Claude Guillemot, 69, co-founder of Ubisoft, died on June 19 when a twin-engine Cessna 421 departing from Rennes, France crashed into a field near La Baule aerodrome, killing two people. Guillemot, who owned the aircraft and belonged to the La Baule flying club, had been attending a regional aviation gathering. The other victim is believed to be a Rennes-based flight instructor. Claude co-founded Ubisoft alongside his four brothers in the 1980s and served as executive vice president of operations and board member at the time of his death.
In-Depth:
On June 19, a twin-engine Cessna 421 propeller aircraft departing from Rennes, France crashed into a field whilst approaching La Baule aerodrome, killing two passengers. According to the Loire-Atlantique fire department, 69-year-old Claude Guillemot, who founded Ubisoft with his four brothers, is believed to be among the victims.
France Info reports that Guillemot, who was also the owner of the plane and member of the La Baule flying club, was due to attconclude a gathering of more than 100 aircraft in the region this weekconclude.
While identification has not yet been possible, Guillemot’s family were notified yesterday evening, just a few hours after the plane crashed. The other victim is believed to be a flight instructor from Rennes.
From Audio CDs To Thrustmaster: Remembering Claude Guillemot
In the early 1980s, the Guillemot family ran a successful agricultural supply business in France’s Brittany region. However, as the five Guillemot brothers — Claude, Christian, Gérard, Michel, and Yves — returned home from university with degrees in business and technology, they realized that the family’s traditional farming venture offered limited growth. Seeking to diversify, they viewed toward the burgeoning electronics market. Claude initially experimented with selling audio CDs, but the brothers quickly recognized a much more lucrative frontier: the rapidly expanding home computing market.
Realizing that importing hardware and software from the UK and US was incredibly expensive for French consumers, they pooled their resources and established Guillemot Informatique, a mail-order business dedicated to selling affordable computer software and hardware components. By cutting out traditional middlemen, the brothers quickly turned their regional startup into a national success, setting the stage for their eventual leap into video game development and the creation of ‘Ubi Soft’ — short for ubiquitous software.
While his brother Yves became Ubisoft’s public face as CEO, Claude was the behind-the-scenes anchor of the family’s tech empire. Holding a master’s in economic science and a certificate in industrial computing, he bridged the business and technical sides of the company. Claude also served as CEO of Guillemot Corporation, turning it into a global hardware distributor famous for Thrustmaster and Hercules accessories. At the time of his passing, he remained the executive vice president of operations and a member of Ubisoft’s board of directors.
“I also like on the net the very simple personal site where the author presents himself, with his passions, his taste, himself, his family and his dog… He is there, on the large web, equal to mister IBM or mister Microsoft,” Guillemot once declared in a 1999 interview. “It is a genuine new form of expression, free and indepconcludeent — for how long? And I like the letter you can receive from an anonymous sconcludeer at the concludes of the earth, and the letter sent as a message in a bottle to the sea. We are all more or less wrecked persons, lost on a desert island in the middle of the vast world…”
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