French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Emmanuel Viau, founder of ERE Informatique, has just joined the association as an honorary member. He will also participate in the Support Committee for the National Video Games Museum.
He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Born in Paris in the 14th, Emmanuel Viau obtained a scientific baccalaureate in 1978 then studied medicine for two years before failing the competitive examination. During his military service, he bought a ZX80 which he learned to use during his hours on duty at the armory. At the end of his conscription, he completed a programming internship at Control Data before joining a cash management company. At the same time, he created a few small games and utilities and one day offered them to Direco International, Sinclair's importer at the time. The latter seems interested – on condition of providing him with around a hundred copies of the games. Emmanuel Viau then left his job and founded ERE Informatique in 1983, to “edit” his own creations but also those of other programmers who would propose them to Direco. This is how he soon after met Philippe Ulrich, whose game Panique impressed him greatly. Viau therefore made him sign a contract before finding a graphic designer, Michel Rho, to create the covers. Sales began to take off with the Cobalt Interceptor flight simulator (1984) on ZX81, and the publisher was asked to release its games on other microcomputers. He published among others Macadam Bumper (1985), Sram, Crafton and Xunk (1986), Eden Blues, Le Passager du Temps (1987) and Teenage Queen (1988). But in 1988, the struggling company was bought by Infogrames, which however allowed it to publish its games abroad such as Captain Blood's Ark (1988) under the Exxos label, which thus became a huge success around the world. Disagreeing with the vision of Infogrames, Philippe Ulrich left to found Cryo Interactive in 1989 while Emmanuel Viau created Novtech, whose objective was to reissue classics at low prices in supermarkets. At the same time, he also published The Angel and the Demon (1993) on CD-i with his company Smart Move, and was also interested in the distribution of games and demos on newsstands; he set up the French distributor of the publisher SoftDisk leading to the creation of the magazine Periodisk. In 1995, he was hired at Coktel Vision / Sierra as European development director, before heading its MDO subsidiary dedicated to the Adi / Adibou series. This is how Emmanuel Viau became Vice-President of his distributor ICE Multimedia in Montreal in 2000. The company went bankrupt in 2002, but he then co-founded Enzyme Testing Labs with one of his colleagues, one of the world leaders in video game quality assurance, which he sold at the end of 2016 to Keywords Studios.
Important!
Thanks to Retrogamer.ca for putting us in touch and carrying out the interview with Emmanuel Viau.
Macadam Bumper (Amstrad CPC/etc., 1985)
Crafton and Xunk / Get Dexter (Amstrad CPC/MSX/Atari ST, 1986)
Sram (Amstrad CPC/MS-DOS, 1986)
Eden Blues / Doomsday Blues (Amstrad CPC/MS-DOS, 1987)
The Passenger of Time (Amstrad CPC, 1987)
Captain Blood's Ark (Atari ST/etc., 1988)
The Angel and the Demon (CD-i, 1993)
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