty million dollars worth of investments. As well, the
Speaker 1: company would expand once again, opening up a studio in France,
Speaker 1: another one and a new international development studio in Shanghai,
Speaker 1: China in and then they opened up the famous Ubisoft
Speaker 1: Montree y'all in Quebec, Canada. In they would follow that
Speaker 1: up with two new studios in Spain and Italy, and
Speaker 1: it really set the stage from the next phase of
Speaker 1: Ubisoft's history. We'll learn more about that in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break. So about that
Speaker 1: Ubisoft Montreal office. Ubisoft was looking to expand into North
Speaker 1: America and office in Montreal would work well as Montreal
Speaker 1: is a French speaking city, though the dialects of Quebec
Speaker 1: and France are very different. In addition, Montreal was looking
Speaker 1: to create incentives to attract tech companies to open offices
Speaker 1: in the city, having struggled as other industries like textiles
Speaker 1: were starting to flounder. After some negotiations, Ubisoft was able
Speaker 1: to get a pretty sweet deal to establish a studio
Speaker 1: in Montreal. When it opened in about half of the
Speaker 1: fifty employees of the studio actually originally came from the
Speaker 1: Parisian office of UBI Soft. The other half were locals,
Speaker 1: and according to later interviews, most of them had no
Speaker 1: clue how to develop software or at the very least
Speaker 1: video games. They were being brought in as kind of
Speaker 1: blank slates, learning on the job how to make games.
Speaker 1: The studio initially focused at least primarily on licensed titles,
Speaker 1: so in other words, the games coming out of Ubisoft
Speaker 1: Montreal were mostly games based off of existing i p
Speaker 1: from other companies like d C Comics or Disney. Sometime
Speaker 1: around then Ubisoft also established a development office in New York.
Speaker 1: I can't get a whole lot of information about the
Speaker 1: specifics around this, but they did have an office of
Speaker 1: developers in New York City at one point. One of
Speaker 1: the projects that that team tackled was a concept called
Speaker 1: The Drift. Now, the Drift never made it as a
Speaker 1: full game, but elements of the Drift would become really
Speaker 1: important in later Ubisoft games. For example, the Drift had
Speaker 1: a modular weapon that could do all sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: like be used as a grappling hook. It also had
Speaker 1: stealth mechanics and surveillance cameras that you could deploy within
Speaker 1: the game, and had crowd ai behaviors that made crowds
Speaker 1: of nonplayer characters react to you depending on your own behavior.
Speaker 1: So if you pulled out a weapon, for example, in
Speaker 1: a public space, the crowd would react to that, or
Speaker 1: if you were running through a crowd, the crowd would
Speaker 1: react to that. The New York team tried to kind
Speaker 1: of pull all this together to make a cohesive game,
Speaker 1: but while the individual ideas were good ones, no real
Speaker 1: game emerged from the collection of ideas. There was a
Speaker 1: last ditch effort to pitch this concept as the basis
Speaker 1: for a James Bond style game, like an actual licensed
Speaker 1: James Bond game, but that ultimately went nowhere. So then
Speaker 1: UBI soft headquarters would decide to close down the New
Speaker 1: York office, with many of that development team moving to
Speaker 1: Montreal to join that team there, and the Drift would
Speaker 1: be put on ice for the time being. In n Michelle,
Speaker 1: Guilmant would found another video game publisher, this one called
Speaker 1: game Loft. Rather than a competitor to Ubisoft, game Loft
Speaker 1: had another market in mind. The Internet was in a
Speaker 1: boom phase. Keep in mind this is getting towards the
Speaker 1: peak of the dot com bubble, and the main focus
Speaker 1: for game Loft was for web based content and then
Speaker 1: later on for mobile games. Game Loft licensed ip held
Speaker 1: by You guessed it would be Soft, and a few
Speaker 1: other web based game companies would do the same, and
Speaker 1: soon those licensing vs we're making up the majority of
Speaker 1: Ubisoft's revenue, which in turn pumped up the company's stock
Speaker 1: value fivefold. Flush with cash, Ubisoft made a move that
Speaker 1: would really help it break into the North American market.
Speaker 1: It acquire another company. Longtime listeners of tech stuff will
Speaker 1: recognize the strategy some companies find that the solution to
Speaker 1: expansion is just in acquiring other companies rather than building
Speaker 1: things out on their own cough Comcast cough. For some companies,
Speaker 1: this kind of boils down into buying growth, which seems
Speaker 1: a little cynical of me, I guess. But for Ubisoft,
Speaker 1: it was a means to tap into a market that
Speaker 1: had thus far remained elusive and to cover some of
Speaker 1: the gaps in Ubisoft's own expertise. Ubisoft's acquisition was a
Speaker 1: game development studio out of North Carolina called Red Storm.
