The Origins of Ubisoft

Though I have already started seeing reports of problems with optical drives, both for the Xbox Series X and the PS five, so that's not great, which serves as a good reminder that sometimes it pays to hang back just a little bit when new hardware comes out, just to see if there are any you know, bugs or issues that still need working out. That way, you can purchase version one point one or whatever and hopefully avoid those problems.

You know. I'm thinking of things like the infamous Red Ring of Death, that kind of stuff where the early adopters bear the brunt of it. They end up getting the faulty hardware, and now you have to go through the whole process of getting stuff repaired or replaced. I like to skip that and kind of swoop in afterward. But still, if it weren't for the early adopters, none of us would have the consoles anyway. The consoles have video games on my mind, is what I was trying

to say. And I thought it was a really good idea to jump into a new deep dive on a video game studio I had yet to tackle this time. I thought it would take a good long look at Ubi Soft or is it you be Soft? I'm kidding. I've actually watched videos of Ubi soft employees saying the name, and there is no standardized pronunciation even within the company. Some of them say you be Soft, some of them to be Soft. I'm going to go with uby Soft

because well, to me, that sounds more French. The company's history has a lot of drama packed into it, from attempted takeovers to allegations of sexual misconduct, to a reputation

for terrible production crunch times and more. In fact, I'm actually recording this just days after there was this confusing event in which employees at the company's Montreal branch had evacuated their buildings, some of them barricading themselves on the rooftop before authorities determined that there was no actual threat present. But we'll get to that in a future episode. Boobisoft is known for some prestige titles like Assassin's Creed and

Far Cry. So it might surprise you to learn that the video game company was founded by a family business that supplied farming equipment to farmers in France. Yeah, farmers, I'm not making that up. It was the early nineties and five brothers, Eve's Michel, Gerard, Christianne and Claude Guilmant would rotate through various jobs at their father's store in Brittany, France as in the northwest section of France, kind of across the English Channel from England, and they carried all

sorts of supplies, including machinery parts for like heavy farm machinery. Now, I say this so that you don't think of it as some sort of quaint, you know, mom and pop shop.

This was big business. But by the nineteen eighties the profit margins for selling equipment like that, we're starting to get fairly narrowed, so it's harder to stay in business, and the brothers looked around to see how they might diversify the family businesses product line, perhaps by finding some products that have a much larger profit margin than say,

tractor parts. At the time, the personal computer industry was starting to kick into a new year, and it had begun in the mid nineteen seventies, but at that time it was almost exclusively the domain of hobbyists. A few years later, there were a ton of different computer companies in this burgeoning industry. Here in the States were familiar with names like Apple and Commodore and Atari and maybe

Tandy and a few others. In Europe, there were a couple of other computer companies at play, like Sinclair or Amstrade, both out of the UK. The Amstrade had just recently debuted in nineteen eighty four, and the brothers saw that it was starting to gain popularity in France. But they

also saw something else that was unusual. If you ordered computers or computer software from a French distributor, it cost way more money than if you ordered the exact same stuff direct from the UK, and that opened up an opportunity their store could become a retailer for computer software in addition to you know, farming equipment. It's sounds like an odd commodation, but that's kind of how things unfolded.

But then the brothers decided that their best course of action was to create a mail order business rather than just try to convert the shop into a true farming and computer software type business, you know, like you do. The brothers founded a new company in nineteen eighty four to oversee mail orders. They called it Guilmo Informatique. The business proved successful, and the following year they formed the Guillmant Corporation to expand into the area of computer hardware

in addition to software. This also proved to be successful, and by night six the corporation was earning around forty million francs. So this was before the European Union and the emergence of the euro and so we have to factor in exchange rates and stuff into the value of the frank relative to the US dollar, which fluctuated a lot in nineteen eight six. So I guess I'm gonna say that they were bringing in somewhere between five and ten million US dollars in nineteen eighty six, which is

a pretty princely sum. If we adjust for inflation, it would be somewhere between twelve million and twenty four million dollars. Because they were able to buy software and hardware at much lower costs from the UK than from other French distributors. They could also price their products at a lower cost to consumers without eating too much into the profit margin, so they were essentially undercutting the competition. In six computer

games were starting to become a real commodity again. The market had crashed hard a couple of years earlier, mostly in video game consoles, but computer games were also affected. But the computer game industry made a pretty fast recovery. While people were a bit more cautious about consoles at first, computers had a totally different value proposition. You could do useful stuff on computers, right. You could have a word processor or something and could do workie work on a computer.

