When Ubisoft Montreal opened in the summer of 1997, the video game development house did not know how to make games. Its management didn't hire hardened industry veterans. Of the 50 original employees, about half came from Ubisoft’s Paris headquarters. The rest -- those whom the French leaders recruited and trained -- had no idea how to create software. Yannis Mallat, CEO at Ubisoft Montreal, makes this extremely clear.

“The founding myth of this studio,” he says, “is that we took a bunch of young people, we gave them PCs, and we said, ‘Make games.’ They were absolutely not game developers at the time.” Mallat emphasizes, “They didn’t know how to make a game whatsoever. At all.” The goal, however, was to change that, to transform Montreal into a place revered for its mastery in the industry. In turn, Mallat says the driving force behind the studio became, “You think we can’t make games. We’ll prove you wrong.”Over the course of the next 15 years, the small-time spinoff studio innovated in unpredictable ways, handcrafted some of the industry’s most successful series, and became what is one of the most important game developers in existence.

Speed Busters.

Yannis Mallat did not join Ubisoft Montreal as its CEO, nor did he always work in the games industry. Before sending his resume to Ubisoft, Mallat spent time aiding African villages, improving their crops and production.Several years of military service, one MBA, and seven Ubisoft interviews later, he became a third-party producer in 1999. Mallat worked with external development studios rather than in the creative trenches himself. “And I thank God for that,” he says, “because it was, for me personally, the best way to quickly learn the craft, to learn how to make games, without being exposed too much to the risks of them.”Working on licensed games helped decrease Ubisoft Montreal’s risks as well. Pop culture typically sells regardless of quality, especially to children. Alongside Speed Busters, the studio’s first original title, the team grew to 150 people cutting their teeth on titles based DC comics, and Playmobil toys, as well as Tonic Trouble and a Donald Duck game.Fortunately, the games were pretty good.Following these early successes, “we decided to devote the whole studio to internal development.” World domination and original products were, of course, the original goals, so Ubisoft made an important acquisition to reinforce its future. In August, 2000, Red Storm Entertainment came under the Ubisoft umbrella. The North Carolina-based developer had previously developed a series of superb tactical action games based on Tom Clancy’s novel, Rainbow Six. Along with the Clancy brand, Red Storm also brought the Epic Games-created Unreal Engine, an intuitive and flexible development framework now used to power an astonishing number and variety of games.With the Clancy name and a powerful new creative tool in its hands, the next generation of gaming consoles looming, and a Montreal team hungry to create something to call its own, Ubisoft made the most of an extraordinary opportunity.

Concept art from The Drift, the game that Splinter Cell eventually became.

“ The Drift became a pitch for a James Bond game.

The Drift's modular pistol with attachments, including sticky cams.

Sam Fisher, version 1.0. Yes, really.

“ Can Sam shoot two guys in the head in a quarter of a second? F**k yeah. It’s Sam.