Speaker 1: Red Storm Studios was only four years old at the time.
Speaker 1: It was founded by Doug Little John's and Tom Freaking Clancy.
Speaker 1: The company took its name from a Clancy novel named
Speaker 1: Red Storm Rising, and it launched out of, and then absorbed,
Speaker 1: an earlier game studio called Vitus Studios. Between its founding
Speaker 1: and two thousand, the studio had published a few titles,
Speaker 1: but the one that really caught fire was the PC
Speaker 1: tactical first person shore game Rainbow six. The game eventually
Speaker 1: would come out for numerous other platforms, including the PlayStation,
Speaker 1: the second Dreamcast, mac computers, and more. The title was
Speaker 1: a phenomenal success and the studio was still relatively small,
Speaker 1: which made it a perfect entry point for a company
Speaker 1: that wants to get into the North American market. Red
Speaker 1: Storm was at a crossroads. According to marketing manager Wendy Beasley,
Speaker 1: the studio was in the mindset that it needed to
Speaker 1: either be acquired to acquire some other company, or to
Speaker 1: go public to be soft and red Storm first initiated
Speaker 1: talks about an acquisition sometime around E three in two thousand.
Speaker 1: E three, for those unfamiliar, is a video game industry conference.
Speaker 1: By August of that year, the paperwork was signed and
Speaker 1: Red Storm had become a one hundred percent owned subsidiary
Speaker 1: of Ubisoft. Now. In the announcement of that acquisition, the
Speaker 1: messaging was made clear that Red Storm would continue to
Speaker 1: operate as if it were a truly independent studio. In addition,
Speaker 1: the developers at red Storm could potentially take over Ubisoft
Speaker 1: titles and franchises that were a better fit for the
Speaker 1: American developers. One big change was that Tom Clancy left
Speaker 1: the company, though he would still license his properties to
Speaker 1: red Storm, which was a good thing as games inspired
Speaker 1: by his work would prove to be some of the
Speaker 1: biggest successes for Ubisoft. During this part of the company's history,
Speaker 1: so now Ubisoft had access to licensed material from Tom Clancy.
Speaker 1: Ubisoft Montreal had talent and assets from the recently closed
Speaker 1: New York office. At some point, the puzzle pieces clicked
Speaker 1: into place, and Ubisoft Montreal got to work on a
Speaker 1: Tom Clancy game in which an operative would complete missions
Speaker 1: using stealth and special equipment to navigate levels while trying
Speaker 1: to avoid detection. Most of the technology from the Drift
Speaker 1: would come into play in this game. In addition, the
Speaker 1: team had a directive from Ubisoft HQ they needed to
Speaker 1: make a game they could go toe to toe with
Speaker 1: the PlayStation Konami game Metal Gear Solid two out of
Speaker 1: the legendary video game developer Hideo Kajima. And that is
Speaker 1: how Tom Clancy's splinter Cell was born as a convergence
Speaker 1: of technologies and opportunities, which I think is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It was an Xbox exclusive and it helped to establish
Speaker 1: the console's legitimacy as well as the company's place in
Speaker 1: the North American video game market, and it would set
Speaker 1: off a chain of events that would push Ubisoft's Montreal
Speaker 1: studio on a path to tackle increasingly ambitious games. There
Speaker 1: was a lot going on around this time. In two
Speaker 1: thousand one, while the Montreal team was hard at work
Speaker 1: finishing splinter Cell, would be Soft acquired the entertainment division
Speaker 1: from the Learning Company, which in turn had properties from
Speaker 1: earlier game companies like Strategic Simulations and Mattel Interactive, among others.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think this acquisition is what confused some
Speaker 1: of the editors on Wikipedia who put together that list
Speaker 1: I had mentioned earlier. One of the games that was
Speaker 1: mistakenly included on that list was the original Pool of
Speaker 1: Radiance game. That's an advanced Dungeons and Dragons licensed game
Speaker 1: that was published under the developer Strategic Simulations Incorporated in Now,
Speaker 1: I love that game, but it is definitely not an
Speaker 1: Ubisoft title. Ubisoft would later go on to make a
Speaker 1: game with a Pool of Radiance name, a sequel at
Speaker 1: least in name, but it shared very little in common
Speaker 1: with the older title, and it got pretty mixed reviews
Speaker 1: as well. Anyway, that's me getting my dander up about
Speaker 1: wick A p D against We'll leave it there. The
Speaker 1: important point here is that the acquisition did give Ubisoft
Speaker 1: the right to several franchises, including an old game that
Speaker 1: had been made for the Apple two called The Prince
Speaker 1: of Persia. Ubisoft Montreal had the task of creating a
Speaker 1: new game based off this concept of the original game
Speaker 1: that had come out decades earlier, and that was a
Speaker 1: platformer and puzzle game that had been created by a
Speaker 1: guy named Jordan Metchner. The Montreal team reached out to
Speaker 1: him and he was reluctant to come on board after
Speaker 1: having a really bad experience with a Prince of Persia
Speaker 1: sequel that had happened to Prince of Persia three D.
