Nadeo

Nadeo (from Chinese 纳德奥 - [Nàdéào]) is a French company wholly owned by Ubisoft. Nadeo is most known for developing the critically acclaimed game TrackMania Nations Forever. Despite their focus on the gaming market, Nadeo have also developed software such as the professional video editor MediaTracker and the industry standard HTML editor and viewer ManialinkEdit.

The current CEO of Nadeo is Florent Castelnérac (aka Hylis).

Beginnings
In 2000, then-young Hylis had decided to fullfill his wish of creating a gaming-oriented company, of which there were not a whole lot in his country of origin at the time. To his surprise, he would immediately find out that many of his friends had a similar desire, and thus they were the very first employees to embark on the Nadeo journey.

However, the idea for TrackMania did not come into the bright mind of Hylis until whole three years later, which he would nearly single-handedly develop using his very own advanced game engine, dubbed the GameBox engine. Nadeo developers, as inexperienced as they were, had absolutely zero clue as to what they were doing with the engine's code, resulting in the game having various bugs, and sometimes even causing terrifying graphical glitches to happen on the player's screen. Nevertheless, Hylis and his team were not of the kind that gives up, and thus they continued to explore the world of C++ in an attempt to improve their programming competence.

TrackMania Nations Forever
Just five years after the original TrackMania release, Nadeo have prepared a real treat for their loyal fans and followers. A new game "full of innovation, fun, and based on community content" - the e-mail sent to all owners of TrackMania read. The letter had an address attached to it, with the address in question being the very first NadeoCon venue.

With the audience being as excited as ever, the Nadeo CEO had unveiled the never before seen gameplay of the Stadium environment. While the crowd was going wild, Hylis added: "this jeu est free absolutèux" [sic]. The people in the showroom could not stop roaring for the next day after hearing the news of the next Nadeo release being completely free.

Months after the initial hype, the game to end all games was finally out for everybody to enjoy: TrackMania Nations Forever - "the annihilator of the game industry", was getting millions of installations mere hours after its release, making it the most installed game title of the year. The record still stands to this day.

Acquisition by Ubisoft
After the undeniably deserved success of TrackMania Nations Forever, Hylis, the Nadeo CEO, had stated to his development team that they should make a shift towards more professional, enterprise software to obtain further support of the shareholders. That was announced not without the assistance of Ubisoft, who acquired Nadeo for a hefty sum of €2B shortly after their impressive market performance.

Some of the software developed during that time is still widely used to this day.