Michel Ancel - Career

Career

Ancel's first demo, Mechanic Warriors, was developed for software house Lankhor. Ancel then joined Ubisoft as a graphic artist after meeting the game author Nicolas Choukroun in Montpellier at the age of 17. He made the graphics of Nicolas' games such as The Intruder, Pick'n Pile before doing his first game as both programmer and graphic artist Brain Blaster published by Ubi Soft in 1990. In 1992, he began to work on Rayman, his directorial debut. It was originally released in 1995 for the Atari Jaguar, and in 1996 for PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

Ancel was also heavily involved in the development of Rayman 2: The Great Escape, but had only an advisory role on Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. Although he praised its development team, he claims he would have "made the game differently".

In 2003, he created Beyond Good & Evil, which garnered critical acclaim and a cult following, but was a commercial failure. However, film director Peter Jackson's admiration of the game — and his frustration with EA's handling of the The Lord of the Rings license — led to Ancel being given direction of the King Kong video game adaptation. In spite of Ubisoft's reluctance to produce a Beyond Good & Evil sequel, Ancel has expressed a clear wish to produce one in the future.

On April 5, 2006, Ubisoft announced Ancel was leading the development of the fourth game in the Rayman series, Rayman Raving Rabbids, for Wii. The game began production in early 2005 and was released on November 15, 2006 for the launch of the Wii. However, Ancel was notably absent from the project after its E3 announcement, and he has made no public appearances regarding the game after the development team switched focus from a free-roaming platformer to the final mini games format shortly after E3. In the final game Ancel was only credited with storyboarding and character design, while design credits were shared between multiple other people.

In an interview with Nintendo Power, Ancel confirmed that he is working on a new project that means a lot to him. He also talks about Jade from Beyond Good & Evil and says "I really hope that Jade will continue to keep her values and her personality". Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed that Michel Ancel is currently working on several unannounced projects, as of March 2008.

In an interview with French-based video game magazine JeuxVidéo, Ancel stated that a sequel to Beyond Good & Evil had been in pre-production by a small team for about a year, but they were awaiting Ubisoft's approval before moving into full production.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 was officially announced at Ubidays 2008 event on May 28, 2008. On December 18, 2008, at the VGL event in Paris, Ancel stated that the game has been under development for a year and a half and that the development team has received total freedom from Ubisoft, giving them the opportunity to make the game how they want.

In 2010, Ubisoft announced Rayman Origins, first an episodic video game designed by Michel Ancel and developed by a small team of five people, but then it was announced that it transformed into a full game.. The title is used UBIart Framework developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and Ancel. UBIart is a developer platform that allows artists and animators to easily create content and use it in interactive environment. The engine is optimized for HD resolutions and is capable to run at 60fps in 1920x1080. UBIart tools will be released as open-source software in 2011.

Speaking at Montpellier in Game conference in June 2010, Ancel revealed that he's developing similar tools to create Beyond Good & Evil 2 with a very small team to preserve its "artistic spirit". Ancel is experimenting with different development techniques and tools. He claims these tools are getting similar to those used by Weta Digital.