Arnaud Ragot is game director for Ubisoft's Steep
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How Ubisoft built a virtual mountain and then created a video game around it

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Steep was born as a labor of love by a team that wanted to give you the feeling that you’re in the Alps flying down a mountain in a wingsuit.

Ubisoft’s Annecy studio is in the French Alps, and the team has been biding its time, waiting to build the mountains around them in the most realistic way possible in a video game. Then the team got its hands on the Ghost Recon: Wildlands game engine, and it built the mountains behind its extreme winter sports video game, Steep.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.