It was just cool that programmers could also make games for computers, and the brothers saw an opportunity. They were already distributing video games as part of their software business, and they saw how popular it was. But they could also form a video game developer studio, a company that actually makes games. Part of the motivation for starting up a development company was that young programmers in France had approached the brothers with either completed games or ideas for games.

The software industry in France was still very young and there were few opportunities for programmers at that time in the country, so the company decided that this was a risk worth taking, but it would require a new organization,

a new company dedicated to game development. On March night six, the brothers Guilmant founded the UBI Soft Entertainment s A. And depending on the source you look at, the original name for the company was broken up into two parts, with Ubi and Soft being distinct words, though lots of

other sources just pair them together as UBI soft. To be fair, their logo made it clear it was UBI soft to words, and for many years that's essentially how official company communications spelled the name of the company now Soft clearly comes from software, but what is UBI Well, that also depends upon which source you cite. Now most claim that UBI stands for ubiquity, meaning omnipresent or found everywhere.

That's what uby soft. Montreal tweeted that the UBI stood for warhen someone asked them outright, so it seems pretty definitive. But other sources point to a more regional explanation for the origin of the company name, and that was that UBI stood for Union de Breton Independent, the Union of

Independent Bretts, as in people from Brittany. Now, according to an interview that Christianne Guillamont sat in for back in, his brother Gerard Guillamont was the one who suggested UBI because he thought it sounded good, and Eve Guillamont had given the ubiquity answer in another interview, So I'm willing to go with ubiquity being the origin. However, I would not be surprised to find out that the sound of the name came first and then the meaning followed afterward.

That's also possible. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying it wouldn't surprise me. Now. The brothers had also made an interesting decision when it came to the headquarters for this company. There are other businesses were located out of Paris at this point, but Ubisoft would be different. After a few months, and originally they worked out of the same sort of Parisian offices, but shortly thereafter, the brothers decided to establish UBI Soft, the video game development company,

in a chateau in Brittany. And when I say chateau, I'm talking about the real deal. Think of something that sits somewhere between castle and mansion, and you're on the right track now. According to the founders, this was largely a marketing strategy to attract programmers who wanted to work

in a different setting than your typical office building. You could work in a chateau La la, and according to Ubisoft's executive director of Worldwide Studios, Christine Burgess Gernard, there was another motivation for putting the HQ in a chateau, one that might in retrospect be viewed with some disapproval. Perhaps In an interview with Game Informer, Christine said, we also thought it would be great to have a place where we could actually lock all of our developers together

so that they could develop games and finish them. It was not always easy when you had a bunch of eighteen or nineteen year olds to realize that when you start a game and you start talking to the press about it and you start investing into it, you have

to deliver. So the first aim was to make sure that everybody was under the same roof, so we could have everybody contained in a way in the quotation, so yikes, with the benefit of a more heightened awareness of things like development crunch and autonomy, which I'm sure we'll touch on again as we go through this history, that kind of perspective takes on a much more sinister meaning. But I want to be fair, it's not at all an unusual tactic for tech companies in general to kind of

go this route. Uh not, maybe not this extreme, but it's not unusual. Microsoft was famous for doing stuff like buying pinball and arcade machines to put in the employee break room so that the developers over at Microsoft would find reasons to stick around the office for longer hours. Google kept chefs on hand to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner, thus removing the need for people to go home to

have meals. The tech world is no stranger to finding ways to discourage workers from, you know, having a life outside of work. The company hired on programmers and a leadership team for all the usual stuff like marketing for example, and at first the focus was purely on the French market, so keep that in mind when I talk about sales figures in a second. So the company got started in March and by the end of the year they had published several titles, including Zombie z O, m b I, Sineclap, Fair,

eflam Mosque, and a developer tool called graphic City. Which was designed to help programmers edits sprites. A sprite is a two dimensional bit map image that can integrate into a larger scene. So a lot of early computer and console games used sprites to represent, say the player character, and you would be able to move around within the larger background world of the video game, whatever it might be. Zombie gets the credit for Ubisoft's first in house game.

