began on Rayman, Ancel revisited his initial drawings and developed the game's world and its characters, citing Celtic, Chinese, and Russian fairy tales as a major source of inspiration. He was also inspired by his childhood, having spent a lot of time by rivers and "chasing strange insects, climbing big trees". When Ancel started work on the game, he began with trees and "strange creatures". In the early 1990s, Ancel became interested in the computer graphic technique of ray tracing and incorporated it into the character animations he was designing at the time. This resulted in the designs of Rayman himself, with his name alluding to the aforementioned technique. Ancel originally envisioned the game's story to involve Jimmy, a human boy who creates an imaginary online world named Hereitscool. After it becomes infected with a computer virus, Jimmy travels into the world and inhabits the body of Rayman, his in-game avatar, to defeat the virus. The idea was scrapped during later development. By 1988, French video game publisher Ubisoft, founded two years earlier by the five sons of the Guillemot family, had hired around six developers and operated from Montreuil, a western suburb of Paris. Ancel was one of Ubisoft's early hires, having caught the attention of the Guillemot brothers for his animation skills. Yves Guillemot encouraged Ancel to pitch ideas for new games, which led to a meeting between Ancel, Houde, designer Serge Hascoët, and Gérard, Yves, and Michael Guillemot, after Ancel and Houde had teamed up and worked on the Rayman concept further. Hascoet recalled the pair presenting a "totally strange" design of a "giant trombone and you had to imagine the player inside", and an animation system that Ancel had developed for roughly six months which he praised for its fluidity. Despite being in the research and development stage, Hascoet pushed for the game to enter formal production and Michel Guillemot agreed to take it on. After Rayman received the green-light in 1992, Ancel said "everything changed". Michel Guillemot realised that additional staff was needed to see the game through, and organised the company accordingly. He also inject money into the project, with Ubisoft setting aside a budget of 15 million francs. Development then split into two offices, with more automated tasks done in Paris and the artistic work completed by Ancel, Houde, and their team of designers at their own facility outside Montpellier. Founded in 1994