It was a small plane on a summer afternoon in France, the kind of flight that barely registers as news until it does. Claude Guillemot, one of five brothers who together built Ubisoft from a mail-order software outfit in rural Brittany into a multinational games publisher, was at the controls of a Cessna 421 when it came down near a beach resort aerodrome. He did not survive.
Guillemot was a co-founder of Ubisoft, the company behind Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and the Tom Clancy game library — franchises that, across four decades, became shorthand for a certain flavour of big-budget, open-world ambition. The company was incorporated in 1986 by Claude and his brothers Yves, Michel, Gérard, and Christian, in the Guillemot family's home region of Carentoir. What started as a distributor undercutting UK software prices became, by the mid-2000s, a publicly listed publisher with studios across Montreal, Paris, and Singapore.
Claude's precise role inside the company's operational structure in recent years was not immediately confirmed by Ubisoft as of the time of filing, but the Guillemot family has retained a significant ownership stake and the brothers have remained figures of record in the company's history. Yves Guillemot has served as CEO since the company's earliest years.
The crash near the aerodrome is under investigation by French authorities. No further passengers were reported aboard. Ubisoft had not issued a formal statement at the time of publication.