Ubisoft's Montreal Studio, Where Artists Are Superheroes WHEN Tchae Measroch leaves work, his hands usually bear a fresh cut or bruise. He works, often on his knees, in a small room crowded with an odd mix of items: a dried-grass hula skirt, a car door, baseball bats, swords and knives of varying length, a camouflage net typically used to disguise military equipment from enemy eyes. Mr. Measroch, a lively 36-year-old sound-effects artist, spends his days figuring out how to make noises he's never heard - like that of an 18th-century musket being loaded or the thump of someone's skull hitting the deck of a warship. A selection of wooden flooring samples also helps him create the sounds of each character's footfalls, no matter in what location, or century, they appear. "A big part of the job is footsteps," he explains. The footsteps belong to characters like Jason Brody, the protagonist of Far Cry 3, a best-selling first-person shooter game created by Ubisoft. The company is the world's fourth-largest game maker, ranked by sales, after Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Nintendo, according to Michael Pachter, an industry analyst at Wedbush Securities. But Ubisoft's video game production studio in Montreal, where Mr. Measroch works, is one of the world's largest, with a staff of 2,500. It is here where an overwhelmingly male staff of writers, producers, coders, directors, animators, artists and others come together to create the fantasy worlds of games like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, into which millions of people escape. When people play a Ubisoft game, Mr. Measroch's ingenuity has wedded the on-screen action with the sounds that make it feel authentic. This may be technologically sophisticated entertainment, but when a clanking pirate falls on a ship's deck, the sound is actually Mr. Measroch banging a leather handbag with metal rings against a slab of wood. When wind rustles through tall grass, he's gently waving the hula skirt in front of his microphone. Leaves shaking in a breeze? That's him shaking the camouflage net. The company is perhaps most admired for its games" attention to detail - the historical accuracy of a swordfight in Renaissance Italy, for example, or the emotional nuance in a villain's sneer. In 2012, Ubisoft was named best video game publisher by six industry groups at E3, the annual industry conference, and won the award for best technology for Far Cry 3 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March. "When you play an E.A. game, it feels like the business people got the last word," says Stephen Totilo, editor in chief of the video game Web site Kotaku (and an occasional game reviewer for The New York Times). With Ubisoft, you can tell that the creative people did. It's pretty clear they take far more creative risks, even in a sequel. They're definitely putting art ahead of other companies. THE Montreal studio of Ubisoft fills a five-story red brick building, a former textile factory built in 1903 that covers a city block at the northern end of Boulevard St. Laurent. The company is based in Rennes, France; it was founded by five brothers from Brittany in 1996. They opened the studio in Montreal a year later, lured by generous tax credits. American competitors soon followed - Electronic Arts in 2004 and a Quebec division of Warner Brothers Games in 2008 - making Montreal a video game industry center. The company takes pains to achieve authenticity - sending a staff member to sailing school, for example, so he could help create a detailed naval fight scene in Assassin's Creed - but it does not put art ahead of money. It keeps costs down and hedges its bets. There are nine installments in the less-costly-to-make Just Dance series. For the first nine months of its current fiscal year, through Dec. 31, 2012, sales totaled 1.1 billion euros, or about $1.4 billion, up 20 percent from 900 million euros in the comparable year-earlier period. Still, the lucrative business of making video games, which for major game makers like Ubisoft remains largely dependent on repeat success of blockbuster sequels, is now being challenged by the rising popularity of mobile technology like smartphones and tablets. Another Montreal studio, THQ, recently filed for bankruptcy, as did Atari, for years an industry leader. "It's a vulnerable industry," says Nate Wooley, publisher of the Web site Game Industry News. And the best way to stay strong, suggests Yannis Mallat, chief executive of Ubisoft's Montreal studio, is to keep pushing the excitement of the experience. "A few years ago," he says, "there was room in the marketplace for average games. Now, players are more demanding, and rightfully so. The games are tested in-house at every stage, with producers hoping their work produces "goose bumps," says Luc Duchaine, a former game producer there who is now Ubisoft's Montreal director of communications. The company is particularly known for its extensive use of performance capture, in which a director works with hired actors. The actors" gestures and facial expressions, translated into animation, make the characters more emotionally resonant, as in the case of Vaas Montenegro, the Far Cry 3 villain played by the actor Michael Mando.