2 + 2 = a new French video game development studio. Baptized “ZeDrimeTim”, the structure has just been officially launched and brings together a quartet of leaders, all shareholders associates, with very different CVs. On the one hand, Mika Tanguy et Gilles Aujard, from the world of cinema and animation and who will be respectively general manager and president. The other, Cedric Lagarrigue et Romuald Capron – two veterans of the video game industry and references in the French ecosystem -, who will officiate as chairman of the strategic board and executive producer.
To finance itself, the company completed a funding round led by Bpifrance. “The project is very solid because it combines sizes from diverse creative universes, which makes it possible to bring a differentiating touch to the video game sector”, underlines Anne Villette, senior investment director of the Creative Industries division of Bpifrance. In ZeDrimeTim’s agenda, three games are scheduled for the next six years. The first of them is scheduled for 2024 (on PC and consoles) and happens to be the origin of the project.
The story began during the last confinement. Passionate regarding video games and familiar with the Unreal Engine, which is used to design video games and which is also increasingly used for the special effects of animated films, Mika Tanguy and Gilles Aujard have time to kill because their activities in the seventh art are at a standstill. They then begin to work on a game project. A few months later, the duo gives birth to a prototype – a platform and action-adventure title where the player embodies an octopus caught in the open sea and who will have to lead a long quest to get back to it – immediately thrilling anyone they present it to.
“A game that has the potential to reach the general public”
“I was blown away by the potential. It is very effective both in game mechanics and in the world of characters. Publishers were already interested in signing their game as a co-production, but we decided to create a studio together,” recalls Cédric Lagarrigue, founder and former boss ofFrench publisher Focus Home Interactive (the number two in France behind Ubisoft) where he had unearthed the nuggets Farming Simulator, “MudRunner” or Pro Cycling Manager and who puts a foot back in the operational four years following his departure.
Entitled “Darwin’s Paradox”, the title will have a budget of development nearly 2 million euros. “It’s a game that has the potential to reach the general public thanks to the Pixar touch that Mika Tanguy and Gilles Aujard manage to bring back. The game is very colourful, very playful, specifies Cédric Lagarrigue who is now senior advisor for the investment bank Alantra. If a platform or a consoler is interested in a temporary exclusivity of the game by financing production costs and marketing operations, we will choose this path which has worked very well for games like ‘Rocket League’ or ‘Fall Guys’. But we will also discuss with publishers. »
In the meantime, it’s time to recruit for ZeDrimeTim which intends to go up initially to regarding fifteen employees. A task devolved to Romuald Capron, the former director of the Lyon studio Arkane – owned by Microsoft following his takeover of ZeniMax Media for 7.5 billion dollars at the start of the 2020 school year and known for its Dishonored license and the game “Deathloop” – which he left a few months ago. “ We are looking for profiles of video game programmers as well as animation and cinema professionals,” he notes. An alloy that must become the hallmark of ZeDrimeTim.
