Sorry, was gone for a moment
[5:40 - INTERVIEW]
The audience of this week is not added in later on, nope! It's real, and here in Toulouse, it's the audience of TGS (not Tokyo Game Show obviously).
Mr Serious: As I said in the news section, we've had a great month for games - and one of the biggest games was Rayman Origins, so we invited him to our show. Michel Ancel, welcome.
Michel Ancel: Hello and thanks.
Mr Serious: Michel Ancel, creator of Rayman, the Raving Rabbids, Beyond Good & Evil, and so much more. Oh, and you also received the medal of a Knight in the Arts and Letters, at the same time as Frédéric Reynald et Shigeru Miyamoto... did the guy who gave you that understand your job?
Michel Ancel: Well yes, it was star-shaped, and there is a game where you collect stars...
Mr Bald: And it's the best game of the month, right? [reference to the news section of the show, he really liked Mario 3D Land]
Michel Ancel: And he gave it to me too, so he definitely knows that [gaming] world.
Mr Bald: Alright, so we'll already go back to the beginning of your career: What made you want to step into the videogame world?
Michel Ancel: Well they gave me the choice: I could become a doctor, an astronaut, ruler of the world... and ruler of the world was a bit complicated, but I kept that in the back of my mind. And sure enough, those jobs are nice, and lots of people practise them.
Mr Bald: What, ruler of the world?
Michel Ancel: A lot of people stand on their heads to get there...Well there's not much room there. You'd have to change planets.
And, the great thing is that in the videogame industry, there weren't much people. And only nice people! But it was terrible, there were no schools or anything for videogames, we had to go to game shops were we total geeks would gather and trade games, demos, etc.
Mr Bald: Games like what?
Michel Ancel: Like uh... yeah I played Barbarian for example, a game where you had to hit people on the head. It had those sounds like "YAK!", "OUCH!" etc, and we actually found that on the diskette. So we took a microphone and replaced it all with crazy noises, that was a lot of fun. So you see, we were already videogame creators.
Mr Bald: And Rayman? The character?
Michel Ancel: Well Rayman happened because when you make a game, you need a main character really quickly. You have to go through all the worlds you have made. The character that was the easiest to use was Rayman because he didn't even have arms or legs.
Mr Bald: Why?
Michel Ancel: You can draw him really quickly.
Mr Serious: Some people say Rayman originated from a drawing you made a long time ago, as a kid. Is it real or not?
Michel Ancel: Ah, that's the legend. In fact the legend is that you really never know who's right and who isn't - and even I don't know anything!
Nah, just kidding. It was indeed a little drawing I made, and I animated it by just moving the mouth behind the face - you know, like a marionette. And the character turned out to really come to life! It became the mascot that allowed me to take my first steps in the videogame industry on computers that don't exist anymore. *laughs*
Mr Bald: Nostalgia!
[9:30]
Mr Serious: And now you just released Rayman Origins, which is a real little gem - we have to say it at some time during the episode.
Mr Bald: I'm a real fan of platforming games.
Mr Serious: And to create this game, you wanted to work worked with a really small team.
Michel Ancel: Exactly, because Rayman 1 started when I was all alone, then a programmer joined me, then an artist, then a decorator, etc.
And with Rayman Origins, I wanted to have almost the same organization. So there were 5-6 of us and we quickly produced many levels and many characters. After some time, Ubisoft said "Wow, what you're doing is really good. Better than we thought!"
Mr Serious: That's... very nice of them. *laughs*
Michel Ancel: Yeah, well it's okay too. They said they wanted the game sooner than we'd planned. We were going to make episodes, but we had to speed up and make a full game. So lots of people joined our team - but it was nice as we kept the spirit from before.
Mr Serious: Is it because the creation process of the game went so well that you wanted to share the UbiArt Framework with others?
Michel Ancel: Yes, the idea is that you can create games with it in not so much time.
Mr Serious: That's rare, normally people who make games don't share their tools...
Michel Ancel: We're working out who would be interested now, and adapting our tools to that. But yes, we really want more craziness to come from everyone who uses the tools. We demonstrated what can be done with it with Rayman, and there's a lot more to be done with it. It's only the beginning.
Mr Bald: What a beautiful game. Damn.
[11:20]
Mr Bald: So anyway, how did you feel about the creation of the Raving Rabbids?
[to be continued...]
Man what a cliffhanger ending! I love cliffhangers.
