20 years ago, in 1986, a small - but fast growing French company called Ubisoft Entertainment S.A. was being formed by the five Guillemot brothers. Initially a publisher and distributor of educational software and video games, Ubisoft opened its first game development studio in 1992, over in lovely - but neo-communist Romania. By that time, Yves Guillemot had already become the company's chief executive officer (CEO) and he continues to hold that position today, against all odds (and EA's takeover maneuvers).

Their Romanian studio was soon followed by an explosion of development studios all around the world. The Montreuil, Montpellier and Annecy studios were live and kicking in France by 1996, and Ubi's expansion continued with the opening of other studios in Shanghai (China, 1996), Montreal (Canada, 1997), Barcelona (Spain, 1998), Casablanca (Morocco, 1998) and Milan (Italy, 1998).

Starting with 2000, Ubisoft made a series of decisive acquisitions: they bought the North Carolina-based developer Red Storm Entertainment in 2000 (responsible for most of the Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series), the German studio Blue Byte (known for the Settlers and Battle Isle series) in 2001, the French studio Tiwak in 2004, and recently they also acquired the British developer Reflections Interactive (the Driver series) from Atari. In the meantime, they also continued to expand their worldwide development studios in Quebec City (Canada, 2005) and Sofia (Bulgaria, 2006).

Today, Ubisoft has 15 development studios in 11 countries (totalling over 2800 developers), offices in 22 countries, and they publish games in 55 countries. Their most successful franchises are Rayman (yep, still holding strong, with over 17 million games sold worldwide), Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon (these three series combined sold a staggering 40 million+ games to date), Prince of Persia, The Settlers, Brothers in Arms and Far Cry. Too bad they lost Crytek over to EA...

But hey, the future's bwiight, so let's wiish them a vewii happy birthday!

P.S. Oh and speaking of Ubi, Splinter Cell: Double Agent just went gold for the PC, and it ships on November 9.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)