Ubisoft is celebrating its 40-year anniversary today, March 28, 2025. Below, we look at how Ubisoft helped to establish the modern game industry, and where it may go from here.
In 1986, Zombi was released for the Amstrad CPC computer. The first-person adventure game heavily borrowed from George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, to the point that knowledge of the film’s plot was necessary to complete the game. While it received decent reviews, Zombi’s only remarkable quality is being the debut game of a French developer called, at the time, Ubi Soft.
Four decades later, and Ubisoft has shed both the space in its name and its somewhat humble beginnings to be one of the biggest names in the entire video game industry. Ubisoft franchises are some of the best-selling in history, from Assassin’s Creed to Just Dance; the company has dealt with some of the biggest IPs around, from Star Wars to Avatar; its list of subsidiaries spans the globe, from Abu Dhabi to Toronto. Anyone who has played a video game in the past 20 years or so has likely touched an Ubisoft game.
