Claire Zamora – Thibaud Zamora
- Montpellier’s Claire Zamora releases her first novel Happiness was there.
- The young woman had imagined the game Is it love, before selling it to Ubisoft.
- “It’s not an autobiographical novel, but I still drew a lot from my own experience,” says Claire Zamora.
Claire Zamora is a jack of all trades. But there is still a common denominator to his creations. “Telling stories, and passing messages,” confides his companion, Thibaud. It was she who imagined Is it love, with the studio they created together in Montpellier (Hérault), 1492. This mobile video game invites users to venture into the twists and turns of a love story. By making choices, at key moments of flirting, like the famous “books in which you are the hero”.
“While working on these games, I wrote a lot,” she says. I created the universes, the stories … Is it love, it is considered a video game, but for me, it is more of a new format of playback. There are techniques that I used, and that can be found in the construction of a novel. “This extraordinary video game adventure, which has been the subject of fourteen applications, and generated more than 60 million downloads around the world, gave Claire Zamora” a taste for writing “. Even if, as a child, Montpellier, who grew up with a mother who taught literature, was already making up stories for herself. “There was a huge room, with a lot of books! », She remembers.
“I was inspired by my own experience”
The young entrepreneur, mother of a little boy, who has since sold Is it love at Ubisoft, immediately relaunched in writing. From a novel this time. Happiness was there, which has just been published, tells the fate of Lucie, a thirty-something with a promising career, deeply involved in a start-up. A call from Enzo, his childhood friend, suffering from cancer, will suddenly call into question this Parisian routine.
“It’s not an autobiographical novel, but I still drew a lot from my own experience,” says Claire Zamora. I had two video game studios, and like Lucie, I experienced stress, the search for performance, etc. And I got seriously ill, I got cancer. We had to make choices, and we put the studio aside, to focus on my health. It made me realize that happiness was there, but I couldn’t see it anymore, too preoccupied with worries. “
“We must not wait to be faced with a tragedy”
We sometimes need, continues the author, “to be confronted with difficulties, with something serious, to say that happiness was there. In this book, my message is that you shouldn’t wait until you are faced with a drama to realize it. And that’s what Enzo wants Lucie to do. “In recent years, before selling her video game to Ubisoft, Claire Zamora has also rebuilt herself by interacting with the enormous community of female players.Is it love. “When we pass, like that, near death, we wonder a little what is the meaning of what we are doing,” she confides. I had a little slump. But I realized that it was the players who gave meaning to what I was doing. I received wonderful testimonies from women, who told me that it made them want to undertake, to change… As it is a game of choice, it influenced them to make choices in their lives themselves. Some have even started, continues the young woman, to reading or writing.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
For now, Montpellier, which has since inspired many video game studios with the success ofIs it love, has no plans to dive back into the gaming world. “I first want to enjoy what I like, without all the stress,” she smiles. Like her heroine, Lucie? For the curious, the answer is in Happiness was there.