Interview with Jacques Exertier (Beyond Good & Evil, King Kong, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown)

From Rayman to Beyond Good & Evil, King Kong, the Raving Rabbids and most recently Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Jacques Exertier has left his mark on some of Ubisoft’s most beloved games. As an animator, narrative director and sometimes creative or animation director, he has navigated between storytelling and gameplay for several decades, with an undiminished passion for strong worlds, atypical characters and unique storytelling.

In this interview, Jacques Exertier speaks on his career, his key experiences and inspirations, as well as the creative challenges, compromises and singular moments that mark the development of a video game.

It seems to me that you originally cut your teeth in animation, working on plenty of projects. Was this your first love? What made you want to get into it?

Before I got into video games, I spent about ten years in cartooning. But that wasn’t even my dream at first: what I really wanted to do was comics, especially when I was at art school.

I didn’t even think cartoons were something I could work on. I didn’t even register those as a possibility. I thought cartoons were Walt Disney, period. Then, when I left Arts, I heard that France Animation in Paris was working on the Rahan series. So I went there, took a test, they accepted me, and that became my job.

I worked on TV series and learned animation there. Back then, it was traditional 2D animation: there were no computers, everything was done frame by frame, on paper. Each drawing was photocopied onto cellulose and then painted by hand with gouache. That was the ’80s.

Then computers came, little by little. It allowed us to test our movements, to see how the animation would look. There was one computer for the whole studio, for sixty people! It’s funny, because all of a sudden, I experienced the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Can you tell us a bit about how you got to Ubisoft?

I joined Ubisoft in 1995, at a rather pivotal moment. As luck would have it, that was precisely the time when 2D animation was starting to lose momentum. A lot of production was going to Asia, because it was cheaper, and in Europe all that was left was storyboarding and character design.

At the same time, the video game industry was growing and began to need animators. This wasn’t the case at the very beginning, in the days of Pac-Man and company, when animation wasn’t really a core concern.

It was through a friend, with whom I’d worked in animation and who had already joined Ubisoft, that I was able to join them. And that happened at the very end of the development of the very first Rayman.

I’d like to take a look back at your work at Ubisoft. Let’s start with Rayman, in particular the fourth one, which later became Rayman Raving Rabbids. Can you tell us what the initial project looked like before it became a party game?

Yes, there were some production problems that made the initial project no longer possible. So we had to start again from scratch, but we absolutely had to have a game.

We completely changed course, and management gave us four months to release what was to become Rayman Raving Rabbids, knowing that the initial project had been all abandoned.

It was imperative that the game be released at the same time as the Wii in France, as Ubisoft was keen to have a title for Nintendo’s new console. It may even have been a deal with them, I can’t remember exactly.

So we had to do something in four months. We turned to the idea of a party game, and we managed to pull it off for several reasons. Firstly, we already had the engine, the Jade Engine, which we had mastered perfectly. The whole team knew it by heart – we’d already used it for King Kong.

What’s more, the team knew each other really well, so everything worked very fluidly, very organically. In the end, the result was a game that far exceeded our expectations and, above all, brought new characters to the forefront: the Rabbids.

You were then creative director on Rabbids: Go Home. What is it like to make such a transition in terms of responsibilities? Is it something you particularly enjoy doing?

On the first game, Rayman vs. the Rabbids, there wasn’t really an official creative director. It was a shared direction, which was actually pretty cool. And then, on Go Home, it was the first project on which I was asked to take over creative direction.

It suited me, because I was with the same team – we knew each other well, we had our way to do things. So the transition was quite natural, even if we struggled for over a year and a half before really finding the core of the game, the central gameplay loop. We explored a lot of different avenues that ended up being abandoned along the way.

As for the role of creative director, it’s not something I’m looking for. I’ve moved away from video games, I’m not really a gamer anymore, so I don’t feel suited to such a big position.

It’s also a very exposed role: you have to protect your team, stand up to pressure from the editorial department, keep a lid on things while maintaining a good working atmosphere. It’s a real balancing act.

Go Home makes a lot of references to our consumerist society. Is this a subject close to your heart? Was it important for you to get a strong message across, both for young and old alike?

Absolutely. It was something we tried to convey to the team right from the start, because we wanted the game to reflect some of our values. We’d had a lot of fun making crazy mini-games, but we thought that a title with a little more ambition, a little more narrative, might also be cool to do. We also wanted to give the Rabbits a story that didn’t rely solely on their idiocy, because otherwise, in my opinion, we’d soon have gone round in circles.

So right from the start, we thought: “What do the Rabbids represent? How can their presence resonate with themes that also speak to humans?" We really wanted to contrast two worlds: the hyper-sanitized human world and the completely chaotic Rabbids world. And at the heart of this, we wanted to tackle the theme of consumer society – but in a light-hearted way, of course. It’s not an overly philosophical discourse, but we wanted there to be a little background, something to give the story a little more weight.

King Kong is a must. Can you tell us a little about the project, from your meeting with Peter Jackson to its realization? What are the constraints involved in adapting a film? Did you have to follow strict specifications, or did you have a certain degree of creative freedom?

Well, yes, we had quite a bit of freedom. Whenever we had a question, we just asked him directly. We were super impressed, of course. We’d come up with a few gameplay suggestions, but we didn’t always know if they fitted in with his intentions. For example, we’d ask him: "Can King Kong do this? Can he do this action?" And almost every time, his answer was, "Not in the movie, but maybe he can in the game." (laughs) It was great!

But at the same time, it could be a little unsettling, because sometimes a well-defined framework helps. It allows you to avoid certain questions, and above all to move forward more quickly. Here, we had a lot of freedom, but we also had to ask ourselves a lot of questions.

Peter Jackson was also a gamer. He’d discovered us through Beyond Good & Evil, and he absolutely wanted the Beyond Good & Evil team to do the King Kong adaptation. So when we met him, there was a real mutual respect – even if, obviously, it was very unbalanced: he was Peter Jackson, after all!

We tried to stay true to the spirit of his King Kong, and we had access to the film script quite early on. We went to London to read it, but we weren’t allowed to leave with it. We spent two hours in a room going through it, taking notes on characters, scenes, anything we could use. We could write things down, but not copy out whole passages – so it was a real exercise in memory.

Later, when we went to Weta in New Zealand, the atmosphere was completely relaxed. We had real discussions. Peter Jackson has a knack for putting everyone at ease very quickly.

We also identified sequences in the film that didn’t lend themselves to video game adaptation – particularly in terms of gameplay – so we had to make big ellipses. Conversely, certain scenes were developed further in the game because they worked better in this format.

Even though there was a common thread with the film, we were able to make quite a few changes. Because in the end, you don’t tell a story in the same way in a film as in a video game: they don’t have the same constraints, nor the same expectations.

You’ll find the second and final part of this interview with Jacques Exertier next week. We’ll be talking about Beyond Good & Evil and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.