In that game, you control a group of characters who are exploring a shopping mall that is infested with well zombies. In this way, it was taking elements of other popular computer games of the time, like Bard's tail Or Wizardry, where you would control a group of characters exploring a fantasy setting, and then combining that with the setting from George Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead movie. There's also a little bit of Oregon Trail kind of going on here,

because you would control crosshairs. After you would hit a use icon to activate your gun, assuming you had one in your inventory, and then you would aim at zombies that were walking across your field of view from one side of the screen to the other, and you would fire to take them down before they would stop and turn and attack you. It wasn't quite at the level of a first person shooter, but you can see elements

that would evolve into that genre. One great addition is that should one of your player characters lose all their hit points and die, they would become a zombie and would become an enemy to the surviving characters, which I think is kind of nifty. And the developers included posters on the walls that said things like are you a programmer? Contact ubi Soft, so that was cheeky. Ubi Soft developed the game for platforms like the armstrad CPC and the

z X Spectrum computer, among others. By January seven, Ubi Soft had sold around five thousand copies of Zombie. So here's where we address the differences in scale from the mid eighties to today. If a video game development studio, even a relatively modest independent studio, were to see five thousand titles sold after a few months of launch, it

would be a pretty big flop. But this was back in the early days of programming, when it was possible for a small team of three or four people to put together a full game, and these were games that were coming from big, established studios, so kind of the equivalent of what we would think of as a triple A title today. Also, at this point, Ubisoft was only selling games within France, which meant they were hitting a

pretty small potential market. After all, only a relatively few number of households owned a computer in the first place, and Ubisoft was only focusing on their own home country. But the early success encouraged the leaders of Ubisoft, who became determined to expand into other markets. At first, they took aim at Spain and West Germany. To keep in mind, this is before the reunification of East and West Germany

into Germany. In addition, Ubisoft began to form partnerships with other developers, and so it became an official distribution partner within France. When we come back, we'll talk more about the early days of Ubisoft's existence, including some very early road bumps, But first let's take a quick break. So in Ubisoft was developing games like a spy hunter like vehicular combat game called Asphalt. You controlled a giant truck

that had a turret gun mounted on it. They also had a pingo like game called mange Quelu, in which you've controlled a red bird that could push rocks around a maze to avoid enemies. By the way my French pronunciation. I know it's terrible. I realized that I'm gonna do my best, but it will be bad. Ubisoft was also distributing games from other companies around this time, and some of those games ended up being really big titles like Akari Warriors and Commando, which were pretty popular, and those

would end up selling thousands of copies within France. Eve Guillmant would become CEO of the company in short order, and one other big change was also coming. The company determined that the chateau in Brittany, while impressive and working like a treat as a way to entice people to come and actually, you know, work as a developer for Ubisoft,

it was just playing expensive to maintain. Too expensive. It turns out that really old buildings require a lot of maintenance, and that heating a building that wasn't designed to accommodate

modern heating methods is pretty expensive. So the company decided to let the lease on the property expire at the end of it, and they decided to shift operations back to Paris, and from what I can tell, the initial plan was to kind of share space with some of the other Guilmalt brother companies now this it and go

over great with all the developers. Paris is an expensive city to live in, and some programmers balked at the prospect of moving from relatively inexpensive Brittany to extremely expensive Paris, and it would mean many of them would have to secure an apartment in a less desirable part of the city to stay within their budgets. A few of them declined to make the move, and Ubisoft would just kind of keep the door open for collaborations, allowing some programmers

to even work remotely. Now, in those cases, it wasn't like the remote programmer was a full time employee, but rather that Ubisoft would look at any work that the programmers produced to see if anything might warrant an investment. One of those people was a guy named michel Ansell, who was quite young and whose family had moved from Montpellier to Brittany in order for him to work at Ubisoft. Paris was not a feasible option for the family and

they decided to relocate back to Montpellier. But on sales talent was undeniable, and the Guillman brothers convinced him to keep communications open. Should he have anything to show them on sale, got to work on some general concepts and later partnered with a programmer named Frederic Howd to create a sort of proof of concept game and the two would present their idea to be soft and it definitely

got the company's attention. They could see a lot of promise in the concept, but it would require a great deal more work and several more years to bring it into existence as a fully fledged game. Will come back to that. In the meantime, Ubisoft continued to develop, publish, and distribute games. In company published a port of its

