VINCENT BAILLET

“To get good results, you had to care a lot about the speed and the memory usage of the devices”
Vincent Baillet

“I’m not sure I have enough to say to fill six pages,” says Vincent Baillet, modestly, when Retro Gamer approaches him with a request for an interview. We, however, were sure he had. After all, Baillet worked for the French publisher Loriciel for ten years from 1984 before becoming a studio manager at Psygnosis for a further five – just as the PlayStation was cementing its number one position in the industry. He then became a studio director for Infogrames when it was snapping up developers left, right and centre, only to go it alone and forge a successful career path making mobile titles and advising others. So as one of the most successful French videogame devs, it was clear he’d have lots to say. “I’ve done my homework,” he told us, when he was finally ready to spill the beans.

It’s said that France came late to videogaming, but what was the French videogame scene like in the late Seventies/early Eighties and what was the first game you played?

I wasn’t allowed to have a home version of Pong when it was released in the Seventies because my parents thought that plugging a console into a television could destroy it. But there was a shopping centre near where I lived and it had a few arcade games. Space Invaders became the first game that I played and Galaxian was the second but I probably didn’t play either of them a lot. They cost one Franc per game and that was a lot of money for children so my first experience with videogames was, in many ways, frustrating.

But were you excited about the computers being launched at the time?

Among the first computers that I came across were an Apple II, because my mathematics teacher had