Loading

Loading

Loading

Loading

Development of The Drift was not going well at Ubisoft New York.The world was in place, for sure. Earth, decorated in a 70s retro-future sci-fi style, had exploded into chunks, with major cities floating on islands in the sky. But the game itself was confused, perhaps because, like Montreal’s early games, its creation relied on the inexperience of nondevelopers.It was a learning process. Despite some great ideas, The Drift was a third-person shooter without much soul. You could aim at two enemies at once and navigate the world with flying vehicles. Smart A.I. led to contextual crowd reactions in the game’s open spaces -- so if you, Buster the reluctant hero, sprinted through a group while wielding a gun, pedestrians reacted with appropriate dismay. That gun was a modular device, too, allowing players to grapple up ledges, change vision modes, and fire cameras into walls.Sound familiar?A year or so later, when Red Storm (and the Clancy name) came to Ubisoft, the ex-New York, now-Montreal team started exploring how its shelved game might sell with Clancy elements. A designer named Nathan Wolff started implementing spy stuff into The Drift. Surveillance cameras. Stealth. Non-direct combat. Ubisoft toyed with basing it on The Sum of All Fears. Ubisoft HQ saw incredible potential, and with Hideo Kojima’s next great game on the horizon, it issued a mandate to the Montreal team: “Make a Metal Gear Solid 2 killer.”No pressure.So The Drift team and the rest of Ubisoft Montreal made a big decision. They would try something new, and they’d do it in the style of Tom Clancy. The pitch was, according to a developer, “What if the NSA couldn’t collect data by conventional means? Would it have access to a wetworks team or operative to do discrete dirty work?” Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell took off inside Ubisoft Montreal, and its star, secret agent Sam Fisher, was born.Using the Unreal Engine, Montreal leveraged real-time lighting to create a unique gameplay core: Levels were designed to challenge players to sneak through shadows and evade light, similar to Thief. This infused stealth into the heart of Splinter Cell, and gave its players a different way to get around (or through) threats than Metal Gear Solid. Montreal still cherry-picked something from Solid Snake, though. The iconic Konami character’s headband is a distinct, defining character trait that makes him enormously recognizable. Ubisoft wanted its lead to have a similarly striking visual identity pervading its gameplay. The glow of Sam Fisher’s night vision goggles instantly made history in the video game industry.When it finally released, Splinter Cell was a smashing success, an instant modern classic, and the flagship title that defined Ubisoft Montreal. It achieved precisely what the team wanted: A modernized realization of Thief’s hardcore stealth. Following its release, a series of increasingly excellent sequels came from both Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Shanghai, who took turns knocking out new Splinter Cell games. They had nothing but hits. Shangai’s Pandora Tomorrow introduced Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer, which pitched sneaky secret agents against slower, stronger guns-for-hire. Its asymmetrical play redefined competitive play, and carried over to Montreal’s masterful follow-up, Chaos Theory.Chaos Theory’s sprawling, complex campaign level designs, thoughtful improvements to Spies vs. Mercs, and terrific cooperative campaign all but perfected Splinter Cell stealth. But, as Chaos Theory’s creative director Clint Hocking puts it, “a lot of strange things happened.” During the project , Hocking explains on Tone Control , “the lead designer and the writer had left. The lead level designer left before the project shipped as well.”After Chaos Theory was completed, “the core of the team vanished” to start up EA Montreal. This sent Hocking in a new direction, with a new team, heading up a new project , as Splinter Cell moved into bizarre new directions without him. Ubisoft Montreal, at this point in 2005, had grown to an enormous 1,400 employees.Planned for an early 2008 release, Splinter Cell: Conviction was an open-world game in which Sam Fisher -- a fugitive with a new, shaggy beard -- hid in plain sight rather than in shadow. Sitting on a park bench, blending in with crowds, and generally acting like a normal dude helped him lie low. Acting suspicious around civilians and generally disrupting the status quo would draw the attention of on-the-prowl police officers. The goggles and gadgets were gone, leaving Fisher to use the environment against his enemies. Toppling tables, kicking cops down stairs, and throwing staplers or chairs became the main method of combative interaction. Conceptually, it was concerning but interesting. In execution, it was mostly just concerning.Enter Maxime Béland.“I was just going to come in and focus on gameplay,” says Béland, a designer who joined a troubled Conviction midway through its production. “To be honest, after two days, I realized that this was not a fix-it job. It was a bigger job...there were too many design problems that were really hard. We didn’t have a solution.”Béland emphasizes that Conviction had some great things."The scene I’ll always remember is, there were cops with MP5s shooting at Sam,” he says. Sam responds by grabbing a book from a shelf and throwing it at the police. “I’m like, ‘Cool! The bookshelf is a generator of books.’ And they’re like, ‘No! Look, every book is modeled and the hand actually picks it up.’” Béland still has a slack-jawed awe. “Wow. That’s insane.”It’s insane because each individual item in a game eats up a certain amount of console memory, and the less memory there is to use, the fewer things a game can actually do. At a certain point, the commitment to an in-game library (and similarly minded things, including an incredibly complex animation system) started negatively affecting the rest of Conviction. Béland recalls Fisher could disarm those MP5-wielding cops by chucking hardcovers at them, but couldn’t actually recover their guns. With everything else in Conviction, the console didn’t have memory to allow it.“How does that work? So what do we do?”Two months into triage, Béland cooked up the concept of Sam as a panther -- a quick, quiet killer. Lethality was often frowned upon in Splinter Cell games, so a psychotic Sam was a departure too. But at least he wasn’t hurling encyclopedias at SWAT. Ubisoft delayed Conviction’s release by nearly two years and promoted Béland.He was suddenly in charge of Conviction as its new creative director. By the end of his version of Conviction, things were very different. Half the team had moved on to other projects, whether because they bailed or were removed. The gameplay mechanics and story changed drastically. Navigation reverted back to climbing pipes instead of sitting on benches. Programmers had to create a new light-and-shadow system from scratch because Conviction didn’t have one.Gameplay comes first for Béland. As a man who believes Fisher should be able to shoot from anywhere -- Sam is the world’s most elite operative, damn it -- he had a gameplay loop built around the panther concept: Mark and Execute allowed players to tag targets and take them down in slow-mo succession with the press of a single button. “It’s something that you see in movies all the time,” Beland explains. In playing games, “You don’t have the precision and the efficiency and the speed that you know Sam should have. Can Sam shoot two guys in the head in a quarter of a second? F**k yeah. It’s Sam.” Was it?Many fans felt betrayed by Béland’s interpretation of Splinter Cell. Why couldn’t Sam hide bodies? Why am I pouncing on guys and slaughtering them in droves? What’s up with all this shooting? At the same time, critics adored Conviction almost universally, praising its refined mechanics and satisfying, kinetic stealth. It sold a respectable 2 million copies. Béland had the great misfortune of piecing a crumbling Conviction back together. The game we got is more in line with classic Splinter Cell than it would have been, and it’s because Béland’s team rebuilt the basics from nearly nothing. Its action focus, to some, seemed simple-minded compared to the methodical, thoughtful pace of previous games. For others, it was the gateway to an intriguing but intimidating must-play series.Ubisoft believed in Maxime Béland so deeply that it sent the franchise with him when he left Ubisoft Montreal. When Béland set up shop at Ubisoft Toronto, he took Fisher and his philosophies with him. What happened is almost atonement. Splinter Cell: Blacklist is a return to form , the classic sensibilities of the series -- brought to life by the unmistakable strengths of what Ubisoft Montreal achieved in Conviction. Where the series goes next is, presumably, in the hands of Béland’s new studio.