Ubisoft Montpellier

Michel Ancel and Frédéric Houde met in 1987 at a computer shop in Montpellier and started making games together. Years later they crossed paths again at Ubi Soft, where Ancel showed Houde Rayman, a game he had dreamed up at 17 and prototyped on an Atari ST. The pair left the company to build it as freelancers, and in 1994 Ubi Soft turned their team into an in-house studio near Montpellier: Ubi Pictures.

The team started with five people working remotely. Rayman came out in 1995 and Rayman 2: The Great Escape in 1999, and with each project the studio grew and moved to new offices in central Montpellier. For Beyond Good & Evil (2003) it built the Jade engine, and late that year Ubisoft merged local developer Tiwak into the studio and renamed it Ubisoft Montpellier. That period also produced Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) and Rayman Raving Rabbids (2006).

It then built the LyN engine for Rabbids Go Home (2009). In 2011 it moved to Castelnau-le-Lez, next to Montpellier, and released Rayman Origins, made with its UbiArt Framework engine, which it also used for Rayman Legends (2013) and Valiant Hearts: The Great War (2014). Those years also brought From Dust (2011) and ZombiU (2012). In 2019 it opened its current home, a 4,500-square-metre building known as Le Monolithe.

Ancel left the studio and the industry in September 2020 to work with a wildlife sanctuary, amid a wave of departures at Ubisoft over misconduct allegations; he disputed the claims against him and denied any link to his exit. Houde still leads the studio as technical director. Its recent games include Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024) and Rayman Legends Retold, dated 2026, and it is working on Beyond Good and Evil 2 with a new engine, Voyager.