first game, Zombie, to the Atari st computer system. While the company was turning out game titles, most of these wouldn't be familiar to people outside of France, and definitely the familiarity drops off once get outside of Europe, as they were still catering primarily to those markets. Also, just as a side note, there is a Wikipedia page that's supposed to be a list of Ubisoft games, but I can tell you that a lot of the entries, at least for the years between n six and nine, are

just playing wrong. Ubisoft is listed as developer for games that it did not develop, though in some cases the company would develop a later game in a series based off the one that shows up on that list. Anyway, just a reminder that Wikipedia is a great starting point for research, but you should always go beyond that because

sometimes the information there is just playing wrong. Anyway, I'm not gonna go through an exhaustive list of all these early games, as most of them have faded into obscurity in the passing years and there wouldn't be much value to that. That being said, I'm immediately going to break my own rule to talk about one game I learned about while researching this. I had never heard of this

game before. This game is called Fred. You play as a big, strong night named Fred, who at the very beginning of the game gets transformed into a tinier version of himself, and then you must face enemies like gnomes, who, for the life of me, like garden gnomes. And there are other batties in there too, like spiders and ravens and stuff, but it's the gnomes that sell this for me. The gameplay is interesting. It kind of reminds me of ghosts and goblins, or ghouls and ghosts if you prefer.

That's another title in that same series, but one cool thing is that the levels have a cheat to them

to give them a little bit of depth. The game is a platform or and it's a side scroller, so you're looking at everything in profile, and enemies typically travel along specific planes of depth, but there are multiple planes in every level, so in other words, you can travel left or right on a plane that's closest to the screen that would be the one you know, closest to the player, or one that's maybe slightly further back, or

maybe one that's even further back close to the background. However, that also means they can be kind of tricky to figure out which plane of depth and enemy is on.

It might look like you're both lined up, but one of you is actually a little further back than the other with respect to the you know, your point of view, and so in those cases your attacks won't hit them, and most of the time their attacks won't hit you either, And you have to each beyond the same plane of depth in order to fight each other, and that's not always apparent. However, the attempt at adding death would be another indicator of game elements that were coming down the

line in the future. Just as Zombie was hinting a little bit at first person shooter elements. These were decent ideas that were executed upon and let's say limited success. That's a kind way of putting it. Fred from what I've seen, does not look like it was a particularly playable game. Around would be Soft established its own internal studio in Paris, by which I mean the company established a real face for programmers to come and work in

a studio. In addition, the company would open its first studio outside of France, establishing a space in Bucharest, Romania. This gave the company access to more developer talent. So remember Michel on Sale and Frederic Howd. They presented their work to be Soft with an early build of what would evolve into the game Rayman, a platformer style game

with a super cute protagonist. Now, those of you familiar with Rayman know that it would go on to become an enormous franchise, spawning more than forty games that were either sequels or spinoffs or tie ends. It would become the big early hit for Ubisoft, and it would put the company on the larger video game map through most

of Europe. And it started off so small. The very earliest concept for Rayman was to be destined for the Atar E S T. That was what it was originally going to be programmed for, but that was back when on Cell was just working on it by himself. Once Frederic joined that changed. The pair of developers worked on their project for Ubisoft with the goal of producing a

game for a system that would never actually emerge. They were working on creating the title for the Super Nintendo CD Peripheral system, which was originally a cooperative project between Nintendo and Sony, but in Nintendo famously dropped a bombshell at C E S and announced that it would instead partner with the Dutch tech company Phillips to develop the CD peripheral and it would be dumping Sony in the process.

And it was really this event that encouraged Sony executive Ken Kutaragi to take the progress that he had made for the proposed Nintendo C D system and pivot that toward the internal development of Sony's own video game console system, which would evolve into the PlayStation. And you can hear more about that story in the episodes I'd did about the history of the PlayStation. Those episodes published earlier this year,

and it's a crazy story anyway. At this stage, Phillips was still supposedly working with Nintendo to develop this CD peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Only no peripheral ever came out. Nintendo never announced that development for the system had been canceled. The company never gave a release date or a proposed price, or even a list of

games that were in development for the system. It just kind of faded from public consciousness because the next generation of video game consoles was starting to creep forward, and really it was a matter of a lost cause at that point. It just made more sense to shift resources to developing the next Nintendo console as opposed to a peripheral for an older console, and so the developers would need to change direction for Rayman. They need to go

to a different platform. The Nintendo CD system was a no go around. That same time, Ubisoft made a huge investment. They opened up another in house studio in Paris, and they hired on more than one hundred programmers. The little project of Rayman grew into a fully fledged next generation studio title on Cell. Would continue his animation design and the developers were building a game around it, and thus we got Rayman a cute character who has a body.

