Marc Levy, the French writer with 50 million readers worldwide, the author of And if it was true…meeting video game developers Assassin’s Creedhere is a “crossover” which promised to be most improbable.
In fact not at all, and his presence on Monday in Bordeaux at the exhibition dedicated to the latest opus ofAssassin’s Creed, released on October 5, owes absolutely nothing to chance. Because Marc Levy is a true fan of video games, and particularly Ubisoft creations. Which did not escape the French firm. “As soon as we knew he was in Bordeaux, we said to ourselves that it was the ideal time to organize a visit to the exhibition for him by the developers of the game” – partly created in the Bordeaux studios of Ubisoft – they explain to us from the company side.
Start of career in IT
Marc Levy was not always a writer. He even started his career in… IT, and his very first job was a graphics card developer for video games, at Logitec France, a company he co-founded with two other partners in the early 1980s. After a merger with the American company Spectrum Holobyte, the same company that created the submarine simulator Gato, he opened a unit responsible for developing an image processing card in Sophia Antipolis. “The credits of the 1988 presidential election, where we see Marianne appearing in fractals, before the face of the elected president is revealed, it was us,” he says again. In short, “I’ve always been in that world. »
The star writer recognizes, however, that this era “was the prehistory of video games. »Behind, there have been “major developments”, notably thanks to Ubisoft “which brought players to a change of era”. The very first Assassin’s Creed thus represented “a huge revolution in the world of video games”. Suffice it to say that facing the developers ofAssassin’s Creed Miragethe latest opus in Ubisoft’s historic saga, Marc Levy does not miss a beat of the explanations and demonstrations, in the very beautiful exhibition dedicated to the game, which is being held at Cour Mably in Bordeaux until October 12.
Passionate aboutAssassin’s Creed
Marc Levy explains that what attracts him most about the game “is the storytelling”. “And in the different licenses ofAssassin’s Creed, the ones that fascinated me the most were the most historical. It’s a question of affinities. Their work is so documented that you yourself come away from it. It opens the mind, particularly to the Arab world, because it allows you to enter into this society, into people’s lives, customs…”
This is good, since Mirage has precisely the ambition to “recreate the emotions that we all experienced with the very first Assassin’s Creed », explains Stéphane Boudon, creative director on Assassin’s Creed Mirage. “There is notably the return of the city, since the game takes place in 9th century Baghdad. It’s been ten years since we last played in a single city, with a density of buildings that allows us to cross the city very quickly, and this crowd, in which we can hide. Our ambition is to immerse a player in an environment, with a very high level of realism, and to rediscover this nostalgia for games of yesteryear. I think it’s a success, in any case we have great feedback from the first players. »
Artistic director Jean-Luc Sala also insists on the “exceptional” music. » “We’re not using all five senses but we’re trying to monopolize as many as possible,” he continues. Every detail counts, even if we are on an artistic vision since nothing remains of Baghdad from the 9th century. But the historians with whom we worked accompanied us and validated each step throughout the process. One of our specialists, Glaire Anderson, doctor in art history in Edinburgh, will also open her next course with the Baghdad ofAssassin’s Creed. »
“Enormous complicity between the two universes”
The writer also says he loves “aerial simulation”, particularly because he “grew up in it”, his father, a former resistance fighter in the Second World War, having become an instructor pilot after the war. Marc Levy himself passed his pilot’s license. Finally sensitive to “the graphic universe” he also greatly appreciated video games Batman.
A true gamer, does Marc Levy nevertheless succeed in bringing his romantic universe closer to that of video games, which seem very far from each other? “Novelists and video game developers rarely discuss together,” he admits, “but there is enormous complicity between these two worlds, I am thinking in particular of the way you think about architecture,” he explains.
A novelist “would have less difficulty adapting to the environment” of video games
“If I hadn’t spent the first years of my professional life designing video games, I wouldn’t have managed to think about my stories in the same way,” he continues. We very often ask a novelist whether he would like to write a script for a film, whereas I think that the scriptwriting of a game is closer to the novelist than the scriptwriting of a film. He would have less difficulty adapting to this environment. »
The “only difference” between the novel and the video game, he points out, “is that in the novel, you have to capture the reader continuously, without physical interaction, whereas in the game there is a link , we play with our keyboard or controller. In the novel, the process is only sensory: the voice, the face must be born. You have to imagine everything. »