In gaming there have are two superpowers--the Japanese motherland and upstart America. But always eager to spread their cultural stamp, the French have carved out a considerable niche in the global gaming industry.

This has been helped by a supportive government. A trio of game designers--including “God game” pioneer (and British citizen) Peter Molyneux of Black and White and Fable fame--were recently made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et de Lettres and the government announced tax breaks for domestic developers, telling Wired magazine "[gaming] represents the best way to harbor the innovative vitality of France's creative juices, by inciting small enterprises to create imaginative works that take advantage of tomorrow's technologies."

But though the French are known for avant-garde art, their videogame companies are hardly small patates. Vivendi is home to US-based Blizzard Entertainment, which itself is home to that money-printing machine World of Warcraft, while the Lyon-based Infogrames is Atari’s parent company. Then there’s Ubisoft, one of the world’s biggest game publishers (with a major studio here in Montreal).

True, Ubi makes much of its money producing Americanized games such as the various Tom Clancy titles, including the Ghost Recon Advance Warfighters, Splinter Cells and upcoming WWIII spinoff End War, while their most highly-anticipated new game, Assassin’s Creed, is set amidst the Crusades. But the company’s heart is Michel Ancel, a legendary designer (and another chevalier, he was knighted last year) whose catalogue couldn’t have come from elsewhere. Ancel joined Ubisoft when he was still a teenager and in the mid ‘90s came up with the armless and legless Rayman, Ubi’s Mario-like platform star and defacto company mascot (which makes sense, since Ancel is essentially Ubi's Miyamoto).

That was all well and good, but Ancel’s rep is largely predicated on a commercial failure, the wondrous cult classic Beyond Good & Evil, a philosophically-minded action game starring a female photojournalist about collusion between a corrupt government that rules by fear, the media that abets their rule and (allegedly) invading aliens. Though it came out back in 2003, I’ve been playing through the past few weeks and it holds up in lush graphics and varied gameplay as well as its immersive world and brain-bending Möbius strip narrative.
Though fans have been holding out for a long-promised but highly-unlikely BG&E sequel, Ancel and his team have been busy designing crazed bunnies.

Taking Rayman away from his platformer roots, last fall Ubi released the Wii hit Rayman Raving Rabbids, a uniquely absurd mini-game collection that made the best use of the motion-sensitive controller this side of Wario.   Now the company has announced an upcoming Rabbids sequel, which will include 60 new mini-games while following the madhouse mammals as they go all Pinky and the Brain and try to take over the WORLD!Sure, it’s not the first small creature people think of when the French come to mind, but if Rabbids 2 proves as successful as the original, it may soon be.