WEBVTT - The Origins of Ubisoft 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:07.800 Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. 0:00:12.160 --> 0:00:14.880 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, 0:00:15.040 --> 0:00:17.840 Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio 0:00:17.880 --> 0:00:21.560 and I love all things tech. And as I've mentioned 0:00:21.640 --> 0:00:25.799 on recent shows, we are entering a new era of 0:00:25.920 --> 0:00:29.520 video game consoles and that has a lot of people excited. 0:00:29.800 --> 0:00:33.680 Though I have already started seeing reports of problems with 0:00:33.760 --> 0:00:38.000 optical drives, both for the Xbox Series X and the 0:00:38.000 --> 0:00:41.600 PS five, so that's not great, which serves as a 0:00:41.640 --> 0:00:45.239 good reminder that sometimes it pays to hang back just 0:00:45.280 --> 0:00:47.920 a little bit when new hardware comes out, just to 0:00:48.000 --> 0:00:50.839 see if there are any you know, bugs or issues 0:00:50.880 --> 0:00:54.240 that still need working out. That way, you can purchase 0:00:54.400 --> 0:00:58.560 version one point one or whatever and hopefully avoid those problems. 0:00:58.800 --> 0:01:01.680 You know. I'm thinking of things like the infamous Red 0:01:01.840 --> 0:01:05.800 Ring of Death, that kind of stuff where the early 0:01:05.840 --> 0:01:09.839 adopters bear the brunt of it. They end up getting 0:01:09.880 --> 0:01:12.440 the faulty hardware, and now you have to go through 0:01:12.440 --> 0:01:16.240 the whole process of getting stuff repaired or replaced. I 0:01:16.360 --> 0:01:19.320 like to skip that and kind of swoop in afterward. 0:01:19.959 --> 0:01:21.800 But still, if it weren't for the early adopters, none 0:01:21.800 --> 0:01:24.520 of us would have the consoles anyway. The consoles have 0:01:25.120 --> 0:01:27.000 video games on my mind, is what I was trying 0:01:27.040 --> 0:01:28.600 to say. And I thought it was a really good 0:01:28.600 --> 0:01:31.560 idea to jump into a new deep dive on a 0:01:31.640 --> 0:01:35.160 video game studio I had yet to tackle this time. 0:01:35.360 --> 0:01:37.640 I thought it would take a good long look at 0:01:37.959 --> 0:01:42.880 Ubi Soft or is it you be Soft? I'm kidding. 0:01:43.000 --> 0:01:47.640 I've actually watched videos of Ubi soft employees saying the name, 0:01:47.680 --> 0:01:52.200 and there is no standardized pronunciation even within the company. 0:01:52.360 --> 0:01:55.240 Some of them say you be Soft, some of them 0:01:55.640 --> 0:01:58.960 to be Soft. I'm going to go with uby Soft 0:01:59.120 --> 0:02:03.480 because well, to me, that sounds more French. The company's 0:02:03.560 --> 0:02:08.480 history has a lot of drama packed into it, from 0:02:08.760 --> 0:02:14.720 attempted takeovers to allegations of sexual misconduct, to a reputation 0:02:14.760 --> 0:02:19.600 for terrible production crunch times and more. In fact, I'm 0:02:19.639 --> 0:02:23.560 actually recording this just days after there was this confusing 0:02:23.600 --> 0:02:28.520 event in which employees at the company's Montreal branch had 0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:31.920 evacuated their buildings, some of them barricading themselves on the 0:02:31.960 --> 0:02:37.200 rooftop before authorities determined that there was no actual threat present. 0:02:37.480 --> 0:02:40.880 But we'll get to that in a future episode. Boobisoft 0:02:41.320 --> 0:02:45.120 is known for some prestige titles like Assassin's Creed and 0:02:45.240 --> 0:02:48.200 Far Cry. So it might surprise you to learn that 0:02:48.280 --> 0:02:51.799 the video game company was founded by a family business 0:02:52.120 --> 0:02:57.480 that supplied farming equipment to farmers in France. Yeah, farmers, 0:02:57.520 --> 0:03:00.880 I'm not making that up. It was the early nineties 0:03:01.200 --> 0:03:07.639 and five brothers, Eve's Michel, Gerard, Christianne and Claude Guilmant 0:03:08.160 --> 0:03:14.040 would rotate through various jobs at their father's store in Brittany, 0:03:14.080 --> 0:03:17.960 France as in the northwest section of France, kind of 0:03:18.000 --> 0:03:22.440 across the English Channel from England, and they carried