Benjamin Liénard

Moby ID: 110965

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Born in 1978 in France, Benjamin early felt in video games starting playing black and white games on Pong console, then Vectrex and finally first colored video games played via Atari 2600, all friends consoles. First bought console was NES in 1989 with several classics ( Super Mario Bros series, Zelda, Gradius, ... ), then owned an Amstrad CPC 6128 on which he wrote his first code lines.

In teenage days, he played on friends' Atari 520 and Amiga, then 486 dx2/66 and finally bought it's first PC ( Pentium I ) in 1997 just before studying computer science at Lyon university. During he's 2 years as student, Benjamin worked on personal project with 2 friends, a chess game, whose particularity was to use the just born DirectX library. in a parallel direction, he gets involved in demo scene with the PoPsY TeAm group. With these efforts to learn new technologies, he managed to join the veteran french studio Lankhor, authors of several awarded games ( Mortville Manor, Maupiti Island, Vroom, ... ), games he played few years ago.

The studio as just finished Official Formula One Racing for Eidos as Benjamin started to work on its sequel, F1 World Grand Prix, mainly on front-end menu, he really gets involved in all parts of the game as a F1 and F1 games fan. The game was released on both PC and Playstation which was very challenging on this console which was close to its end of life ( 2000 ). On its second project, Warm Up ! , Benjamin continue to expand his work on gameplay programing.

At the end of 2000, Lankhor had its last F1 project killed and started te be in bad position. Benjamin quickly finalized a game design he had in mind since years and managed to sell it to Microids. So the Ski Park Manager project was born in 2001, Benjamin working as project manager, programmer and game designer. Despite of the team hard work, the game was released un-finalized and bugged. One year, few people working on it ( only 8 ) and bad relation with Microids were too hard conditions to make a good game despite of an attractive concept. Lankhor finally closed its doors at the end of the project ( 2001-2002 ) and Benjamin, as many french developers was jobless for several months.

After failing to create a new studios, he joined Widescreen Games in 2003 working few months on the AI of Plague of Darkness ( killed by Namco ) and then Pirates: Legend of the Black Buccaneer, he finally joined Arkane Studios to program the AI of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, using the famous Source Engine of Valve Software. This was the most important project Benjamin worked on and the game was awarded by multiple website during 2006 E3. After this game release, he left Arkane Studios to rejoin Frederic Raynal's latest project at Ubisoft. During one and a half year, he managed a junior developer team on the THI ( Treasure Hunter Institute ), transforming the recently acquired Cry Engine to a third person MMO game. The game reached the beta test four years after but was finally cancelled by Ubisoft.

In 2008, bored about the way video game industry is managed in France, he decided to leave it and is now developing software for UAVs.

Credited on 6 games

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Dark Messiah: Might and Magic - Elements (2008, Xbox 360) Programmers
Dark Messiah: Might and Magic (2006, Windows) Programmerrs
Val d'Isère Ski Park Manager: Gold Edition (2002, Windows) Programming
Val d'Isère Ski Park Manager (2002, Windows) Programmers
Warm Up! (2000, PlayStation) Menus Programming
F1 World Grand Prix (1999, Windows) Menus & Interfaces - Programming

[ full credits ]

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