The Rise of Ubisoft Toronto: How a New Team Nailed its AAA Debut

Alexandre Parizeau is already exhausted when the fire alarm goes off, the power goes out, and Ubisoft Toronto evacuates.

After three years, Parizeau’s team is days from finishing its first game, Splinter Cell Blacklist. Anyone who doesn’t have questions for the senior producer has bad news. A water pipe burst. The floor is flooding. Electricity won’t return for several hours.

Parizeau remains his usual self. Despite having to send hundreds of employees home before lunch, he is lighthearted and warm. He is all smiles as we head to a safe spot -- Ubisoft Toronto’s motion capture lab, a massive space in a structure connected to the studio. It doesn’t have power, either. Parizeau, calm and casual as ever, picks up where we left off: discussing the ins and outs of his studio's origins and future. He talks in the dark.

“We’ve invested a lot in our engine to support full-body performance capture,” he says. “That means we’re capturing the body movement, the facial, the voice, all of that at the same time. So you have the full performance of the actor translate directly one-to-one in the game.” 80 cameras peer over the sound stage, capturing every angle of an actor in real time. The performance space is 2,000 square feet and filled with hundreds of props. Mock Ak-47s, 9mm pistols, and various karambit knives -- Sam Fisher’s blade of choice in Blacklist -- fill every inch of the off-stage tables.

Ubisoft likes making good games.

“

This sort of technology is becoming the norm in the industry, the foundation of how developers craft their in-game cutscenes and create lifelike in-game animations. Ubisoft Toronto’s capture studio is among the game industry’s finest. It’s also representative of Ubisoft proper’s commitment to making this Toronto developer matter.

Ubisoft Toronto was conceptualized as a studio as large and important as its sister studio in Montreal. Even the offices are similar -- both are ancient, brick buildings with hardwood floors and plenty of open space. Unlike Montreal, most Ubisoft developers tend to act as support studios, or they exist to work on secondary, smaller projects. Toronto will also contribute to other developers’ titles -- it already completed its work on multiplayer maps for Montreal’s in-limbo Rainbow 6: Patriots, and is working on an unannounced Assassin’s Creed project.

But the goal is, first and foremost, to make major waves.

This is evident in its leadership. Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat oversees Toronto’s operations as well. "We don't top-down things that much," Mallat says. "This makes room for the self-culture of the people who join to emerge and build the identity of the studio." One of those people is ex-Assassin’s Creed producer Jade Raymond, who acts as the studio’s managing director. She and Mallat recruited Parizeau in 2010, alongside longtime Ubisoft creative director Maxime Béland.

Few admire Parizeau like Béland. The two completed Rainbow Six Vegas together; they celebrated its award-winning success with a Las Vegas steak dinner together. They saved the struggling Splinter Cell Conviction together. They would only agree to move to Toronto to help start a new studio if they could do it together.

They’ve spent the past three years building a new team to modernize Splinter Cell. Conviction’s notorious complications led to Parizeau and Béland trying to salvage something usable from its interesting ideas and impossible execution. Blacklist development was different. The staff was theirs. The artistic approach was theirs. The new interpretation of the main character was theirs. Blacklist was built on their own terms.

Parizeau talks a lot about trust, developing relationships, and learning what a team is capable of when explaining Toronto’s growth. His game, which sees Sam Fisher leading a new team into unfamiliar waters and making their own calls, seems almost like an on-the-fly parable for the studio creating Blacklist’s story.

“You can make good games with bad tech, you can make bad games with good tech, you can have a lot of time, no time,” says Béland. “Special teams make special games. Look at Naughty Dog...the only thing that guarantees a good game is having a good team that is unified and trusts each other.”

It’s very clear that this starts at the top between Parizeau and Béland, and permeates through the entirety of Ubisoft Toronto.

One of the greatest appeals of starting a new studio, Parizeau explains, was bringing in outsider opinions, people with “different views about how we make games.” Parizeau has enjoyed learning how Ubisoft’s philosophies are seen from new lenses. “Why do you do it this way?” was an important, recurring question during Blacklist’s development. Along with various Ubisoft vets, Toronto’s hired talent from nearly every major Canadian studio -- Rockstar Toronto, Relic, Digital Extremes, Silicon Knights, EA Canada, and Capcom Vancouver, to name a few. Krome, Pandemic, and other veterans of international teams joined forces here, too.

Raymond, Parizeau, and Béland's team released Splinter Cell: Blacklist on August 20, 2013 to enormous critical success. IGN's review calls it "the best game in the series since 2005’s Chaos Theory," which is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Splinter Cell. But, as it goes in large studios such as Ubisoft Toronto, the Blacklist team has already dissolved. Its people have scattered across the studio to make progress on its new projects. Nobody at Toronto seems disheartened by this.

The only thing that guarantees a good game is a good team that's unified and trusts each other.

“

“I’ve seen what these people can do,” Parizeau says. He’s excited for whatever work he can do with those developers because it means a closer, more connected relationship with them than he already has. Béland speaks of his Blacklist team with paternal adoration. “They were our people,” he says. “Now our people are going to be working on different things. It’s sad. But it’s going to be cool.”

Parizeau and Béland have already moved onto their next project. When I ask Béland if he would work on something without Parizeau, he laughs and says, still smiling, "I've done it before." Maybe it's projects. Toronto has at least five in the works, and both men are excited when they see the progress their former team members have made. Of course, neither will say why just yet.

For Parizeau, this nonchalant reverence is just the effect Ubisoft has, something inherent in its DNA, and something that goes beyond the leadership of Ubisoft Toronto. “Ubisoft likes making good games,” he says, “and it goes all the way from Yves [Guillemot, CEO], to Serge [Hascoet, CCO], to everyone in the company.” Quality comes before everything, even if it means starting from scratch to get it right again, or starting a new studio to strengthen something that already works. “I don’t think there’s a lot of companies like that,” Parizeau says. “In many ways, I feel like it’s special.”

It’s what keeps him at Ubisoft. It’s what motivates him to make outdo what he and Béland have done before. It's how his team's first release can score an impressive 9.2 on IGN. It’s why he’s able to sit in the darkness and smile in the middle of a catastrophe.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s currently reading Tom Bissell's God Lives in St. Petersburg. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.