He's got feet, he's got hands, he's got a head, but he doesn't have a neck, he doesn't have arms, he doesn't have legs, so he has these sort of free floating appendages. And that meant the designers could give Rayman really interesting abilities, like throwing a punch with his fist traveling halfway across the screen potentially, so they made a creative platform or game based around this little fella. Now, initially the first platform the project would focus on was

the Atari Jaguar. Now that you know the Nintendo thing had fallen through, they thought, let's look at this new console, the Autar Jaguar. Now a lot of you out there may not know a whole lot about that console because it didn't have a particularly illustrious or long lifespan. It launched first in North American and within just three years

Atari would discontinue the system. The Jaguar was a cartridge based console, though Atari would try to extend a life of the flailing system later by releasing a CD ROM add on. But that means that any game for the system had to be hard coded onto a circuit board that was housed inside a cartridge that you would then

plug into the console. If Ulbi Soft had only ever made a version of Rayman for the Atari Jaguar, there's a really good chance that no one would even know what Rayman was at this point, would be Soft itself, would not be the company that it is. It likely would have made little to no impression due to that small market size of Jaguar owners. But fortunately, both for

the company and for gamers, that's not what happened. Mis Jail Guilmant recognized the potential of the game and had a hunch that Sony's PlayStation console, which was on the way but not yet on the market, was going to be a huge deal. So part of the work that those one plus developers were doing was to create a version of Rayman for the PlayStation that would be ready to go as soon as the console was hitting store shelves.

The prevailing feeling was that to compete globally in the platform game market, especially to go up against established Japanese video game companies, they would need to time the launch to a console launch. They would need to tie it to that, otherwise Raymond would likely get left behind by the numerous games coming out of other places like Japan, and it totally worked. When Raymond shipped, there were only

nine games available on the PlayStation. As Eve Guilmant would Riley observe, customers didn't have much choice but to try this one. The company would also publish the title for other systems like the Sega Saturn for PCs. This was at the tail end of the ms DOS days, just before Windows would really take over, and then much later on for more recent platforms like iOS and Android, but obviously those came much much later. The game was a big success in Europe, though it met with a more

modest reception in the United States. In the same year Raymond debuted would be Soft established a new department within the company, the Editorial Department, with a man named Serge Ascue named as the head of that department. Says started with the company back in ninety eight, originally serving as a video game tester after applying for the gig through a newspaper. At As head of Editorial, Says would be

the voice of authority on game development. If you wanted a game made, you had to get approval from him first. He could take a get your work and demand changes or even cancel a project outright, he would play a key role in the direction of the company, and more recently he was in the news that paint him in a truly negative light. Now I'll get to those in an upcoming episode, as the allegations of his behavior didn't really become public until this year, that is twenty twenty.

The important thing to keep in mind is that he was effectively the gatekeeper of games coming out of the studio. If he didn't like it, it wasn't going to stick around for very long. Raymond's success marked a real turning point for Ubisoft. One year after the game's launch, Ubisoft would list on Paris's secondary stock exchange and raise more

than eighty million dollars worth of investments. As well, the company would expand once again, opening up a studio in France, another one and a new international development studio in Shanghai, China in and then they opened up the famous Ubisoft Montree y'all in Quebec, Canada. In they would follow that up with two new studios in Spain and Italy, and it really set the stage from the next phase of Ubisoft's history. We'll learn more about that in just a moment,

but first let's take another quick break. So about that Ubisoft Montreal office. Ubisoft was looking to expand into North America and office in Montreal would work well as Montreal is a French speaking city, though the dialects of Quebec and France are very different. In addition, Montreal was looking to create incentives to attract tech companies to open offices in the city, having struggled as other industries like textiles

were starting to flounder. After some negotiations, Ubisoft was able to get a pretty sweet deal to establish a studio in Montreal. When it opened in about half of the fifty employees of the studio actually originally came from the Parisian office of UBI Soft. The other half were locals, and according to later interviews, most of them had no clue how to develop software or at the very least video games. They were being brought in as kind of blank slates, learning on the job how to make games.

