Guillaume de Fondaumière
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Guillaume de Fondaumière was born on June 28, 1971 in Marseille, France. He created his first company at the age of 16, C. de C. Promotion - specializing in clubs, fashion shows and live concerts. After obtaining the French Baccalaureate at the Lycée Français de Vienne in 1990, he studied management and Marketing at the European Business School Paris. He graduated in 1994.
In 1993, he and an old schoolmate, Stephen Carrière, met architects Matjaz Pozlep and Diego Zanco while on a traineeship together. They subsequently, co-founded Arxel Tribe, a 3D graphics studio.
Guillaume de Fondaumière first headed the Paris based subsidiary company of the Ljubljana Group. Meanwhile 'Arxel Tribe' soon became a prominent leading special effects company in Europe.
In 1996, 'Arxel Tribe' joined the Brazilian author Paulo Coelho and star designer Moebius to create the video game 'Pilgrim'. The following year, Pilgrim was published successfully by Infogrames Entertainment (today known as Atari).
ARXEL TRIBE was split into two departments in 2000, one specializing in special effects the other in video games. In 1998, 'Arxel Tribe' developed a new game 'Ring' - adapted from Richard Wagner's opera Der Ring des Nibelungen. The game won a number of international awards and sold in excess of 500,000 copies.
Between 1998 and 2000, 'Arxel Tribe' grew to become the world's most important developer of adventure games. The video game department's headquarters was transferred to Paris with the creation of The arxel Guild SA. In 2000, 'Arxel Tribe' was France's largest independent video game developer. Guillaume de Fondaumière became the President, and Chief Executive of the ARXEL TRIBE Group.
In 2001, The 'Arxel Guild SA' was sold for over 15 M€ to 'CTO S.P.A.', Italy's leading video game distributor. Guillaume de Fondaumière continued to supervise all publishing activities of the group, in addition to controlling all matters concerning the acquisition of book and film licenses for video game adaptations, such as: (Alfred Hitchcock's - Hannibal.
Guillaume de Fondaumière remained President and chief Executive of the company until resigning in March 2003 because of divergence with the CTO Group strategy. The Arxel Guild SA was liquidated in Paris by CTO S.p.A. in February 2004 and CTO S.p.A. was put into forced liquidation in August 2004 after a fierce legal battle against Electronic Arts. Arxel Tribe which had survived the Group's turmoil in Slovenia has been closed down by its management in 2006.
Early in 2004, Guillaume de Fondaumière joined the video game development company, Quantic Dream, as Chief Operating Officer. He was named President of the APOM, the French association of independent multimedia producers in April 2005 and re-elected in June 2006 for two years.
