Michel Ancel | Code Like It's 198x

In 1999 Edge went to Montpellier to meet the man it called “France’s answer to Shigeru Miyamoto” and found him in a cramped townhouse with no air conditioning, wires trailing across the carpet between six or so rooms. His character, the magazine noted, had “made its way into around four million homes worldwide”, yet Michel Ancel himself was barely known. He had started at Ubi Soft about ten years earlier, after sending the company an animation he had drawn on his Atari ST of a character with “no arms, no legs, big eyes, and floppy ears”. That character became Rayman, and Ancel spent most of the next thirty years making games for Ubisoft, from bright platform games to a science-fiction adventure about a photojournalist.

Fast facts

Born: 1972, in Monaco.
Ubi Soft: from about 1989, when he was 17, until 2020.
Created: Rayman (1995) and Beyond Good & Evil (2003).
Also led: Rayman 2: The Great Escape (1999), Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), Rayman Origins (2011) and Rayman Legends (2013).
Honour: made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, with Shigeru Miyamoto and Frédérick Raynal.
Left games: September 2020, to work on a wildlife sanctuary.

Ubi Soft’s young artist

Ancel came to Ubi Soft through that Atari ST demo. The company, then one of France’s biggest publishers along with Infogrames, liked it enough to bring him in-house, Edge reported, “with the intention of realising the potential of his character in a videogame”. Before that happened he worked on smaller games. Amiga Action reviewed one of them, the Ubi Soft puzzle game Brain Blasters, in August 1991, at £25.99, crediting the team to “Michael Ancel”; it was a memory game for up to three players, in which wizards competed to rebuild patterns of blocks from memory.

Rayman

Rayman came out in 1995 for the Atari Jaguar, the PlayStation and the Saturn, and the missing limbs became the game: the hero’s fist flies across the screen and his hair spins like a helicopter. In 1997 Ubi Soft’s interviewee in the German magazine Video Games described Ancel as “the inventor and co-director of Rayman”. Reviewers loved the look and argued about the difficulty; the game sold millions and became one of the first PlayStation Platinum reissues. The Rayman entry tells its story in full.

Ancel’s next idea went to other hands. Edge reported in 1998 that Tonic Trouble, a 3D adventure starring a character called Ed, had been “created by Michel Ancel, the designer behind the PlayStation hit Rayman”, and that both it and Rayman 2 “were conceived by Michel Ancel”; Tonic Trouble was developed at Ubi Soft’s Montreal studio.

Rayman 2

By 1999 Ancel was overseeing Rayman 2: The Great Escape from Montpellier, the series’ first fully 3D game. He talked to Edge about stories, not engines. “I don’t think technology is telling great stories,” he said, and he pointed to the limited animation of My Neighbour Totoro: “when you have a very good sequence it stands out.” He wanted to keep the core team to no more than 30 people, to recover “that good feeling when you know you’ve been working on a project when it was just three, four or five people, with one code ‘magician’, one special artist”, while admitting that an ambitious, Zelda-like game needed more hands. His favourite games, he said, were Zelda III and Galaxian.

Beyond Good & Evil

Beyond Good & Evil (2003) was Ancel’s own story: a young photojournalist, Jade, on the planet Hillys, uncovering a conspiracy behind an alien invasion. He told Edge it was “very reminiscent of Jules Verne” and that it had a European flavour on purpose; Sony of America had sent a message saying only, “Your game looks very European.” The development was long and troubled. The early version had no fighting at all, and when Sony’s ICO failed commercially, Ancel said, “Ico’s failure was like a sword in the gut”. The team, “very demoralised” and missing milestones, was given more time, and changed a great deal: they made the story more mature, made Jade look less like a schoolgirl and more like a war reporter, and cut old-fashioned puzzle and adventure sections. He also disliked the marketing: “They called it The Michel Ancel Game, but nobody knows my name!”

Critics liked it; buyers did not find it. Edge reported that it was among the games that “sank without trace” at Christmas 2003, one of three new Ubisoft games, with Prince of Persia and XIII, lost in the Christmas rush, and Electronic Gaming Monthly later called it “the ’03 critical hit (and commercial flop)”. Ancel told Edge in 2005 that he had written the story to be longer and that a sequel would be good, “but we have no plans for that.”

King Kong and the Rabbids

Ubisoft then gave Ancel’s Montpellier team the official game of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. His team worked closely with Jackson and with the effects company Weta, whose concept art was its main reference, and Ancel wanted the player in the world without a screen full of information: “it’s in 1933, I didn’t want a HUD or things like that.” After Rayman, Rayman 2 and Beyond Good & Evil, he said, “it was about eight years of creating characters and things like that… that’s enough.” Edge’s review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong in Christmas 2005 called it “that rarest of things in this medium: an actual faithful adaptation”.

In 2006 Edge previewed Rayman Raving Rabbids, the Wii game in which Rayman is captured by an invasion of manic rabbits, as “Michel Ancel’s next”. That year, Ancel, Alone in the Dark’s Frédérick Raynal and Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto were made Chevaliers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Edge introduced the “Monaco-born” Ancel as head of Ubisoft Montpellier, and he named his influences as French comics: “When I was young, I liked Astérix and Gaston Lagaffe a lot. Authors like Franquin can be named as influences for our games.”