The studio initially focused at least primarily on licensed titles, so in other words, the games coming out of Ubisoft Montreal were mostly games based off of existing i p from other companies like d C Comics or Disney. Sometime around then Ubisoft also established a development office in New York. I can't get a whole lot of information about the specifics around this, but they did have an office of

developers in New York City at one point. One of the projects that that team tackled was a concept called The Drift. Now, the Drift never made it as a full game, but elements of the Drift would become really important in later Ubisoft games. For example, the Drift had a modular weapon that could do all sorts of stuff

like be used as a grappling hook. It also had stealth mechanics and surveillance cameras that you could deploy within the game, and had crowd ai behaviors that made crowds of nonplayer characters react to you depending on your own behavior. So if you pulled out a weapon, for example, in a public space, the crowd would react to that, or if you were running through a crowd, the crowd would

react to that. The New York team tried to kind of pull all this together to make a cohesive game, but while the individual ideas were good ones, no real game emerged from the collection of ideas. There was a last ditch effort to pitch this concept as the basis for a James Bond style game, like an actual licensed

James Bond game, but that ultimately went nowhere. So then UBI soft headquarters would decide to close down the New York office, with many of that development team moving to Montreal to join that team there, and the Drift would be put on ice for the time being. In n Michelle, Guilmant would found another video game publisher, this one called game Loft. Rather than a competitor to Ubisoft, game Loft had another market in mind. The Internet was in a

boom phase. Keep in mind this is getting towards the peak of the dot com bubble, and the main focus for game Loft was for web based content and then later on for mobile games. Game Loft licensed ip held by You guessed it would be Soft, and a few other web based game companies would do the same, and soon those licensing vs we're making up the majority of Ubisoft's revenue, which in turn pumped up the company's stock

value fivefold. Flush with cash, Ubisoft made a move that would really help it break into the North American market. It acquire another company. Longtime listeners of tech stuff will recognize the strategy some companies find that the solution to expansion is just in acquiring other companies rather than building things out on their own cough Comcast cough. For some companies, this kind of boils down into buying growth, which seems

a little cynical of me, I guess. But for Ubisoft, it was a means to tap into a market that had thus far remained elusive and to cover some of the gaps in Ubisoft's own expertise. Ubisoft's acquisition was a game development studio out of North Carolina called Red Storm. Red Storm Studios was only four years old at the time. It was founded by Doug Little John's and Tom Freaking Clancy. The company took its name from a Clancy novel named Red Storm Rising, and it launched out of, and then absorbed,

an earlier game studio called Vitus Studios. Between its founding and two thousand, the studio had published a few titles, but the one that really caught fire was the PC tactical first person shore game Rainbow six. The game eventually would come out for numerous other platforms, including the PlayStation, the second Dreamcast, mac computers, and more. The title was a phenomenal success and the studio was still relatively small, which made it a perfect entry point for a company

that wants to get into the North American market. Red Storm was at a crossroads. According to marketing manager Wendy Beasley, the studio was in the mindset that it needed to either be acquired to acquire some other company, or to go public to be soft and red Storm first initiated talks about an acquisition sometime around E three in two thousand. E three, for those unfamiliar, is a video game industry conference.

By August of that year, the paperwork was signed and Red Storm had become a one hundred percent owned subsidiary of Ubisoft. Now. In the announcement of that acquisition, the messaging was made clear that Red Storm would continue to operate as if it were a truly independent studio. In addition, the developers at red Storm could potentially take over Ubisoft titles and franchises that were a better fit for the

American developers. One big change was that Tom Clancy left the company, though he would still license his properties to red Storm, which was a good thing as games inspired by his work would prove to be some of the biggest successes for Ubisoft. During this part of the company's history, so now Ubisoft had access to licensed material from Tom Clancy. Ubisoft Montreal had talent and assets from the recently closed