all 0:03:22.480 --> 0:03:27.800 sorts of supplies, including machinery parts for like heavy farm machinery. Now, 0:03:27.840 --> 0:03:29.680 I say this so that you don't think of it 0:03:29.720 --> 0:03:33.480 as some sort of quaint, you know, mom and pop shop. 0:03:33.639 --> 0:03:36.560 This was big business. But by the nineteen eighties the 0:03:36.600 --> 0:03:40.320 profit margins for selling equipment like that, we're starting to 0:03:40.360 --> 0:03:43.400 get fairly narrowed, so it's harder to stay in business, 0:03:43.720 --> 0:03:45.720 and the brothers looked around to see how they might 0:03:45.840 --> 0:03:50.720 diversify the family businesses product line, perhaps by finding some 0:03:50.760 --> 0:03:54.120 products that have a much larger profit margin than say, 0:03:54.320 --> 0:03:58.360 tractor parts. At the time, the personal computer industry was 0:03:58.400 --> 0:04:01.000 starting to kick into a new year, and it had 0:04:01.040 --> 0:04:04.000 begun in the mid nineteen seventies, but at that time 0:04:04.040 --> 0:04:08.040 it was almost exclusively the domain of hobbyists. A few 0:04:08.120 --> 0:04:11.600 years later, there were a ton of different computer companies 0:04:11.880 --> 0:04:15.160 in this burgeoning industry. Here in the States were familiar 0:04:15.200 --> 0:04:18.880 with names like Apple and Commodore and Atari and maybe 0:04:19.040 --> 0:04:22.000 Tandy and a few others. In Europe, there were a 0:04:22.040 --> 0:04:26.200 couple of other computer companies at play, like Sinclair or Amstrade, 0:04:26.600 --> 0:04:29.839 both out of the UK. The Amstrade had just recently 0:04:29.880 --> 0:04:32.960 debuted in nineteen eighty four, and the brothers saw that 0:04:33.360 --> 0:04:36.160 it was starting to gain popularity in France. But they 0:04:36.160 --> 0:04:39.560 also saw something else that was unusual. If you ordered 0:04:39.640 --> 0:04:44.760 computers or computer software from a French distributor, it cost 0:04:44.920 --> 0:04:47.920 way more money than if you ordered the exact same 0:04:47.960 --> 0:04:51.760 stuff direct from the UK, and that opened up an 0:04:51.760 --> 0:04:56.719 opportunity their store could become a retailer for computer software 0:04:56.800 --> 0:05:00.280 in addition to you know, farming equipment. It's sounds like 0:05:00.279 --> 0:05:03.200 an odd commodation, but that's kind of how things unfolded. 0:05:03.720 --> 0:05:05.880 But then the brothers decided that their best course of 0:05:05.920 --> 0:05:09.520 action was to create a mail order business rather than 0:05:09.560 --> 0:05:12.320 just try to convert the shop into a true farming 0:05:12.320 --> 0:05:15.760 and computer software type business, you know, like you do. 0:05:16.240 --> 0:05:19.240 The brothers founded a new company in nineteen eighty four 0:05:19.279 --> 0:05:23.840 to oversee mail orders. They called it Guilmo Informatique. The 0:05:23.920 --> 0:05:27.919 business proved successful, and the following year they formed the 0:05:28.000 --> 0:05:32.720 Guillmant Corporation to expand into the area of computer hardware 0:05:32.960 --> 0:05:37.159 in addition to software. This also proved to be successful, 0:05:37.360 --> 0:05:41.039 and by night six the corporation was earning around forty 0:05:41.120 --> 0:05:45.000 million francs. So this was before the European Union and 0:05:45.080 --> 0:05:48.200 the emergence of the euro and so we have to 0:05:48.240 --> 0:05:50.600 factor in exchange rates and stuff into the value of 0:05:50.640 --> 0:05:54.200 the frank relative to the US dollar, which fluctuated a 0:05:54.200 --> 0:05:57.839 lot in nineteen eight six. So I guess I'm gonna 0:05:57.839 --> 0:06:00.680 say that they were bringing in somewhere between five and 0:06:00.800 --> 0:06:03.800 ten million US dollars in nineteen eighty six, which is 0:06:03.839 --> 0:06:07.680 a pretty princely sum. If we adjust for inflation, it 0:06:07.680 --> 0:06:11.279 would be somewhere between twelve million and twenty four million dollars. 0:06:11.760 --> 0:06:14.280 Because they were able to buy software and hardware at 0:06:14.400 --> 0:06:18.120 much lower costs from the UK than from other French distributors. 