Origins, Legends and UbiArt

Ancel brought Rayman back to two dimensions with Rayman Origins (2011), which Edge called “a bounding, joyful and unapologetically old-school 2D platformer”. It was built with UbiArt Framework, an engine that Ubisoft Montpellier developed for it with part-funding from the French government, which let an animator have a drawn silhouette moving in the game within minutes. Ancel, by then studio head, told Edge in 2013 that a visit to Weta in New Zealand had shown him how much repetitive work programmers could hand to the computer, and that “we believe we can achieve big games even with this size [of studio]”. Rayman Legends followed in 2013, delayed by six months shortly before release so that it could come out on other consoles as well as the Wii U, which left fans “furious, and so are the devs — series creator Michel Ancel included”, Edge reported.

He also co-founded his own small studio in Montpellier, Wild Sheep Studio, whose game Wild was announced for the PlayStation 4 in 2014. It has not been released.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 and leaving Ubisoft

A sequel to Beyond Good & Evil had been teased in 2008, and in 2013 Ancel told Edge that UbiArt’s techniques would carry over to “large-scale open-world games such as Beyond Good & Evil 2”. Ubisoft finally showed Beyond Good and Evil 2 at E3 in 2017, as a prequel. In September 2020 Ancel announced that he was leaving: “After more than 30 years, I’ve decided to stop working on video games and fully focus on my second passion: Wild Life!” Ubisoft said he had “decided to stop working in video games in order to focus on other personal projects”, and that the Montpellier team would carry on with the game.

A week later the French newspaper Libération published an investigation into the making of the game that included complaints from staff about Ancel’s management. Ubisoft confirmed to Kotaku that he had been under investigation. In its words: “Yves Guillemot committed back in July that any allegation will be investigated and no one will be outside of that process — and this would include Michel Ancel. And as Michel confirmed to the journalist at Libération, he is under investigation. The investigation is still ongoing.” Ancel denied the accusations on Instagram: “I worked hard on every of my projects and always had respect for the teams. The accusations are wrong.” The public sources available do not report the outcome of the investigation.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 was still in development at Ubisoft in 2026, without him.

Sources

Amiga Action issue 23, August 1991, p. 44: Brain Blasters review (Ubi Soft, £25.99, “Team: Michael Ancel”).
Video Games (Germany), January 1997: interview with Ubi Soft about Tonic Trouble (Ancel “der Erfinder und Co-Director von Rayman”).
Edge issue 57, April 1998, p. 48: Tonic Trouble “created by Michel Ancel, the designer behind the PlayStation hit Rayman”. Edge issue 63, October 1998: Rayman 2 and Tonic Trouble “both conceived by Michel Ancel”; Tonic Trouble developed in Montreal.
Edge issue 76, October 1999, pp. 84–85: interview with Michel Ancel (the Atari ST animation, joining Ubi Soft, four million homes, the Montpellier office, his favourite games, technology and stories, team sizes).
Edge issue 131, Christmas 2003, pp. 64–67, “Audience with Michel Ancel”: Beyond Good & Evil (Jules Verne, “looks very European”, ICO, the demoralised team and the changes, Jade’s redesign, “The Michel Ancel Game”).
Edge issue 133, February 2004, pp. 9–10: Beyond Good & Evil absent from the Christmas 2003 charts.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 195, September 2005, p. 20: “the ’03 critical hit (and commercial flop) Beyond Good & Evil”.
Edge issue 143, December 2004: Ubisoft sets Ancel’s team to make the King Kong game. Edge issue 153, September 2005, p. 48: King Kong preview and interview (no HUD; “eight years of creating characters”; the Beyond Good & Evil story and a sequel). Edge issue 157, Christmas 2005, p. 87: Peter Jackson’s King Kong review (Weta’s concept art as the team’s reference).
Edge issue 162, May 2006: Ancel, Raynal and Miyamoto made Chevaliers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Edge issue 163, June 2006: Rayman Raving Rabbids preview (“Michel Ancel’s next”).
Edge issue 165, August 2006, pp. 62–63, feature on French development: Ancel on Franco-Belgian comics; “Monaco-born Michel Ancel, head of Ubisoft Montpellier”.
Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, p. 118: Rayman Origins review.
Edge issue 252, April 2013, p. 63: the delay of Rayman Legends.
“Intelligent design”, Edge issue 258, October 2013, p. 16: UbiArt Framework, Weta, studio head Ancel, Beyond Good & Evil 2.
Wikipédia (French), “Michel Ancel” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): Wild Sheep Studio and Wild, announced in 2014. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Ancel
Wikipedia, “Beyond Good and Evil 2” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): the 2008 teaser at Ubidays; the E3 2017 reveal as a prequel; development continuing in 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2
Ubisoft, “An update on Beyond Good & Evil 2”, 18 September 2020 (web, secondary). https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/6ptJuA0jx7qhvhTnSosl8L/an-update-on-beyond-good-evil-2
Chris Wallace, “Rayman creator Michel Ancel leaves the games industry to work on a wildlife sanctuary”, MCV, 21 September 2020 (web, secondary): Ancel’s announcement. https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/rayman-creator-michel-ancel-leaves-the-games-industry-to-work-on-a-wildlife-sanctuary/
Ethan Gach, “Report: Beyond Good & Evil 2 Director Michel Ancel Left Ubisoft Amid Investigation”, Kotaku, 25 September 2020 (web, secondary): Libération’s report, Ubisoft’s statement to Kotaku, and Ancel’s response on Instagram. https://kotaku.com/report-beyond-good-evil-2-director-michel-ancel-left-1845184216