French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Laurant Weill, co-founder of Loriciels, 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.
Laurant Weill discovered computers at thirteen when her father took her to a dedicated lounge. This led him to study computer science in addition to biochemistry. At seventeen he developed commercial management software... which he marketed himself. At eighteen and with friends, he designed his own computer based on the 68000 processor, a few months before its release! But Thomson will unfortunately not be interested in this machine that was ahead of its time... While he was doing his military service, Laurant Weill created a store, Ellix, specializing in the British Oric microcomputer. The store quickly became the official importer in France, and it met with great success. Laurant, his friends and even customers of the store began to create games and he realized that there was a real market for this emerging industry. It was therefore in September 1983, after his studies, that he formalized with Marc Bayle the first video game company in France, Loriciels, whose name, found by his wife in an emergency at the INPI, is the contraction of “Oric” and “Software”. However, the company published on most microphones of the time and Laurant Weill also created or participated in other companies such as Microïds, Brøderbund Europe or Evolution, to whom we owe the word processing software supplied with the Amstrad CPC. The release of L'Aigle d'Or in 1985 reinforced Loriciel - the "s" disappeared when the logo changed in 1987 - in its status as leader in France and the company did not forget to innovate in terms of peripherals: optoelectronic gun for West Phaser, 3D glasses for Jim Power... But the company went bankrupt in 1992 after three years of difficulties linked largely to the arrival of Japanese consoles closed to French publishers. In 1994, Laurant Weill founded Visiware, which quickly became the world leader in games for interactive television. Its main interactive channel, Playin’TV, is broadcast in 77 countries. More recently, the company Sync (an offshoot of Visiware) is already an important player in the “second screen” by enriching TV shows and advertisements on mobiles.
The Golden Eagle (Oric 1, 1985)
Sapiens (Thomson MO5, 1986)
Skweek (Amiga, 1989)
Jim Power: In Mutant Planet (Amiga, 1992)
And you, why not become a member of MO5.COM too?