Most people who have played Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry or Just Dance have never heard of Claude Guillemot. That was the point. While his brother Yves became the public face of Ubisoft, Claude worked the back office of the family’s gaming empire, and on Friday evening he was killed when his small plane went down near the Atlantic coast.
Guillemot, one of the five brothers who founded Ubisoft in 1986, died June 19 at 69 when a twin-engine Cessna 421 crashed in a field while approaching La Baule-Escoublac Airport in western France, the Associated Press reported. A flight instructor on board was also killed. La Baule Mayor Franck Louvrier said both men were licensed and experienced pilots. The cause is under investigation.
The plane had left Rennes for La Baule, where a weekend fly-in was set to draw more than 100 aircraft, French outlet Ouest-France reported. Witnesses told the mayor the Cessna made a turn on its landing approach and went down. Responders found the wreck on fire, with flames spreading into the surrounding field, according to TheGamer’s account of the French reports. Guillemot owned the plane and belonged to the local flying club.
Ubisoft confirmed his death Saturday and said it would say nothing more. “Ubisoft learned with deep sadness of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the group and President of Guillemot Corporation, in an accident,” the company said in a statement carried by TechCrunch. “Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time.” His brother Yves, the chief executive, has not spoken publicly about the death, GameRant reported.
Here is the thing about Ubisoft that the obituaries tend to skip. It was a hardware business before it was a games business. In the early 1980s the Guillemots ran an agricultural supply company in Brittany, and when the five brothers came home from university they noticed that importing computers and software from Britain and the United States cost French buyers a fortune, TheGamer reported. So they built a mail-order shop to undercut the middlemen. That shop became Ubi Soft, short for ubiquitous software.
Claude’s lane was the machines. According to his Ubisoft biography, he had run Guillemot Corporation since 1997, the family hardware company behind the Thrustmaster controllers and the Hercules audio line, which sells in more than 140 countries. At Ubisoft he sat on the board as executive vice president for operations, the same biography says. He held a master’s in economic science and a certificate in industrial computing, TheGamer reported, and he was the brother who made the plumbing work.
The catalog he helped fund and ship is the part everyone knows. Ubisoft published Rayman, Prince of Persia, Far Cry, the Tom Clancy games, Just Dance and Assassin’s Creed, which grew into one of the biggest franchises in the business, TechCrunch reported. The Guillemot Corporation also bankrolled the early Ubisoft, MMORPG.com reported, and the brothers still hold their Ubisoft stake through it. The family put French video games on the world map at a time when almost nobody expected France to matter in the industry.
The death lands at a brutal moment for the company. Ubisoft has spent the past few years cutting projects and shedding staff, its games no longer the sure bets they once were, Deadline reported. A reworked Assassin’s Creed Black Flag is due July 9, a release the company is treating as a chance to steady itself. Claude Guillemot had a hand in the franchise that may now have to carry it.
He gave few interviews. In one from 1999 that TheGamer reported on, he talked about the early web and sounded less like a hardware executive than a man taken with the romance of the thing. He said he liked getting a letter “from an anonymous sender at the ends of the earth,” a message in a bottle thrown out into the world. He died on a June evening, near a coastal field that was about to fill with the small planes he loved.
