育碧背后的“隐形”兄弟：克劳德·吉尔莫，为什么值得被记住？

Today, we'll talk about a man who has just passed away.

His name was Claude Guillemot.

This name

may be quite unfamiliar to you.

But the company he helped found

you have almost certainly heard of:

Ubisoft.

Ubisoft

is one of the world's biggest game companies.

Assassin's Creed,

Far Cry,

Just Dance —

these games, hits across the whole world,

all came from Ubisoft.

You could say

countless gamers around the world

have played their games.

Let's first talk about

where this company came from.

The story's starting point

was forty years ago.

In 1986,

in western France,

a place called Brittany,

five blood brothers

founded Ubisoft together.

Claude

was one of these five brothers.

At first,

what they did

was just a small business —

by mail order,

selling computer software.

No one imagined

that decades later,

this small business

would grow into

a game empire spanning the globe.

Among these five brothers,

the most famous

is actually the younger brother, Yves.

Yves

long served as Ubisoft's CEO,

the company's public 'face',

often appearing in public and giving interviews.

Claude, by contrast,

took the completely opposite path.

He kept an extremely low profile,

almost never showing his face in public.

He was more like the company's 'head steward',

quietly

running operations,

managing this vast family business's

every aspect.

He also ran

another of the family's companies,

one that makes gaming hardware.

The controller you play games with,

the steering wheel and such —

they're connected to him.

If

the younger brother Yves

was the star out on the stage,

then Claude

was the one

who, behind the scenes,

held up the entire stage.

So,

this tragedy —

how did it happen?

This Friday evening,

Claude

boarded

a small private plane.

It was

a twin-engine Cessna.

The plane flew to

France's west coast,

a seaside town called La Baule,

preparing to land.

But just as it was about to touch down,

the plane

plunged into a field,

and then burst into flames.

On board,

including him,

there were two people in all,

all killed.

The other

was a flight instructor.

Claude

was sixty-nine.

After the news broke,

the entire gaming world

fell into shock and grief.

And this event

has an especially poignant side.

In fact,

over the past two years,

Ubisoft's days

have not been easy.

The company is restructuring with difficulty,

slashing costs.

At just such

a precarious moment,

this founder who raised it with his own hands

departed, in such

a sudden way,

left it.

Speaking of this,

I want to say one more thing to you.

Our era

is used to lionizing those

who stand in the spotlight.

But Claude's story reminds us:

behind every

name we know well,

there are, in fact, others

who, all their lives,

stay where the light doesn't reach,

quietly

getting things

done, one by one.

Finally,

I want to leave you with two questions.

First,

in your own life,

is there such

a 'person behind the scenes' —

not often seen by you,

yet always

holding something up for you?

Second,

when a person

spends a lifetime

building a 'city',

and this city

is, at this moment, swaying and unsteady,

what does his departure

leave

to us?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they're worth our

thinking about slowly.