Claude Guillemot, one of the five Guillemot brothers who founded Ubisoft, has died in an air crash at the age of 69, Bloomberg reports. The French businessman was not only part of the creation of the publisher that would grow into a global video game giant, but also played a major role in building the family’s hardware and technology businesses.
According to Bloomberg, Claude Guillemot died in an air crash at the age of 69. His death marks the loss of one of the key figures from the generation that began building a video game business in Europe at a time when the continent’s publishing market looked nothing like the global, multibillion-dollar industry it has become.
Claude Guillemot founded the company that was still known as Ubi Soft in 1986 alongside his brothers Yves, Michel, Gérard, and Christian in Brittany. The family had previously operated a business connected to agricultural products, but the brothers gradually shifted toward computers, hardware, and software during the middle of the 1980s. Their early ventures included Guillemot Informatique, a mail-order business for computers and software, followed in 1985 by Guillemot Corporation, which focused on hardware distribution. The brothers quickly recognized that distributing video games across Western Europe could become a serious business opportunity, and after importing and distributing titles from foreign publishers, they began moving toward their own development and publishing structure. During its early years, Ubi Soft distributed games in France from companies including Electronic Arts, Sierra, and LucasArts, while its own first titles also began to appear, including Zombi.
He Helped Build More Than Ubisoft’s Publishing Business
Yves Guillemot became the most public-facing executive in Ubisoft’s history and has long served as the company’s chief executive, but Claude Guillemot’s role went far beyond being one of the founders who happened to be there at the beginning. As deputy chief executive in charge of operations on Ubisoft’s board, he was involved in the less visible but essential work behind the company’s expansion, from logistics and organization to the business infrastructure required to support growth. The publisher that would later become globally known through franchises such as Assassin’s Creed, Rayman, Far Cry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Prince of Persia, Just Dance, and Watch Dogs grew out of the joint venture of the five brothers.
Claude Guillemot’s name was just as closely tied to Guillemot Corporation, where he served as chief executive and oversaw the development of a business centered on PC, mobile, and console accessories. Its best-known brands include Thrustmaster, widely recognized for racing wheels, flight controllers, and console peripherals, as well as Hercules, a name associated with PC hardware, sound cards, DJ equipment, and other technology products. That side of the story matters because the Guillemot brothers’ business model was never limited to video game publishing alone: software distribution, game development, publishing networks, hardware, and international trade were built as parts of the same wider system.
Many people know Ubisoft mainly through its creative output: the breakthrough of Rayman in the 1990s, followed by franchises such as Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed, and Far Cry, helped turn the company into one of the defining forces in global gaming. Behind that creative identity, however, stood a powerful family business structure in which the brothers managed different areas while shared ownership and shared strategic interests helped protect the company’s independence for decades. Claude Guillemot brought the operational and technological side of that structure, while his hardware company built a business that depended not on the success of one game, but on peripherals, computer equipment, and a functioning international sales network. That work may have been far less visible than the announcement of a new Assassin’s Creed, but it remained part of the same story that transformed a small business in Brittany into one of the best-known names in video games.
Claude Guillemot’s death is therefore not simply the loss of a co-founder of a major French publisher. It is the loss of a businessman who helped shape the route from the early European era of game distribution to the international industry built around the Guillemot family’s companies.
Source: Bloomberg