0:06:18.400 --> 0:06:21.240 They could also price their products at a lower cost 0:06:21.320 --> 0:06:24.440 to consumers without eating too much into the profit margin, 0:06:24.600 --> 0:06:29.799 so they were essentially undercutting the competition. In six computer 0:06:29.920 --> 0:06:34.120 games were starting to become a real commodity again. The 0:06:34.160 --> 0:06:37.840 market had crashed hard a couple of years earlier, mostly 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:42.560 in video game consoles, but computer games were also affected. 0:06:42.920 --> 0:06:46.359 But the computer game industry made a pretty fast recovery. 0:06:46.760 --> 0:06:51.000 While people were a bit more cautious about consoles at first, 0:06:51.360 --> 0:06:55.000 computers had a totally different value proposition. You could do 0:06:55.240 --> 0:06:58.359 useful stuff on computers, right. You could have a word 0:06:58.400 --> 0:07:02.240 processor or something and could do workie work on a computer. 0:07:02.800 --> 0:07:06.279 It was just cool that programmers could also make games 0:07:06.480 --> 0:07:09.800 for computers, and the brothers saw an opportunity. They were 0:07:09.840 --> 0:07:13.520 already distributing video games as part of their software business, 0:07:13.520 --> 0:07:15.680 and they saw how popular it was. But they could 0:07:15.680 --> 0:07:19.840 also form a video game developer studio, a company that 0:07:19.880 --> 0:07:24.360 actually makes games. Part of the motivation for starting up 0:07:24.360 --> 0:07:28.240 a development company was that young programmers in France had 0:07:28.280 --> 0:07:33.520 approached the brothers with either completed games or ideas for games. 0:07:33.920 --> 0:07:37.080 The software industry in France was still very young and 0:07:37.120 --> 0:07:40.560 there were few opportunities for programmers at that time in 0:07:40.600 --> 0:07:43.480 the country, so the company decided that this was a 0:07:43.600 --> 0:07:47.720 risk worth taking, but it would require a new organization, 0:07:47.920 --> 0:07:54.040 a new company dedicated to game development. On March night six, 0:07:54.320 --> 0:07:58.960 the brothers Guilmant founded the UBI Soft Entertainment s A. 0:07:59.680 --> 0:08:02.360 And depending on the source you look at, the original 0:08:02.440 --> 0:08:04.320 name for the company was broken up into two parts, 0:08:04.360 --> 0:08:07.640 with Ubi and Soft being distinct words, though lots of 0:08:07.640 --> 0:08:10.760 other sources just pair them together as UBI soft. To 0:08:10.840 --> 0:08:13.920 be fair, their logo made it clear it was UBI 0:08:14.680 --> 0:08:19.800 soft to words, and for many years that's essentially how 0:08:19.880 --> 0:08:25.160 official company communications spelled the name of the company now 0:08:25.240 --> 0:08:29.520 Soft clearly comes from software, but what is UBI Well, 0:08:29.640 --> 0:08:33.280 that also depends upon which source you cite. Now most 0:08:33.360 --> 0:08:39.319 claim that UBI stands for ubiquity, meaning omnipresent or found everywhere. 0:08:39.960 --> 0:08:43.200 That's what uby soft. Montreal tweeted that the UBI stood 0:08:43.200 --> 0:08:47.080 for warhen someone asked them outright, so it seems pretty definitive. 0:08:47.400 --> 0:08:50.520 But other sources point to a more regional explanation for 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:53.360 the origin of the company name, and that was that 0:08:53.520 --> 0:08:58.880 UBI stood for Union de Breton Independent, the Union of 0:08:59.000 --> 0:09:03.080 Independent Bretts, as in people from Brittany. Now, according to 0:09:03.120 --> 0:09:07.360 an interview that Christianne Guillamont sat in for back in, 0:09:08.720 --> 0:09:12.400 his brother Gerard Guillamont was the one who suggested UBI 0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:17.480 because he thought it sounded good, and Eve Guillamont had 0:09:17.520 --> 0:09:22.120 given the ubiquity answer in another interview, So I'm willing 0:09:22.200 --> 0:09:25.240 to go with ubiquity being the origin. However, I would 0:09:25.280 --> 0:09:28.320 not be surprised to find out that the sound of 0:09:28.360 --> 0:09:31.760 the name came first and then the meaning followed afterward. 0:09:32.600 --> 0:09:35.840 That's also possible. