Was this scary for young Désilets? "Not when you're 23, you have a job and you get paid. When they opened Ubisoft Montreal, they brought some experienced producers but no senior game designers. "It was a new studio and everybody had just come out of school. With Hype: The Time Quest, he and the team tried to pay homage to the classic JRPG Chrono Trigger.
So it's particularly cool to use time as the basis for the central fantasy of a game". "Time", he says, "is the only dimension we can't control. In hindsight, that was also the beginning of an obsession with time that spans his whole career. His first project in Ubisoft was Playmobil adaptation Hype: The Time Quest. And who also knew games." But not being literate about established rules of game design also helped him bend those same rules. To an extent, the lack of specific experience helped him "have a good interview, because they stumbled on a guy who had a pretty wide array of interests and knowledge. So he went for an interview without having the slightest idea of how to make a video game, armed only with his knowledge as a gamer and a reader of specialized press. He had been playing games since the early Eighties, enjoying Choplifter, Lode Runner and other games on the Apple II. But I applied for a job because I was a gamer."
But becoming a video game developer wasn't really the plan. Ubisoft Montreal happened to have just opened its offices. In 1997, a young and eager Patrice Désilets had just graduated from film school and was looking for a job. Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox
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