Norbert Cellier

Norbert Cellier has about 20 years of experience in the video games industry, and worked on 50 titles in game design, programming, technical management and production.

He was born on January 7, 1967 in Lyon. After graduating at the Lycée Beauregard, he studied at INSA Lyon (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées) where he received a degree in Computer Engineering. When he was still a student in the early eighties, he started programming games on the Thomson TO7, ZX81, and Commodore C64, and he got a couple of classical strategy games published by a videogame magazine.

He entered the game industry as a trainee at Infogrames in the summer of 1989, where he helped finishing the Amiga version of Quest for the Time-Bird and worked on a couple of ports for Drakkhen.

In September 1991 he started working at Infogrames where he stayed till December 2001. The very first title he worked on was Eternam, a game that was already in production when he arrived and which he considered as quite a strange game. He liked his next game, Shadow of the Comet, better. In his role as Director it was a challenging enterprise, as it was created with a small team and finished in less than 2 years.

He became in charge of the PC department and worked on games as Alone in the Dark series, Prisoner of Ice, Time Gate: Knight's Chase, Chaos Control, No Respect, and AIV Network$. After these games he became in charge of the console publishing department, with titles as the famous Heart Of Darkness, and all the European licensed games as Lucky Luke, Tintin, and Asterix, and (later on) the international ones as Looney Tunes, Superman, and Wacky Races.

Cellier worked on these titles in different roles; in the beginning he did programming and game design, but later on he focused on managerial and strategic tasks. Each title was systemically released on 5 or 6 platforms including handhelds and localized in 6 languages.

After having worked for more than 10 years for the same company (and for a short period as Project Manager at Widescreen Games), he decided that is was time to found his own company. The company, called ElektroGames, is based on a production model inspired by the movie industry. Six years after its foundation in 2003, it has produced titles such as Arx Fatalis Collector Edition, Another World 15th Anniversary, Building And Co., Fame Academy, Nostradamus, Safari Adventures (aka WWF Panda Junior), and The Secrets of Da Vinci.

Though the company is located in Paris, Cellier is still living in Lyon.