BETA | UBISOFT MONTPELLIER
The staff at Ubisoft’s Montpellier Studio are lucky enough to work on some of the giant publisher-developer’s most admired titles
Ray of Light
Ubisoft Montpellier is the regular workplace of Michel Ancel, but the studio has a great more to it than a single iconic developer. As Will Freeman discovers, it is arguably the French giant’s most creatively daring studio, and a place where the likes of Eric Chahi have come to realise their visions
RAYMAN ORIGINS was something of a new direction for Ubisoft’s energetically creative Montpellier studio. That is to say, it is a sequel of a game that itself began life at the development outfit situated in the south of France. Almost without exception, before Origins the Ubisoft Montpellier team has never worked on the same IP twice. Sequels, they insist, are not their thing.
While the numerous other Ubisoft studios
scattered across the globe toil away on the triple-A fodder that has made the giant publisher and developer a rival to the likes of EA and Activision, in a discreet industrial building near the Mediterranean coast the Montpellier team focus on making games that are typically atypical. It was at Ubisoft Montpellier that Rayman was born, and more recently where Another World creator Eric Chahi chose to step out from several years in the development
30 | FEBRUARY 2012
wilderness to create From Dust. It is where Beyond Good and Evil was created, and where resident luminary Michel Ancel proved the potential of licensed IP with the King Kong
There is this pacifistic aspect to
what we do. It comes from the feeling, the atmosphere and the history of this studio.
Benoit Lambert, Ubisoft Montpellier
video game. The studio is central to the Rabbids games’ early history, and today it remains the place to be for Ubisoft staff hoping to flex some of their creative muscle.
And yet all too often, such is the interest in
Ancel, when a spotlight is cast on Ubisoft Montpellier it misses everything but the man who made Rayman. Yet Ancel is not the only creative visionary at the studio. Certainly, the output of the Montpelier team is still mainstream entertainment for the masses, but its games remain quite different from most chart-focused products. They are always offbeat, regularly creatively risky, and never explicitly violent. Other Ubisoft studios have made profitable sequels from Montpellier- generated IP, but rarely is it the task of those lucky enough to work with names like Ancel and Chahi to return to an intellectual property of their own creation.
PICTURE THIS Ubisoft Montpellier’s history is an intricate one of multiple locations and transformations that is integral to the wider
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