Michael Ancel

I originally researched Peter Poken. However he is a film concept artist not a game concept artist. I decided to re-do my research and I looked at Michael Ancel.

Above image found here 

Michael Ancel is a french game designer who created Rayman for games company Ubisoft in 1995. Rayman was his directorial debut however he worked on the graphics for the games The Intruder, Pick-n-Pile and Brain Blaster prior to this. It was at the age of 17 when he met a french games designer that he decided to work for Ubisoft.

Above image found here 

Ancel says that his work in Rayman was inspired by chinese, russian and celtic fairytales. His design philosophy is to create games that have a great deal of freedom for example his games generally avoid having bars that show health or low health instead Ancel prefers to blur vision and add heavy breathing to convey this to the player.

Image of chinese, russian and celtic fairytales 

Ancel is also highly critical of games that claim to offer player freedom. This is because he feels that often games that do this present unknown or hidden obstacles to players later on which is unexpected and is not in line with what Ancel believes game freedom is. He is also critical of the theory that the most original games are french in origin. This is because he feels that it is the united states game publishers fear of stepping into the unknown that stops their games from achieving total originality.

In 2006 Ancel and two other game designers were knighted by the French minister of culture and communication. It was the first time that game designers were given this honor. Other accolades that he has received include being named 24th out of 100 worlds best game designers by IGN.