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm 0:09:35.880 --> 0:09:39.079 just saying it wouldn't surprise me. Now. The brothers had 0:09:39.160 --> 0:09:41.959 also made an interesting decision when it came to the 0:09:42.000 --> 0:09:46.000 headquarters for this company. There are other businesses were located 0:09:46.000 --> 0:09:49.679 out of Paris at this point, but Ubisoft would be different. 0:09:49.760 --> 0:09:52.760 After a few months, and originally they worked out of 0:09:52.800 --> 0:09:57.200 the same sort of Parisian offices, but shortly thereafter, the 0:09:57.360 --> 0:10:02.120 brothers decided to establish UBI Soft, the video game development company, 0:10:02.200 --> 0:10:06.199 in a chateau in Brittany. And when I say chateau, 0:10:06.679 --> 0:10:09.280 I'm talking about the real deal. Think of something that 0:10:09.360 --> 0:10:13.560 sits somewhere between castle and mansion, and you're on the 0:10:13.640 --> 0:10:16.760 right track now. According to the founders, this was largely 0:10:16.760 --> 0:10:20.679 a marketing strategy to attract programmers who wanted to work 0:10:20.720 --> 0:10:24.000 in a different setting than your typical office building. You 0:10:24.000 --> 0:10:27.920 could work in a chateau La la, and according to 0:10:28.040 --> 0:10:33.800 Ubisoft's executive director of Worldwide Studios, Christine Burgess Gernard, there 0:10:33.920 --> 0:10:37.439 was another motivation for putting the HQ in a chateau, 0:10:37.880 --> 0:10:42.600 one that might in retrospect be viewed with some disapproval. 0:10:42.920 --> 0:10:47.600 Perhaps In an interview with Game Informer, Christine said, we 0:10:47.720 --> 0:10:50.280 also thought it would be great to have a place 0:10:50.320 --> 0:10:53.600 where we could actually lock all of our developers together 0:10:53.960 --> 0:10:57.000 so that they could develop games and finish them. It 0:10:57.080 --> 0:10:59.360 was not always easy when you had a bunch of 0:10:59.400 --> 0:11:02.880 eighteen or nineteen year olds to realize that when you 0:11:02.920 --> 0:11:05.360 start a game and you start talking to the press 0:11:05.400 --> 0:11:08.800 about it and you start investing into it, you have 0:11:09.040 --> 0:11:11.880 to deliver. So the first aim was to make sure 0:11:11.920 --> 0:11:14.920 that everybody was under the same roof, so we could 0:11:14.920 --> 0:11:20.960 have everybody contained in a way in the quotation, so yikes, 0:11:21.400 --> 0:11:24.280 with the benefit of a more heightened awareness of things 0:11:24.320 --> 0:11:28.520 like development crunch and autonomy, which I'm sure we'll touch 0:11:28.559 --> 0:11:31.719 on again as we go through this history, that kind 0:11:31.720 --> 0:11:35.360 of perspective takes on a much more sinister meaning. But 0:11:35.679 --> 0:11:38.120 I want to be fair, it's not at all an 0:11:38.440 --> 0:11:41.679 unusual tactic for tech companies in general to kind of 0:11:41.720 --> 0:11:45.040 go this route. Uh not, maybe not this extreme, but 0:11:45.200 --> 0:11:48.960 it's not unusual. Microsoft was famous for doing stuff like 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:52.160 buying pinball and arcade machines to put in the employee 0:11:52.160 --> 0:11:55.520 break room so that the developers over at Microsoft would 0:11:55.520 --> 0:11:59.000 find reasons to stick around the office for longer hours. 0:11:59.600 --> 0:12:03.880 Google kept chefs on hand to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 0:12:04.280 --> 0:12:07.240 thus removing the need for people to go home to 0:12:07.320 --> 0:12:10.480 have meals. The tech world is no stranger to finding 0:12:10.480 --> 0:12:14.200 ways to discourage workers from, you know, having a life 0:12:14.200 --> 0:12:18.080 outside of work. The company hired on programmers and a 0:12:18.240 --> 0:12:21.960 leadership team for all the usual stuff like marketing for example, 0:12:22.400 --> 0:12:25.600 and at first the focus was purely on the French market, 0:12:25.720 --> 0:12:28.160 so keep that in mind when I talk about sales 0:12:28.200 --> 0:12:30.960 figures in a second. So the company got started in 0:12:31.040 --> 0:12:34.559 March and by the end of the year they had 0:12:34.600 --> 0:12:41.559 published several titles, including Zombie z O, m b I, Sineclap, Fair, 0:12:41.679 --> 0:12:47.160 eflam Mosque, and a developer tool called graphic City. Which 0:12:47.200 --> 0:12:51.120 was designed to help programmers edits sprites. A sprite is 0:12:51.160 --> 0:12:54.760 a two dimensional bit map image that can integrate into 0:12:54.800 --> 0:12:58.000 a larger scene. So a lot of early computer and 0:12:58.040 --> 0:13:02.120 console games used sprites to represent, say the player character, 0:13:02.559 --> 0:13:04.679 and you would be able to move around within the 0:13:04.800 --> 0:13:08.040 larger background world of the video game, whatever it might be. 0:13:09.000 --> 0:13:12.640 Zombie gets the credit for Ubisoft's first in house game. 0:13:13.240 --> 0:13:16.559 In that game, you control a group of characters who 0:13:16.559 --> 0:13:21.719 are exploring a shopping mall that is infested with well zombies. 0:13:22.240 --> 0:13:25.320 In this way, it was taking elements of other popular 0:13:25.440 --> 0:13:28.920 computer games of the time, like Bard's tail Or Wizardry, 0:13:28.960 --> 0:13:31.800 where you would control a group of characters exploring a 0:13:31.800 --> 0:13:36.040 fantasy setting, and then combining that with the setting from 0:13:36.040 --> 0:13:40.040 George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead movie. There's also 0:13:40.080 --> 0:13:43.000 a little bit of Oregon Trail kind of going on here, 0:13:43.080 --> 0:13:46.520 because you would control crosshairs. After you would hit a 0:13:46.720 --> 0:13:49.559 use icon to activate your gun, assuming you had one 0:13:49.559 --> 0:13:52.600 in your inventory, and then you would aim at zombies 0:13:52.840 --> 0:13:55.600 that were walking across your field of view from one 0:13:55.640 --> 0:13:58.280 side of the screen to the other, and you would 0:13:58.280 --> 0:14:00.480 fire to take them down before they would stop and 0:14:00.559 --> 0:14:03.520 turn and attack you. It wasn't quite at the level 0:14:03.520 --> 0:14:06.400 of a first person shooter, but you can see elements 0:14:06.400 --> 0:14:11.160 that would evolve into that genre. One great addition is 0:14:11.200 --> 0:14:13.640 that should one of your player characters lose all their 0:14:13.679 --> 0:14:17.320 hit points and die, they would become a zombie and 0:14:17.360 --> 0:14:20.000 would become an enemy to the surviving characters, which I 0:14:20.000 --> 0:14:23.280 think is kind of nifty. And the developers included posters 0:14:23.320 --> 0:14:26.080 on the walls that said things like are you a programmer? 0:14:26.520 --> 0:14:31.000 Contact ubi Soft, so that was cheeky. Ubi Soft developed 0:14:31.000 --> 0:14:34.880 the game for platforms like the armstrad CPC and the 0:14:35.000 --> 0:14:41.240 z X Spectrum computer, among others. By January seven, Ubi 0:14:41.280 --> 0:14:46.000 Soft had sold around five thousand copies of Zombie. So 0:14:46.240 --> 0:14:49.400 here's where we address the differences in scale from the 0:14:49.440 --> 0:14:53.160 mid eighties to today. If a video game development studio, 0:14:53.480 --> 0:14:58.120 even a relatively modest independent studio, were to see five 0:14:58.160 --> 0:15:02.080 thousand titles sold after a few months of launch, it 0:15:02.080 --> 0:15:06.000 would be a pretty big flop. But this was back 0:15:06.000 --> 0:15:09.120 in the early days of programming, when it was possible 0:15:09.120 --> 0:15:12.000 for a small team of three or four people to 0:15:12.040 --> 0:15:14.880 put together a full game, and these were games that 0:15:14.920 --> 0:15:18.760 were coming from big, established studios, so kind of the 0:15:18.800 --> 0:15:20.720 equivalent of what we would think of as a triple 0:15:20.760 --> 0:15:24.840 A title today. Also, at this point, Ubisoft was only 0:15:24.880 --> 0:15:28.720 selling games within France, which meant they were hitting a 0:15:28.760 --> 0:15:33.120 pretty small potential market. After all, only a relatively few 0:15:33.280 --> 0:15:36.360 number of households owned a computer in the first place, 0:15:36.720 --> 0:15:40.600 and Ubisoft was only focusing on their own home country. 