Eighteen years after its creation in Bordeaux by a bunch of friends, Asobo is celebrating its majority by delivering to Microsoft the latest and eagerly awaited version of the Flight Simulator video game, which could establish it as a major studio.
With this historic video game, which has mobilized a large community of enthusiasts since 1982, Asobo is playing big: that its + Flight Sim + for PC delight fans of the franchise and it will be the guarantee of flying in lenient skies. But may their hopes be dashed and it may be a forced landing.
“When there is such an important expectation, we should not disappoint,” Laurent Michaud, an economist specializing in the world of video games, told AFP. “Asobo’s reputation is at stake.”
With games of this type, “the chopper falls quickly”, assures the expert, citing the example of “Battlefront” of the American publisher Electronic Arts, which takes up the Star Wars: the “retribution of the players” was such that the license “broke”.
For now, everything is smiling at the Bordeaux studio, whose name means “Let’s have fun” in Japanese: since March it has been surfing its triumph at the very first “Pegasus”, the “Césars” of video games, thanks to “A Plague Tale, “which has won over over a million buyers and won six awards including Best Game.
Released in May 2019, this title allows you to embody a brother and a sister who try to survive, hunted by the Inquisition, while an epidemic of black plague ravages a medieval kingdom infested with rats.
A world at odds with Flight Simulator – and Pixar games (like Ratatouille) with which Asobo began to break through – but which proves the versatility of the studio, at ease in “technicalities” and very different worlds, analyzes Laurent Michaud .
If Asobo succeeds with Flight Simulator, it will be a stepping stone to “bigger games, budgets, teams,” he says. And, for Microsoft, a point marked in the “war of consoles” between its next Xbox and the future PS5 of Sony, which is carried out on the front of the material as on that of the contents, in particular of the exclusive games.
– “Culture garage” –
“We worked hard to do the best possible honor to the Flight Simulator franchise,” David Dedeine, Asobo co-founder and creative director for the game, told AFP, who believes that this collaboration with Microsoft will “mark a new turning point. in the studio’s history.
A story that began in 2002 with twelve friends installed on trestles in the living room of a Bordeaux apartment. “We come from the + garage culture +”, slips David Dedeine.
“At the time, a missed delivery and it was + game over + immediately”, abounds Martial Bossard, another co-founder of Asobo and chief software engineer on Flight Simulator.
The difference between these first steps and the current work with Microsoft, “it’s like learning to fly a small plane and in the end being an Airbus pilot”, assures Martial Bossard, using the aeronautical metaphor: “At the beginning we has few systems, few instruments. We can fly on sight. If there is a gust, we adjust and it will be fine. No, there are 208 people in Asobo including 120 on + Flight Sim +. .. “
The two forties have been taking flying lessons for four years. “It was essential”, in particular to introduce “something sensitive in the game”, underlines Martial Bossard.
“How does a pilot feel? What does he hear? How his head moves? How does the plane react under a cloud or over the sea? In simulations in the past, this was a little rigid all that, “he said, also congratulating himself that Microsoft’s technologies have allowed Asobo to reproduce our planet sufficiently faithfully to introduce visual flight.
With Flight Simulator, “monument of video-game history”, according to David Dedeine, the pressure has in any case increased a notch on the Bordeaux side.
“We had so many testimonials (from fans) from everywhere, of all ages, including in the world of aviation where a lot of people wanted to help us make the best + soft + possible …”, says t -he. “There we are touching on something that goes far beyond the product.”
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