New York office. At some point, the puzzle pieces clicked into place, and Ubisoft Montreal got to work on a Tom Clancy game in which an operative would complete missions using stealth and special equipment to navigate levels while trying to avoid detection. Most of the technology from the Drift would come into play in this game. In addition, the team had a directive from Ubisoft HQ they needed to make a game they could go toe to toe with the PlayStation Konami game Metal Gear Solid two out of

the legendary video game developer Hideo Kajima. And that is how Tom Clancy's splinter Cell was born as a convergence of technologies and opportunities, which I think is pretty cool. It was an Xbox exclusive and it helped to establish the console's legitimacy as well as the company's place in the North American video game market, and it would set off a chain of events that would push Ubisoft's Montreal studio on a path to tackle increasingly ambitious games. There

was a lot going on around this time. In two thousand one, while the Montreal team was hard at work finishing splinter Cell, would be Soft acquired the entertainment division from the Learning Company, which in turn had properties from earlier game companies like Strategic Simulations and Mattel Interactive, among others. In fact, I think this acquisition is what confused some of the editors on Wikipedia who put together that list

I had mentioned earlier. One of the games that was mistakenly included on that list was the original Pool of Radiance game. That's an advanced Dungeons and Dragons licensed game that was published under the developer Strategic Simulations Incorporated in Now, I love that game, but it is definitely not an

Ubisoft title. Ubisoft would later go on to make a game with a Pool of Radiance name, a sequel at least in name, but it shared very little in common with the older title, and it got pretty mixed reviews as well. Anyway, that's me getting my dander up about wick A p D against We'll leave it there. The important point here is that the acquisition did give Ubisoft the right to several franchises, including an old game that had been made for the Apple two called The Prince

of Persia. Ubisoft Montreal had the task of creating a new game based off this concept of the original game that had come out decades earlier, and that was a platformer and puzzle game that had been created by a

guy named Jordan Metchner. The Montreal team reached out to him and he was reluctant to come on board after having a really bad experience with a Prince of Persia sequel that had happened to Prince of Persia three D. But persistence went out and he would end up joining the team and become heavily involved in the project, becoming the head writer for the new game. Now keep in mind this is also going on at the same time as the Splinter Cell development, so it was a really

busy time in Montreal. One of the creative features of the Prince of Persia game was the incorporation of a rewind feature, so players could build up the capability to do a quick rewind of time so that if they made a mistake that would have led to disaster, they can activate that feature and rewind time just as short ways and then try it again. So you miss a jump, you rewind time you try and make the jump again.

The writers worked this capability into the story itself, making it a clever feature of not just the gameplay, but the mythology of the game world, and it was, in my mind, a stroke of brilliance. The resulting game was Prince of Persia the Sands of Time, which published in two thousand three. The game was a critical success, though it took a little bit longer for sales figures to

follow suit. Now I owned both splinter Cell and Prince of Persia of the Sands of Time for the Xbox the original Xbox, and they were two of my favorite games of that console generation. Clearly, Ubisoft Montreal wasn't hurt by the fact that half of their starting employees had little to no experience in video game development. The team learned quickly and they were turning out some real bangers

for games. The Prince of Persia game made use of a game engine that Ubisoft had developed for a totally different project, one that was held by Michelle A. Sell, the guy who created Rayman. After working on numerous Rayman sequels on Cell, wanted to tackle something totally different, and that's something would be a project called Beyond Good and Evil, a game in which the player controls a young woman as she tries to uncover a conspiracy in a science

fiction setting. The game had a long and troubled development process back at Ubisoft HQ in France, and it included a nearly complete rewrite, and it would have ultimately debuted to lackluster sales, but it got really good reviews. The game was released on the then current generation of video game consoles, which were the PlayStation two and the Xbox and the Nintendo GameCube, and also it came out for Windows. Much later on. It would also come to the Xbox three,

sixty and the p US three. Over time, the reputation for the game would lead to better sales figures, but at first, at least, it appeared to be a serious misstep. In retrospect, many at Ubisoft said that the failure largely rested on the company's marketing for the game. And we're going to conclude this part of our story with ubi Soft two words officially becoming ubi Soft one word, and that happened on September nine, two thousand three. The company

also would replace its logo. Originally, its logo had been a large maroon pinkish Ubi I with the word soft written in white script on top of U B i uh. It had gone through a few other permutations of logos in the following years, but in two thousand three we finally got the more familiar swirl logo, which would remain the official logo for more than a decade. It changed

again in twenty seventeen, but we'll get to that. So in our next episode, will continue the story of Ubi Soft and talk about how some sharks in the games industry started to circle the studio just as it was really taking off on the global stage, but that will have to wait until next time. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff,

reach out to me and let me know. The best way to do that is on Twitter, where I used the handle text stuff h s W for the show, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.