A Brief History of French Touch Software :

> Summer 1998

Pierre-Olivier Latour began working on his first 3D engine: Infinity. Soon, he decided to create an outstanding windsurfing simulation game based on this engine : WindRacer.

> October 1998

Didier Larue saw some screenshots of Infinity on the author's web page and offered his services with David Lardat as 3D artists. A few days later, Didier and David had designed a first ship and the small team extended the concept of the game to a water racing simulation not limited to windsurfing and gave it a new name : WaterRace. They also started working on a deeper project: Lords of Steel, a Mech based adventure game that would occur in a feudal world. At that time, it became obvious that some special tools were needed for the project. As a consequence Pierre-Olivier developed Fusion, a complete 3D editor and texturing tool.

> November 1998

Eric Dufresne and Yann Lorgeuilleux saw the very early screenshots of the game, and offered to join the team as graphic designers and handle all the 2D work for the team, including game logos, interfaces and the web site.

> December 1998

The French Touch team held its first meeting in Paris and defined definitely both the concept and the interface of WaterRace. They also started to imagine the background world and the script of Lords of Steel.

> January 1999

French Touch opened its web site and presented its projects to the Mac gaming community...

> February 1999

Siete 7 Black, a Spanish R & B musician joined the French Touch team with the idea of making the best musics for our upcoming games, with a special touch of course!

> November 1999

Marc Gohring, Peter Goedtkindt and Bernard Caumes joined the French Touch team respectively as 3D animator, additional programmer (to develop the physic engine) and 3D artist.

> April 2000

Peter and Bernard left the team. Jean-Christophe Charrier, a french graphic designer, joined the team as a level designer.

> June 2000

Claude Barras joined us as a 3D artist.

> August 2000

Stéphane Rosset joined us as a Business Manager We officially created French Touch SàRL, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

> November 2000

After almost 2 years of hard work of our unpaid team that worked during its free time only, the first game project of French Touch (WaterRace) is released! There is a lot of similar teams over the Internet, but it's quite rare that this kind of project ever comes to life, so we're quite happy about it!! The story goes on...