0:15:40.640 --> 0:15:44.240 But the early success encouraged the leaders of Ubisoft, who 0:15:44.280 --> 0:15:48.040 became determined to expand into other markets. At first, they 0:15:48.080 --> 0:15:51.480 took aim at Spain and West Germany. To keep in mind, 0:15:51.520 --> 0:15:55.200 this is before the reunification of East and West Germany 0:15:55.280 --> 0:15:59.920 into Germany. In addition, Ubisoft began to form partnerships with 0:16:00.040 --> 0:16:03.920 other developers, and so it became an official distribution partner 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:07.840 within France. When we come back, we'll talk more about 0:16:07.880 --> 0:16:12.360 the early days of Ubisoft's existence, including some very early 0:16:12.600 --> 0:16:23.600 road bumps, But first let's take a quick break. So 0:16:23.680 --> 0:16:29.720 in Ubisoft was developing games like a spy hunter like 0:16:30.120 --> 0:16:34.680 vehicular combat game called Asphalt. You controlled a giant truck 0:16:34.720 --> 0:16:38.240 that had a turret gun mounted on it. They also 0:16:38.280 --> 0:16:42.480 had a pingo like game called mange Quelu, in which 0:16:42.520 --> 0:16:45.560 you've controlled a red bird that could push rocks around 0:16:45.560 --> 0:16:48.680 a maze to avoid enemies. By the way my French pronunciation. 0:16:48.800 --> 0:16:52.280 I know it's terrible. I realized that I'm gonna do 0:16:52.360 --> 0:16:55.320 my best, but it will be bad. Ubisoft was also 0:16:55.400 --> 0:16:58.240 distributing games from other companies around this time, and some 0:16:58.280 --> 0:17:01.000 of those games ended up being really big titles like 0:17:01.440 --> 0:17:05.640 Akari Warriors and Commando, which were pretty popular, and those 0:17:05.680 --> 0:17:09.359 would end up selling thousands of copies within France. Eve 0:17:09.520 --> 0:17:13.440 Guillmant would become CEO of the company in short order, 0:17:13.720 --> 0:17:17.800 and one other big change was also coming. The company 0:17:17.880 --> 0:17:22.560 determined that the chateau in Brittany, while impressive and working 0:17:22.600 --> 0:17:24.639 like a treat as a way to entice people to 0:17:24.680 --> 0:17:27.760 come and actually, you know, work as a developer for Ubisoft, 0:17:28.280 --> 0:17:32.800 it was just playing expensive to maintain. Too expensive. It 0:17:32.800 --> 0:17:36.320 turns out that really old buildings require a lot of maintenance, 0:17:36.440 --> 0:17:40.440 and that heating a building that wasn't designed to accommodate 0:17:40.600 --> 0:17:45.400 modern heating methods is pretty expensive. So the company decided 0:17:45.440 --> 0:17:48.399 to let the lease on the property expire at the 0:17:48.520 --> 0:17:51.720 end of it, and they decided to shift operations back 0:17:51.760 --> 0:17:54.040 to Paris, and from what I can tell, the initial 0:17:54.119 --> 0:17:56.639 plan was to kind of share space with some of 0:17:56.640 --> 0:18:00.359 the other Guilmalt brother companies now this it and go 0:18:00.440 --> 0:18:04.440 over great with all the developers. Paris is an expensive 0:18:04.440 --> 0:18:07.560 city to live in, and some programmers balked at the 0:18:07.640 --> 0:18:13.960 prospect of moving from relatively inexpensive Brittany to extremely expensive Paris, 0:18:14.400 --> 0:18:16.040 and it would mean many of them would have to 0:18:16.080 --> 0:18:18.760 secure an apartment in a less desirable part of the 0:18:18.800 --> 0:18:21.800 city to stay within their budgets. A few of them 0:18:21.840 --> 0:18:25.520 declined to make the move, and Ubisoft would just kind 0:18:25.560 --> 0:18:29.440 of keep the door open for collaborations, allowing some programmers 0:18:29.520 --> 0:18:33.960 to even work remotely. Now, in those cases, it wasn't 0:18:33.960 --> 0:18:37.320 like the remote programmer was a full time employee, but 0:18:37.440 --> 0:18:40.600 rather that Ubisoft would look at any work that the 0:18:40.640 --> 0:18:44.399 programmers produced to see if anything might warrant an investment. 0:18:45.040 --> 0:18:48.879 One of those people was a guy named michel Ansell, 0:18:49.200 --> 0:18:52.200 who was quite young and whose family had moved from 0:18:52.359 --> 0:18:56.119 Montpellier to Brittany in order for him to work at Ubisoft. 