Vincent Baillet
From coder to studio manager, Vincent Baillet’s fastrising career arguably mirrored the growth of the French games industry. But, as he tells Retro Gamer, the “32-bit console earthquake” shook away a lot of freedom
It’s said that France came late to videogaming, but what was the French videogame scene like in the late Seventies/early Eighties and what was the first game you played?
I wasn’t allowed to have a home version of Pong when it was released in the Seventies because my parents thought that plugging a console into a television could destroy it. But there was a shopping centre near where I lived and it had a few arcade games. Space Invaders became the first game that I played and Galaxian was the second but I probably didn’t play either of them a lot. They cost one Franc per game and that was a lot of money for children so my first experience with videogames was, in many ways, frustrating.
But were you excited about the computers being launched at the time?
Among the first computers that I came across were an Apple II, because my mathematics teacher had one, and a Commodore PET 2001 but I also had a friend who bought a Tandy TRS80 and another one had a Commodore CBM 3000. I recall we spent a lot of time experiencing various things on these computers and that we were a little afraid that our experiments could destroy these precious machines.
Which computer did you have and why did you decide that was the one you wanted?
The first computer I owned was a ZX81 and I bought it because it was cheap. I bought the ‘kit version’ because it was the only one I could afford. For those who don’t know, this was a DIY version of the ZX81 and when you bought it, you received a printed circuit board, and all the components to solder on.
Having a computer at home was rather unusual at that time. Most people didn’t even know what the purpose of that machine actually was. Looking back, I was probably seen as some sort of alchemist: somebody who would go on to spend days and nights writing texts in a strange language that nobody could understand.
Did the ZX81 introduce you to coding, then?
No. I actually started programming using my TI-57 programmable calculator. I then moved on to another calculator called the HP-41C which was made by Hewlett Packard and which a friend lent me. Learning how to program on these machines was a good introduction and a great education. To get good results, you had to care a lot about the speed and the memory usage of the devices. The more constraints that you had, the more you had to use your brain – and it’s fair to say that these machines were full of constraints! Compared to them, the ZX81 was a much more comfortable machine because it had a lot of MHZ and RAM.
Are we right in saying that it was the Oric-1 which unleashed your talent, though?
Well, for a start, I’m not sure that I have a talent [laughs], but let me explain. Before having an Oric-1, I was a
“I’m not sure I have enough to say to fill six pages,” says Vincent Baillet, modestly, when Retro Gamer approaches him with a request for an interview. We, however, were sure he had. After all, Baillet worked for the French publisher Loriciel for ten years from 1984 before becoming a studio manager at Psygnosis for a further five – just as the Playstation was cementing its number one position in the industry. He then became a studio director for Infogrames when it was snapping up developers left, right and centre, only to go it alone and forge a successful career path making mobile titles and advising others. So as one of the most successful French videogame devs, it was clear he’d have lots to say. “I’ve done my homework,” he told us, when he was finally ready to spill the beans.
To get good results, you had to care a lot about the speed and the memory usage of the devices
strong Othello player – or Reversi as it is also known. At the time, a French monthly computer magazine called L’ordinateur
Individuel organised Othello computer tournaments so I decided that I would program an Othello game on the HP-41C calculator, and later on my ZX81. My software proved to be quite good but that is probably because I must have spent about a trillion hours working to optimise it. The Oric-1 came later. I had bought one of these computers with the first salary I earned in my summer job and so I developed my Othello game for it. It was named Reversi Champion and, once the game was finished, I travelled to Paris to show it to Laurant Weill of Loriciel because I had read in a magazine that he was looking for new games. And I came back with a distribution contract.
Were there alternatives to loriciel at the time?
Not really. In France, at that time, there were not many publishers. There were Ere Informatique, Sprite, Ubisoft, Infogrames, Loriciel and Cobra, from memory, but I think that I ended up choosing Loriciel because they had publicly said they were looking for games to publish. Laurant Weill and Marc Bayle were nice people, and what they offered me for my game was way beyond my dreams so I didn’t call the other publishers and decided to go with them.
It was the start of a long relationship. Which games did you start working on at loriciel?
I had started with Loriciel as a freelance programmer because I still had to finish my studies. But since everybody was happy with Reversi Champion, I was asked if I would work on a conversion for the Sega
Yeno SC3000 [note: Sega’s SC-3000 computer was distributed in France by ITMC under the ‘Yeno’ brand]. I was then tasked with completing another conversion for a machine by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was a kind of strange PC. By that point, I had become bored making games of Othello so I switched to working on a French-checker game on the Thomson MO5.
Around 1984, the Amstrad was released and I had become bored with games that needed to use the mind so I worked on a shoot-’em-up called 3D Fight. It was a big success at the time and it was a bit strange for me to earn more than my parents while still being a student. After the success of 3D Fight, I decided to stop studying, and I called Laurant in order to see if he had a real, fulltime job for me. That was the start of eight years of an exciting adventure with Loriciel and I worked on lots and lots of games such as Mach 3, Bactron, West Phaser,
Turbo Cup, Val d’isère Championship, and many, many more. I also worked on a display engine that ended up being used in many Loriciel games and, on top of that, I sometimes had to help other developers with various aspects of their games, whether that was optimisation or debugging or some other technical thing they needed.
how was the company structured?
When I started working for Loriciel, the company was employing fewer than ten people. But working for
Each game that we made was a new challenge, and in a lot of ways the challenge was more important