The video shown above was used by Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal at his presentation, at D.I.C.E. 2008. It features cutscenes from the movie Bambi with a song from Evanescence. Yannis stated that even though the movie is 66-years old, it still triggers deep emotional reactions in his son, who cries everytime he watches it.
Yannis Mallat’s point was that pure technology doesn’t work when making video games. In order to have a successful title, you must design above all game mechanics, game flow, Artificial Intelligence, interactions, characters to create emotions.
This closed the panel where he was, which debated if it was better to build your own engine, or just buy a technology and skip R&D. Yannis Mallat said they missed the point because your focus shouldn’t be on getting the best, fastest, best-looking engine and technology, but on innovation and emotion.
Technology’ main role is to serve creative talent. Quite frankly, code does not translate into emotion.
This made quite a spash in the room, where all the big boys were speaking about the merits of the Unreal Engine 3. Yannnis’s philosophy is most certainly interesting and thought-provoking; and in the days where everyone talks about web frameworks, APIs, scalability, I can’t help into making a parallel when making web applications, say code alone does not translate into good user experience
