Sometimes the news lands and there’s no clever angle to find. This is one of those.
Claude Guillemot, one of the five brothers who founded Ubisoft back in 1986, died Friday evening when the twin-engine Cessna 421 he was flying crashed near La Baule airport on France’s Atlantic coast. He was 69. A flight instructor was also on board and was killed in the crash, and both men, by the accounts coming out of France, were experienced, licensed pilots.
The mayor of La Baule, Franck Louvrier, said the plane was on its landing approach when, according to witnesses, it made a turn and went down, crashing into a field just short of the runway. An investigation is now underway, and the cause hasn’t been established.
Ubisoft confirmed the death in a short, careful statement. The company said it was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the group and chairman of Guillemot Corporation, and that its thoughts were with his family and loved ones. No further comment would be made, it added. There’s a particular kind of silence in a statement like that, the sound of a company that has lost one of its own and isn’t in the mood to perform grief for the press.
The Name Behind a Lot of Games You’ve Played
If you’ve ever played a game in the last two decades, you’ve almost certainly touched something the Guillemot family built.
Claude and his four brothers founded Ubisoft in 1986, and that small French outfit grew into one of the biggest publishers on the planet. Assassin’s Creed. Far Cry. Just Dance. Rayman. The Tom Clancy franchises. If you owned a console or a half-decent PC at any point, those names were part of the furniture. For a lot of South African gamers who grew up on whatever the local retailers actually stocked, an Assassin’s Creed title was often the big-budget purchase you saved for, the one you traded in three others to afford.
Ubisoft today is run by Claude’s brother Yves, the company’s chairman and CEO. Claude sat on the board as Deputy Chief Executive Officer but wasn’t part of the day-to-day leadership team, focusing instead on Guillemot Corporation, the separate family-controlled business he chaired.
A Death That Arrives at a Hard Moment
There’s no graceful way to put this part, so I’ll just say it plainly.
The loss comes while Ubisoft is already going through a genuinely rough patch. Claude Guillemot’s death lands as the company gears up for the release of Black Flag Resynced on July 9, a reboot it’s hoping will help reset its fortunes after several financially difficult years in which the popularity of its games has waned. The company has been through layoffs, studio restructuring, and the kind of turbulence that makes headlines for all the wrong reasons.
None of that is the story today. But it’s the backdrop, and it’s worth being honest about, because the Guillemot brothers built something that mattered in this industry, and watching one of its founders go in circumstances like these is hard regardless of where Ubisoft’s share price happens to sit this quarter.
We spend a lot of time on this site poking at the games industry, at publishers, at the decisions that frustrate players. Ubisoft has caught its share of that from us and will again.
But the people who build these companies are still people. A man went up in a small plane on a Friday evening in France, the way he’d clearly done many times before, and didn’t come back. So did the instructor sitting beside him, whose name most of these reports haven’t even carried.
The games will keep coming. The industry will keep arguing about Ubisoft’s future. That’s all still ahead of us. For now, condolences to the Guillemot family, and a quiet acknowledgement of someone whose work, whether you ever thought about him or not, was part of a lot of our lives.
Rest easy, Claude.
