In 1992, a twenty-year-old named Michel Ancel started work on a game at Ubisoft in Montpellier, in the south of France. It was his first time as director. He was drawing, programming and working on the sound himself, more or less alone, and the main character he was drawing had no arms and no legs.
Ancel was born in Monaco on March 29, 1972, and his father's military career moved the family around. He first held a game console in Tunisia. As a teenager he taught himself to draw, to compose and to program, and he had already sketched the character who would become Rayman. He joined Ubisoft in 1989 as a graphic artist. He made his first complete game, Brain Blaster, in 1990.
Rayman's hands and feet float beside his body, connected to nothing. Ancel's sources for the world around him were fairy tales, including Celtic and Chinese ones, and his own childhood: rivers, insects, trees. The game never stops to explain any of it. Things are there because the world is built to hold together, and a player accepts that within a minute.
The project did not go in a straight line. It was first aimed at the Super Nintendo and the Atari ST, then moved to the Atari Jaguar, because Ancel felt the Jaguar was the first console that could show the graphics he had in mind. Rayman came out in 1995 on the Jaguar, then on the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn (sources differ on the exact dates by region). The small team he started with had grown into its own studio, now known as Ubisoft Montpellier.
Rayman 2: The Great Escape followed in 1999 and is widely counted among the best platformers of its generation. In 2003 came Beyond Good & Evil, in which a photojournalist named Jade fights with a camera as much as with anything else. Critics loved it. It did not sell as Ubisoft had hoped. Ancel went on to direct King Kong in 2005, and later Rayman Origins in 2011 and Rayman Legends in 2013, both praised for their hand-drawn look.
In 2008 Ancel announced a sequel to Beyond Good & Evil. It was announced again, and shown again, over the following years, and it did not come out. Former staff later said his time was split between that game and Wild, a project at his own small studio, Wild Sheep, and that this left the Ubisoft project disorganised.
In September 2020 Ancel announced on Instagram that he was leaving the games industry after more than thirty years, to work on a wildlife sanctuary built around education and nature. He said both of his projects were in capable hands. About a week later the French newspaper Libération published an investigation. Employees described a manager who threw out work and belittled people, and said other managers had been placed between him and the team. Ancel denied the accusations and called the report fake news, saying his role was to bring a vision to producers and managers, not to manage the team. Whether his departure and the investigation were linked is described differently in different accounts.
Rayman Legends is still sold today. It carries the world that a twenty-year-old drew without explaining it, and it carries the name of a man who later said he had never meant to manage the people who built it. A world can hold together without anyone explaining it. Can the people inside the studio that makes it?