Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot dies in France plane crash
The Ubisoft co-founder and Guillemot Corporation chief died alongside a flight instructor when their twin-engine plane went down near La Baule.
Claude Guillemot, one of the five brothers who founded Ubisoft in 1986, was killed in a plane crash in western France on Friday evening, the company and local authorities confirmed. He was 69.
The twin-engine Cessna 421 he was flying came down in a field as it approached La Baule-Escoublac Airport on the Atlantic coast, according to La Baule Mayor Franck Louvrier. A flight instructor aboard the aircraft was also killed. Both men were licensed, experienced pilots, the mayor said. An investigation is under way, and the cause has not been established.
Ubisoft confirmed Guillemot's death but did not comment further.
His footprint on the industry is hard to overstate. Ubisoft is the studio behind Assassin's Creed, the long-running historical-adventure series, as well as Just Dance, Rayman and the Tom Clancy line of military games. Within the company Claude sat on the board and served as executive vice-president for operations. Since 1997 he had also been chairman and chief executive of the Guillemot Corporation, the family's gaming hardware and accessories business.
For players, Guillemot's name was largely invisible. For the business of games, it was foundational. He belonged to the generation of European founders who turned the 1980s home-computer boom into industrial-scale studios, and Ubisoft's long survival as an independent, family-led publisher, rather than a label folded into a larger conglomerate, owed much to the brothers' collective grip on the company. The five have run it together for close to four decades, an unusually long stretch of family control in an industry that tends to consolidate.
Ubisoft grew from those origins into one of the world's largest video game companies, with development studios spread across several continents. Few publishers of its scale have stayed under the hand of the people who started them; fewer still have kept five siblings working in the same business for as long as the Guillemots have. That continuity is now broken at the top of the company in the most abrupt way possible.
Word of the crash landed on a studio already under close watch from investors, and on a release calendar increasingly crowded by rivals, including the approaching launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. Tributes from across the games business followed quickly, many of them noting how rare it has become for a single family to steer a publisher of Ubisoft's size for so long. Deadline and other outlets reported the death on Saturday.
La Baule, a seaside resort on France's Atlantic coast, is a long way from the trade shows and earnings calls where Guillemot's decisions were felt. French investigators have begun examining the wreckage, and it may be weeks before they explain why a flight that two seasoned pilots would treat as routine ended the way it did.
Guillemot is survived by an industry he helped invent and a company that still carries the family name. The circumstances of the crash, a small private aircraft that came down in a field short of the runway, remain under investigation.
