Patrice Désilets and his lifelong obsession with time
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In 1997, a young and eager Patrice Désilets had just graduated from film school and was looking for a job. Ubisoft Montreal happened to have just opened its offices. But becoming a video game developer wasn't really the plan.
"Not even close," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I studied movies and theater. I thought I would be making movies. But I applied for a job because I was a gamer."
He had been playing games since the early Eighties, enjoying Choplifter, Lode Runner and other games on the Apple II. 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. It went well.
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. And who also knew games." But not being literate about established rules of game design also helped him bend those same rules.
His first project in Ubisoft was Playmobil adaptation Hype: The Time Quest. In hindsight, that was also the beginning of an obsession with time that spans his whole career.
"Time", he says, "is the only dimension we can't control. And that's fascinating. So it's particularly cool to use time as the basis for the central fantasy of a game".
With Hype: The Time Quest, he and the team tried to pay homage to the classic JRPG Chrono Trigger. "It was a new studio and everybody had just come out of school. When they opened Ubisoft Montreal, they brought some experienced producers but no senior game designers. We had to learn on the fly."
Was this scary for young Désilets? "Not when
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