The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Yannick Cadin and François-Xavier Talgorn, pioneers at Ubisoft, have just joined the association as honorary members. They will also participate in the Support Committee for the National Video Games Museum. They consider our initiative necessary and welcome, and thus offer us their support. There is no doubt that the support of such personalities from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Born on August 2, 1967, Yannick Cadin discovered programming on machines like the ZX81, the Canon In his final year, a class friend introduced him to the small Rainbow Production studio, where Yannick met someone looking for a programmer for the team developing the very first game from a new publisher.
He then worked with the graphic designer Patrick Daher and the screenwriter Alexandre Bonan on the game Zombi (1986), inspired by the eponymous 1978 horror film, first in his free time then he left high school and became one of the first part-time employees of Ubi Soft – he decided to take his freedom again a few weeks later – as “head of software”; he is sorting through the game proposals while continuing work on Zombi. Adding a touch of action to the graphic adventure game, the latter was a success and led to two other games inspired by films on which Yannick was also a designer, Manhattan 95 (1987, based on New York 1997) and Hurlements (1988).
At the same time, he helps other programmers with copy protection for example, and carries out all the graphic functions of Master of Souls (1988) so that its author, Éric Doireau, can code it in a high-level language. The latter recommended him to carry out the MS-DOS port of his Teenage Queen (1988) on behalf of ERE Informatique. During 1988, Yannick Cadin turned away from the world of video games to focus on “professional” computing; he then held different positions for various entities, created or participated in the creation of companies, and ended up founding in 1997 his IT services company, Kommando, renamed Diablotin in 2002 and still in operation.
Born on April 2, 1968, François-Xavier Talgorn discovered computers at the age of 14 during an evening with friends, which he spent programming on a TI-57 calculator. Two years later, he received his first computer, an Oric Atmos, which was followed by an Amstrad CPC. He then began to tinker with a few BASIC games, and quickly became interested in music and sound programming. François-Xavier signs the music of M.G.T. / Magnetik Tank (1986) on behalf of Loriciels, then he presented a demo to Ubi Soft who hired him for the soundtrack of Inertie (1987).
He continued with around ten titles including the PC version of Zombi, Fear over Amityville (1987), Hurlements and Le Maître des Âmes (1988). At the end of the 1980s, he left Ubi Soft and entered university where he obtained a Master's degree in computer science. After a two-year wandering as a game designer for an obscure small video game studio, François-Xavier founded his own company iLAB, which develops educational games including around twenty CD-ROMs for Hachette Multimedia. At the end of the 1990s, he joined DURAN DUBOI, a specialist in cinema special effects, as head of game design where he participated in the development of the very first Virtual Skipper (2000) on behalf of Ubisoft.
At the same time, he also became interested in marketing through various software projects and from 2002, he spent two years as marketing director at QEDSoft, which developed 3D technology for the web. In 2005, he returned to development and traveled around the world as an international Java J2EE and Oracle trainer before joining Lotsys, the technological subsidiary of the Française Des Jeux group, in 2009 for a casual games platform project.
In 2012, François-Xavier returned to pure programming via a Master 2 Research option in computer science where he excelled, which led him to join the University of Paris VIII Vincennes where he taught and worked on a doctoral thesis entitled “Abstraction and stylization: from the model to the rendering engine” which he plans to defend in December 2018.