Patrice Désilets restarts from the very beginning

The story of human evolution is amazing. Non-linear, chaotic, unexpected. We started from a curious adaptive advantage, the ability to discern the red colour from the rest of the range, which helped us to distinguish unique elements: ripe fruit, safe food, a way to survive. Soon those resources diminished and from the trees, we pushed ourselves towards the ground, an insidious environment that forced us to rise on the strength of our legs, widening the horizons. The walk became a run and the run then blurred into a marathon of millions of years. Now we are the pinnacle of the food chain, self-conscious, able to perceive the extraordinary miracle of existence. At the head of Panache Digital, Patrice Désilets - Assassin's Creed's dad - wants us to experience all these things through Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, his new, ambitious creature.

Drinking from the Firehose: No Man's Sky case as the mirror of the industry

"The intensity of the feedback was overwhelming but I decided: you either had to hide or you had to face it, so I did something that I wouldn't recommend but I decided to kind of drink from the Firehose. Every mail that you send to Hello Games goes directly to my folder (...), we didn't block or mute peolpe, if you talked about No Man's Sky then I probably read it."

With these words, Sean Murray, guilty of having been part of a failed mechanism, starts to talk about a long process of redemption. From the stage of the 2019 edition of the Game Developer Conference, the founder of Hello Games, visibly tense, shares his experience as a developer. His story is, at the same time, the sum of all that is good and unsustainable in the video game industry.

A journey with long-awaited Trico

Back in 2015, I was in Venice the day before the E3 Sony conference took place. I was a spokesman in an event built around synergies between video games and contemporary art. In those days I had the pleasure to meet great people such as the journalist Emilio Cozzi and Alessandro Bragalini, Art Director at Forge Reply for the video game transposition of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf. At lunch we found ourselves talking about our expectations for this new year of wonders and, case you don't believe me, they could confirm you I had no doubt about The Last Guardian being shown on stage. I'm a big fan of Fumito Ueda's games and the information I had gathered brought me to the same conclusion: the time was ripe for its comeback.

"If it happens, tomorrow I'll walk naked all around the San Servolo island.", Alessandro said, happy to share the same enthusiasm for Ueda's works but while keeping a reasonable amount of scepticism.
Well, too bad for him, 'cause I was right.