幕后那座山，崩了：育碧创始人克劳德·吉尔莫之死

Today, we'll talk about one man's departure.

His name was Claude Guillemot.

To the vast majority of people,

this is

a rather unfamiliar name.

But the company he helped build with his own hands

is known to almost everyone —

Ubisoft.

Assassin's Creed,

Far Cry,

Just Dance …

these games that ring out across the world,

all stand behind one name:

Ubisoft.

Hundreds of millions of gamers worldwide

have, in the virtual worlds it built,

spent countless nights.

And Claude

was, of all this,

one of the starting points.

Let's turn the clock

back forty years.

In 1986,

in western France,

a place called Brittany,

five blood brothers

jointly founded Ubisoft.

Claude

was one of them.

In that era,

what they did

was no more than

the plainest of small businesses —

by mail order,

selling computer software.

No one could have foreseen

that this unremarkable family business

would, over a few decades,

grow into

a game empire spanning the globe.

Among these five brothers,

the one truly known to the public

is the younger brother, Yves Guillemot.

For a long time,

Yves served as Ubisoft's CEO,

the company's undisputed 'face',

frequently

appearing before the cameras,

at earnings calls,

and under the spotlight.

Claude, by contrast,

chose

a completely opposite road.

He was extremely low-key,

almost never showing his face in public.

He was more like, of this vast family enterprise,

the 'head steward' and the 'ballast stone':

quietly

tending to the company's operations,

coordinating the myriad threads of capital and

internal affairs.

At the same time,

he also headed

another company under the family,

one devoted to gaming hardware.

When you and I play games,

the controller in our hands,

the wheel and pedals at our feet,

are all, to the domain he ran,

closely tied.

If

the younger brother Yves

was the dazzling star

out on the stage,

then Claude

was the one

who stayed always behind the scenes,

and with his shoulders

quietly bore the whole stage.

So,

this tragedy that struck without warning —

how exactly did it happen?

On this Friday evening,

Claude

boarded

a small private plane —

a twin-engine Cessna.

The plane flew all the way to

France's west coast,

a seaside town called La Baule,

preparing to land.

But then,

at the very moment of landing,

the plane lost control,

plowed into a field,

and instantly erupted in roaring flames.

The two people on board —

Claude himself,

and an experienced flight instructor —

all perished.

Claude

was sixty-nine.

As the grim news spread,

the entire game industry

fell into shock and mourning.

And this news

is all the more wrenching

because of

the delicate moment at which it came.

In fact,

over the past two years,

Ubisoft's situation

has been quite hard.

Players' discontent,

falling results,

have forced this former giant

to set out on

a painful road of restructuring —

boldly

cutting costs,

redrawing its businesses,

while behind it,

capital like Tencent

waits and watches,

quietly.

At just such

a storm-tossed,

uncertain juncture,

this man who once,

brick by brick,

built it up with his own hands,

departed, in such

an abrupt way,

and forever,

left the stage.

Speaking of this,

I want to talk with you about

a deeper layer of this.

The era we live in

is used to

casting all its applause and gaze

onto those

faces standing in the spotlight.

We remember the CEO,

remember the stars,

remember those

names brought up again and again.

But Claude's life

is like

a gentle, silent reminder:

behind every

tall tower we look up to,

there are people like this,

willing

to spend a lifetime in the shadows,

unknown,

yet carrying the heaviest cornerstone

steadily

on their own shoulders.

At the end of the show,

I want to leave you

with two questions.

First,

back in your own life —

is there such a 'person behind the scenes',

one you rarely see,

even rarely think of,

yet it is precisely he

who has always, for you,

quietly

held up a piece of the sky?

Second,

when a person

pours out a whole lifetime

to build a city,

and this city

is, at this moment, storm-tossed,

is his sudden departure

the ending

of one story,

or the beginning

of another

hard journey?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they

are worth your

thinking about slowly.