Born on 23 January 1967 in Argenteuil, Hervé Lange His father introduced him to computers at an early age, but he was initially fascinated by comics, and even tried his hand at the École Estienne competition. In 1982, when his parents bought his brother a Oric-1He found a way to reconcile his two passions in graphic design and video games.
After creating little games for his sister, he delivered his first commercial title while still at school, The Secret of Kaïpur (1984), following a meeting in a Parisian shop of Philippe Deramburethe future founder of France Logiciels. The small company could sense the rise of theAmstrad CPC and Lange created in two months The prison of Nepharia (1985), which sold two thousand copies, and then embarked on the ambitious project of an RPG with Iron & Flame (1986).
But France Logiciels went bankrupt and the student, then at engineering school, heard about the young studio. Ubi Softwhich finances the end of the development and will produce its spin-off The Ring of Zengara (1987). After completing his studies in electronics and in parallel with his military service, he founded the label Computer's Dream to create B.A.T. (1989), sold in bundle in its original version on Atari ST with the sound card MV-16which is then used for the Music Master.
The group then B.A.T. II - The Koshan Conspiracy (1992), but Ubisoft wanted to concentrate on publishing, so Lange and his team founded the development company Haïku Studios to complete the CD-ROM version of B.A.T. II (1993), and then decided to work for other publishers such as Activision or Psygnosis. But, apart from Down in the Dumps (1996) for Philips MediaMost of them (including a game to accompany the film based on the novel The Island of Doctor Moreau) will be cancelled; however, the company is lending a hand to Cryo on Lost Eden (1995) and MegaRace 2 (1996) before closing its doors in 1997. Mendel (1999), a new 3D technology he developed with André Villard and Olivier CordoleaniHowever, it also attracted the attention of the special effects company DURAN DUBOI to pay off the studio's debts.
Hervé Lange became head of R&D and designed tools for the storyboard and animatics used in Enki Bilal's film Immortal, ad vitam (2004). But he also participated in the creation of the game Virtual Skipper (2000) for the company boss, a sailing fanatic. He then collaborated with the director Marc Caro on thee-Boarda tool for storyboarding using video game techniques.
Unable to finance the project in France, Hervé Lange moved to Montreal in 2004 with the aim of exploiting this research and co-founding the startup Xtranormalbut began by spending eight months at Behaviour Interactive where he worked on a number of console titles for younger audiences as technical director, including Kim Possible (2005) and Teen Titans (2006); he returned there from 2009 to 2013 when his company was in difficulty following the crisis, to work on the MMO Monkey Quest (2011) by Nickelodeon.
He was then hired by Autodesk as a software architect, where he still works today in the field of digital creation tools and the storytelling.
