Éric Viennot is far from retirement and is still actively working on a variety of projects, including “man dreaming in unknown language”, a transmedia project combining a book and a film. The concept of transmedia would dominate much of this author’s career. To develop his passion for contemporary art, Éric Viennot resigned from his career in Working as a teacher at the same university, he co-founded the independent studio Lexis Numérique, where he was creative director for 24 years.
While Alexandra Ledermann’s horseback riding franchise is undoubtedly one of the studio’s major commercial successes, Éric Viennot’s narrative game Ernest Uncle’s Adventures, Memoirs, and Alternative Thinking will be remembered first. A series of adventure games for children and translated into more than 15 languages, Les Aventures de l’Oncle Ernest allowed the studio to grow from 5 employees to over 50 employees in the early 2000s. Ubisoft In 2003, Eric Viennot put aside younger audiences and created Europe’s first alternative reality video game.
Players will have to investigate through the multitude of websites that have been created or already exist for the occasion. The concept was intriguing and had some success (over 250,000 copies sold in Europe), in addition to winning the SACD 2003 Interactive Creation Award. A sequel titled In Memoriam: The Last Ritual will be released in 2006, a year before the Lyon native became Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.Last year, Eric Venault even published the novel in mourning18 years after the game’s release, allowing people who didn’t have the chance to play it at the time to discover its main plot and its universe.
After the In Memoriam series, Éric Viennot continued to explore the path of transmedia games, of which he will remain one of the pioneers. Working with Orange, he worked for several years on Alt-Minds, a supernatural thriller inspired by true events, set for release in 2012. Between the TV series and the game, the project invites the public to take part in a large eight-person interactive survey week that expands in a real space. Long before Ingress and Pokémon GO, players had to use location-based apps to “catch” Glyphs scattered around the world. “Directing an interactive thriller written in real time in eight weeks is an admirable ambition.”, Yukishiro wrote in his test at the time, but was not persuaded by the game’s application, June 2014.