Speaker 1: But persistence went out and he would end up joining
Speaker 1: the team and become heavily involved in the project, becoming
Speaker 1: the head writer for the new game. Now keep in
Speaker 1: mind this is also going on at the same time
Speaker 1: as the Splinter Cell development, so it was a really
Speaker 1: busy time in Montreal. One of the creative features of
Speaker 1: the Prince of Persia game was the incorporation of a
Speaker 1: rewind feature, so players could build up the capability to
Speaker 1: do a quick rewind of time so that if they
Speaker 1: made a mistake that would have led to disaster, they
Speaker 1: can activate that feature and rewind time just as short
Speaker 1: ways and then try it again. So you miss a jump,
Speaker 1: you rewind time you try and make the jump again.
Speaker 1: The writers worked this capability into the story itself, making
Speaker 1: it a clever feature of not just the gameplay, but
Speaker 1: the mythology of the game world, and it was, in
Speaker 1: my mind, a stroke of brilliance. The resulting game was
Speaker 1: Prince of Persia the Sands of Time, which published in
Speaker 1: two thousand three. The game was a critical success, though
Speaker 1: it took a little bit longer for sales figures to
Speaker 1: follow suit. Now I owned both splinter Cell and Prince
Speaker 1: of Persia of the Sands of Time for the Xbox
Speaker 1: the original Xbox, and they were two of my favorite
Speaker 1: games of that console generation. Clearly, Ubisoft Montreal wasn't hurt
Speaker 1: by the fact that half of their starting employees had
Speaker 1: little to no experience in video game development. The team
Speaker 1: learned quickly and they were turning out some real bangers
Speaker 1: for games. The Prince of Persia game made use of
Speaker 1: a game engine that Ubisoft had developed for a totally
Speaker 1: different project, one that was held by Michelle A. Sell,
Speaker 1: the guy who created Rayman. After working on numerous Rayman
Speaker 1: sequels on Cell, wanted to tackle something totally different, and
Speaker 1: that's something would be a project called Beyond Good and Evil,
Speaker 1: a game in which the player controls a young woman
Speaker 1: as she tries to uncover a conspiracy in a science
Speaker 1: fiction setting. The game had a long and troubled development
Speaker 1: process back at Ubisoft HQ in France, and it included
Speaker 1: a nearly complete rewrite, and it would have ultimately debuted
Speaker 1: to lackluster sales, but it got really good reviews. The
Speaker 1: game was released on the then current generation of video
Speaker 1: game consoles, which were the PlayStation two and the Xbox
Speaker 1: and the Nintendo GameCube, and also it came out for Windows.
Speaker 1: Much later on. It would also come to the Xbox three,
Speaker 1: sixty and the p US three. Over time, the reputation
Speaker 1: for the game would lead to better sales figures, but
Speaker 1: at first, at least, it appeared to be a serious misstep.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, many at Ubisoft said that the failure largely
Speaker 1: rested on the company's marketing for the game. And we're
Speaker 1: going to conclude this part of our story with ubi
Speaker 1: Soft two words officially becoming ubi Soft one word, and
Speaker 1: that happened on September nine, two thousand three. The company
Speaker 1: also would replace its logo. Originally, its logo had been
Speaker 1: a large maroon pinkish Ubi I with the word soft
Speaker 1: written in white script on top of U B i uh.
Speaker 1: It had gone through a few other permutations of logos
Speaker 1: in the following years, but in two thousand three we
Speaker 1: finally got the more familiar swirl logo, which would remain
Speaker 1: the official logo for more than a decade. It changed
Speaker 1: again in twenty seventeen, but we'll get to that. So
Speaker 1: in our next episode, will continue the story of Ubi
Speaker 1: Soft and talk about how some sharks in the games
Speaker 1: industry started to circle the studio just as it was
Speaker 1: really taking off on the global stage, but that will
Speaker 1: have to wait until next time. If you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: reach out to me and let me know. The best
Speaker 1: way to do that is on Twitter, where I used
Speaker 1: the handle text stuff h s W for the show,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
Speaker 1: is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.