0:18:56.720 --> 0:19:00.320 Paris was not a feasible option for the family and 0:19:00.359 --> 0:19:04.600 they decided to relocate back to Montpellier. But on sales 0:19:04.680 --> 0:19:08.920 talent was undeniable, and the Guillman brothers convinced him to 0:19:09.000 --> 0:19:12.680 keep communications open. Should he have anything to show them 0:19:12.760 --> 0:19:16.159 on sale, got to work on some general concepts and 0:19:16.280 --> 0:19:19.919 later partnered with a programmer named Frederic Howd to create 0:19:20.000 --> 0:19:23.200 a sort of proof of concept game and the two 0:19:23.200 --> 0:19:26.359 would present their idea to be soft and it definitely 0:19:26.440 --> 0:19:28.800 got the company's attention. They could see a lot of 0:19:28.840 --> 0:19:31.920 promise in the concept, but it would require a great 0:19:31.960 --> 0:19:34.240 deal more work and several more years to bring it 0:19:34.240 --> 0:19:37.160 into existence as a fully fledged game. Will come back 0:19:37.200 --> 0:19:41.520 to that. In the meantime, Ubisoft continued to develop, publish, 0:19:41.640 --> 0:19:46.240 and distribute games. In company published a port of its 0:19:46.280 --> 0:19:50.720 first game, Zombie, to the Atari st computer system. While 0:19:50.760 --> 0:19:53.360 the company was turning out game titles, most of these 0:19:53.400 --> 0:19:57.480 wouldn't be familiar to people outside of France, and definitely 0:19:58.240 --> 0:20:01.720 the familiarity drops off once get outside of Europe, as 0:20:01.760 --> 0:20:05.359 they were still catering primarily to those markets. Also, just 0:20:05.440 --> 0:20:08.920 as a side note, there is a Wikipedia page that's 0:20:09.000 --> 0:20:11.919 supposed to be a list of Ubisoft games, but I 0:20:11.960 --> 0:20:14.439 can tell you that a lot of the entries, at 0:20:14.520 --> 0:20:18.200 least for the years between n six and nine, are 0:20:18.280 --> 0:20:21.840 just playing wrong. Ubisoft is listed as developer for games 0:20:21.840 --> 0:20:24.960 that it did not develop, though in some cases the 0:20:24.960 --> 0:20:28.320 company would develop a later game in a series based 0:20:28.320 --> 0:20:30.800 off the one that shows up on that list. Anyway, 0:20:30.840 --> 0:20:34.160 just a reminder that Wikipedia is a great starting point 0:20:34.240 --> 0:20:37.240 for research, but you should always go beyond that because 0:20:37.800 --> 0:20:40.760 sometimes the information there is just playing wrong. Anyway, I'm 0:20:40.760 --> 0:20:43.200 not gonna go through an exhaustive list of all these 0:20:43.240 --> 0:20:45.879 early games, as most of them have faded into obscurity 0:20:45.880 --> 0:20:48.439 in the passing years and there wouldn't be much value 0:20:48.440 --> 0:20:51.879 to that. That being said, I'm immediately going to break 0:20:51.880 --> 0:20:54.240 my own rule to talk about one game I learned 0:20:54.280 --> 0:20:56.600 about while researching this. I had never heard of this 0:20:56.640 --> 0:21:01.000 game before. This game is called Fred. You play as 0:21:01.119 --> 0:21:04.840 a big, strong night named Fred, who at the very 0:21:04.840 --> 0:21:08.359 beginning of the game gets transformed into a tinier version 0:21:08.440 --> 0:21:12.440 of himself, and then you must face enemies like gnomes, who, 0:21:12.600 --> 0:21:15.800 for the life of me, like garden gnomes. And there 0:21:15.800 --> 0:21:18.520 are other batties in there too, like spiders and ravens 0:21:18.600 --> 0:21:21.240 and stuff, but it's the gnomes that sell this for me. 0:21:22.000 --> 0:21:26.359 The gameplay is interesting. It kind of reminds me of 0:21:26.440 --> 0:21:29.679 ghosts and goblins, or ghouls and ghosts if you prefer. 