Hylis

Florent Castelnérac (born 1975), commonly referred to by his nickname Hylis, is the CEO of the french company Nadeo. He is known for his programming skills, effective marketing strategies and his mostly weird, incoherent speeches.

For his work in the industry, Hylis received numerous accolades, including, but not limited to: Best French Developer, Best French CEO, Best French Community Manager, Best French Guy.

Castelnérac is an avid philantropist and donates most of his earnings to various charitable organisations.

Biography
During his studies, Hylis founded an amateur game developer's club with friends Xavier Bouchoux (KIA), Jean-Sébastien Luce and Damien Quilot (gone missing). The members of this small circle went on to form the basis of the Nadeo development studio, which was officially founded in 2000.

Castelnérac was always passionate about video games, and eventually realised that he wanted to make a name for himself in the gaming industry. His first tenure was with Delphine Software, which he later left for another job at the french VFX company Duran Duboi.

However, his employer company did not specialize in video game production. Duran Duboi mainly created tools for special effects, notably for movies. With the aim of creating animated films, the company desired to develop a technology for creating images as if it was a game. Castelnérac was hired to carry out that task.

Duran Duboi was later pushed into the video game industry, with their title Virtual Skipper being released into public in 2000. The game made use of the engine developed by Hylis and later used by all Nadeo PC titles - the GameBox engine.

Pascal Hérold, the founder of Duran Duboi, joined forces with Florent Castelnérac later into 2000 to found Nadeo, an independent video game development studio, responsible in particular for the creation of the TrackMania game series.

Controversies
In September 2020, following prior controversies at Ubisoft, Nadeo was the subject of an investigation in the media. The articles spoke of "concerning, brutal management methods". In particular, Hylis' "hold" over his employees, and various accusations of moral harassment. However, Castelnérac claims that "Nadeo's integrity is judged to be 100% solid", citing a study carried out by the consultancy Great Place to Work.

In April 2022, a new media investigation noted that the pages devoted to Nadeo and its CEO on the Wikipedia had been targeted by modifications that seemed to be part of a desire to disguise the past controversy.

In August 2023, members of the TrackMania community managed to breach the Nadeo e-mail server, revealing all sorts of conversations Castelnérac had with some of the more known players back in the day. The leaked conversations confirmed the Hylis' involvement in the Crash of '07, further cementing the opinion of the players that it was planned by Nadeo. Leaked messages also proved the rumoured affiliation of Hylis with the most decorated roof style player Wormah.