Ubisoft Co-Founder Claude Guillemot Dies in French Plane Crash at 69

Claude Guillemot, one of the five brothers who built Ubisoft from a family business in rural Brittany into one of the world's largest video-game publishers, died Friday evening in a small-plane crash in western France. He was 69.

A twin-engine Cessna 421 carrying Guillemot and a flight instructor came down in a field just short of the runway at La Baule Airport, on the Atlantic coast, an airport official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to be named publicly. Both people aboard were killed. The cause is under investigation; CBS News reported that both men were licensed and experienced pilots. Ubisoft confirmed his death in a statement to The Associated Press and did not elaborate.

For most players, Guillemot was an invisible figure behind very visible games. He and his brothers Michel, Yves, Gérard and Christian founded Ubisoft in 1986, and the company grew into the studio behind Assassin's Creed, Just Dance, Rayman and the Tom Clancy's series. Yves Guillemot remains chairman and chief executive. Among the siblings, Claude's lane was the hardware and the holding structure rather than the marquee franchises.

That distinction matters to understanding what he actually ran. Since 1997 he was chairman and chief executive of the Guillemot Corporation, a separately listed company that owns the Hercules audio brand and the Thrustmaster line of racing wheels, flight sticks and game controllers — the peripherals a serious player bolts onto a PC. Through that vehicle the brothers also hold a strategic stake in Ubisoft, the lever that has kept the family in control through years of takeover speculation. He was also president of the Guillemot Foundation.

His death lands at a turbulent moment for the company the brothers spent four decades building. Ubisoft has spent the past year restructuring after a run of weak releases and a strained share price, and the family's grip has repeatedly been tested by outside investors. The hardware business Claude led offered a steadier counterweight to the hit-or-miss economics of blockbuster game development, where a single delayed title can swing a year.

The studio's near-term calendar underscores those stakes. The industry's attention is fixed on the autumn launch of a rival megahit, with Grand Theft Auto VI pre-orders opening this week, a reminder of how much a modern release can cost to make and how unforgiving the market has become for anything less than a phenomenon. Ubisoft built its name in exactly that arena.

Tributes moved quickly through the games industry over the weekend, from former colleagues and rival studios who noted that the Guillemots were among the first to turn a European mail-order games operation into a global publisher. The brothers started by selling games by catalogue in the 1980s before deciding to make their own, an origin story that reads, in hindsight, like a blueprint many European studios would follow.

French aviation authorities have not released findings on what brought the aircraft down. What is known is narrow and human: a 69-year-old company builder, flying near the coast on a Friday evening, who helped turn a small French firm into a name printed on hundreds of millions of game boxes. Reuters and other outlets confirmed the death through the company and local officials. The investigation into the crash continues.