0:21:29.800 --> 0:21:32.800 That's another title in that same series, but one cool 0:21:32.880 --> 0:21:35.240 thing is that the levels have a cheat to them 0:21:35.320 --> 0:21:37.520 to give them a little bit of depth. The game 0:21:37.800 --> 0:21:40.000 is a platform or and it's a side scroller, so 0:21:40.040 --> 0:21:43.280 you're looking at everything in profile, and enemies typically travel 0:21:43.359 --> 0:21:47.760 along specific planes of depth, but there are multiple planes 0:21:47.880 --> 0:21:50.359 in every level, so in other words, you can travel 0:21:50.480 --> 0:21:53.639 left or right on a plane that's closest to the 0:21:53.680 --> 0:21:55.840 screen that would be the one you know, closest to 0:21:55.880 --> 0:21:59.199 the player, or one that's maybe slightly further back, or 0:21:59.240 --> 0:22:03.040 maybe one that's even further back close to the background. However, 0:22:03.240 --> 0:22:05.359 that also means they can be kind of tricky to 0:22:05.359 --> 0:22:07.679 figure out which plane of depth and enemy is on. 0:22:07.760 --> 0:22:10.520 It might look like you're both lined up, but one 0:22:10.520 --> 0:22:13.000 of you is actually a little further back than the 0:22:13.000 --> 0:22:16.040 other with respect to the you know, your point of view, 0:22:16.560 --> 0:22:19.480 and so in those cases your attacks won't hit them, 0:22:19.520 --> 0:22:21.879 and most of the time their attacks won't hit you either, 0:22:22.560 --> 0:22:25.119 And you have to each beyond the same plane of 0:22:25.200 --> 0:22:27.320 depth in order to fight each other, and that's not 0:22:27.400 --> 0:22:30.520 always apparent. However, the attempt at adding death would be 0:22:30.520 --> 0:22:33.280 another indicator of game elements that were coming down the 0:22:33.359 --> 0:22:36.119 line in the future. Just as Zombie was hinting a 0:22:36.119 --> 0:22:39.520 little bit at first person shooter elements. These were decent 0:22:39.560 --> 0:22:45.160 ideas that were executed upon and let's say limited success. 0:22:45.600 --> 0:22:48.399 That's a kind way of putting it. Fred from what 0:22:48.520 --> 0:22:51.040 I've seen, does not look like it was a particularly 0:22:51.200 --> 0:22:56.480 playable game. Around would be Soft established its own internal 0:22:56.520 --> 0:22:59.400 studio in Paris, by which I mean the company established 0:22:59.440 --> 0:23:01.800 a real face for programmers to come and work in 0:23:01.880 --> 0:23:05.639 a studio. In addition, the company would open its first 0:23:05.720 --> 0:23:10.120 studio outside of France, establishing a space in Bucharest, Romania. 0:23:10.440 --> 0:23:14.359 This gave the company access to more developer talent. So 0:23:14.520 --> 0:23:18.680 remember Michel on Sale and Frederic Howd. They presented their 0:23:18.680 --> 0:23:21.159 work to be Soft with an early build of what 0:23:21.280 --> 0:23:25.840 would evolve into the game Rayman, a platformer style game 0:23:25.880 --> 0:23:29.120 with a super cute protagonist. Now, those of you familiar 0:23:29.119 --> 0:23:32.000 with Rayman know that it would go on to become 0:23:32.040 --> 0:23:36.120 an enormous franchise, spawning more than forty games that were 0:23:36.119 --> 0:23:39.920 either sequels or spinoffs or tie ends. It would become 0:23:40.359 --> 0:23:43.120 the big early hit for Ubisoft, and it would put 0:23:43.119 --> 0:23:46.600 the company on the larger video game map through most 0:23:46.640 --> 0:23:50.280 of Europe. And it started off so small. The very 0:23:50.280 --> 0:23:54.119 earliest concept for Rayman was to be destined for the 0:23:54.160 --> 0:23:56.440 Atar E S T. That was what it was originally 0:23:56.480 --> 0:23:59.440 going to be programmed for, but that was back when 0:23:59.480 --> 0:24:01.880 on Cell was just working on it by himself. Once 0:24:01.920 --> 0:24:05.880 Frederic joined that changed. The pair of developers worked on 0:24:06.400 --> 0:24:09.480 their project for Ubisoft with the goal of producing a 0:24:09.560 --> 0:24:12.280 game for a system that would never actually emerge. They 0:24:12.280 --> 0:24:16.240 were working on creating the title for the Super Nintendo 0:24:16.560 --> 0:24:21.200 CD Peripheral system, which was originally a cooperative project between 0:24:21.280 --> 0:24:26.919 Nintendo and Sony, but in Nintendo famously dropped a bombshell 0:24:26.960 --> 0:24:29.840 at C E S and announced that it would instead 0:24:29.960 --> 0:24:33.840 partner with the Dutch tech company Phillips to develop the 0:24:33.960 --> 0:24:38.040 CD peripheral and it would be dumping Sony in the process. 0:24:38.400 --> 0:24:41.600 And it was really this event that encouraged Sony executive 0:24:41.680 --> 0:24:45.399 Ken Kutaragi to take the progress that he had made 0:24:45.480 --> 0:24:49.240