Inside Eidos

by ERIK LEIJON

Last month I had the opportunity to visit the site where the new Eidos Montreal studio is being built. Located in the building directly adjacent to A2M, the city’s second biggest developer, Eidos Montreal’s general manager Stéphane D’Astous says they’re ahead of schedule, and the race is on for the eventual grand opening later this month.

Eidos, part of the largest gaming publisher in the U.K. and known primarily for the famed Tomb Raider and Hitman series, announced back in February they would be opening their largest studio yet in Montreal. They already have one floor of the Gordon Brown building on de Maisonneuve reserved for the studio, with plans to incorporate another floor sometime during their three-year growth cycle. By September 2009, the current core team of a dozen will balloon to 350, and include multiple development teams and a game-testing studio.

The most surprising aspect of the current operation is that Eidos have essentially given D’Astous carte blanche to build the studio in his own vision. D’Astous says the bigwigs in England didn’t even come down to Montreal when he signed the lease on the new space. “In the past, Eidos was used to growth through acquisitions, and this is their first experience building in-house,” he says, explaining perhaps why they haven’t been so hands-on (although the company recently sent 30 high-ranking employees to Montreal for an experts’ only meeting).

D’Astous’s father was an architect, and he holds a BA in industrial design (in addition to an MBA), so he’s been the main man behind the hi-tech, industrial look of the office. The coolest part of the big windowed/wall-lacking space is the server room, which sits right near the main entrance and will be viewable through glass walls. Eidos Montreal will be the main testing headquarters for the whole company and its many studios, and the response for potential testers has been solid. He needs 50 testers in place by Christmas.

Eidos Montreal has the core team in place, and they’ve seemingly done a good job attracting talented individuals from other companies and from outside Montreal. Since D’Astous comes from Ubisoft, no doubt a few of his former colleagues will jump ship when the studio begins development. D’Astous remains confident that there shall be no strife with Ubisoft when the defections become official. He says, “How many people have left Ubisoft since they opened? Hundreds? How many times have they used the (non-compete) clause?” The answer is twice, but one of those was under suspiciously similar circumstances, when former Ubi employee Alain Tascan opened the EA Montreal studio in 2003.

The press conference for the official launch will be in October, as will the announcement of the title they’re working on. The game will be based on a current Eidos property.

Nintendo shows off

Last week, Nintendo brought in a few reps to show off a few upcoming Wii and DS titles to Montreal journalists, and even though the next Smash Bros is still being kept under wraps,

Jordan Dodge from Red Octane was kind enough to bring Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, the first Guitar Hero game for the Wii.

It still uses the guitar peripheral but there are some noticeable changes. The Wii remote is plugged and inserted directly into the guitar. This was done to take advantage of the remote’s motion sensor (to activate star power) and to make the guitar wireless. A couple of new twists are the inclusion of Slash, who was previously motion-captured and will now be an unlockable character, and an online multiplayer mode. There’s even a battle mode, where star power is used as one of eight weapons against your opponent. The coolest one (we didn’t see any of them) was one weapon that forces your opponent to play with their wrong hand. It comes out this October.