Xavier Poix reveals hit dancing game was kept under the radar at Ubisoft, developed by a team of 20, and based on a Raving Rabbids minigame.

The original Just Dance wasn’t pitched to Ubisoft heads until six months before it hit store shelves and was developed by a team of just 20 people, according to Ubisoft’s Xavier Poix.

In an interview with GameSpot, Poix, the managing director of Ubisoft France, said “I was, let’s say obliged, to keep a small team in terms of costs. Even it was a small risk, it was a risk, because the game was not officially pitched. The idea was to keep it very low profile until we were sure about what we had.”

“We pitched Just Dance very late in process compared to what we do usually. We pitched it, I think, six months prior to the launch when it was actually already developed. It was somehow already in the Rabbids, even if it was different, but in that game there was no tongue-in-cheek aspect, no artistic direction or anything.”

Poix also spoke about the difficulties he and his team had convincing others within Ubisoft that the idea would prove popular.

“It was quite interesting, we were creating more gamer’s games and the image of this team… I think it’s OK to say now that people within the Paris studio never thought it would be a success. We were working on Ghost Recon at the time and the discrepancy was huge.”

“People thought it would never work, because people don’t dance, or that it wasn’t precise enough for people to actually learn to dance.”

Ubisoft recently revealed that the Just Dance series has sold over 42 million copies to date, making it Ubisoft’s second biggest selling game ahead of Splinter Cell’s 27 million and below Assassin’s Creed’s 57 million.

For more on GameSpot’s interview with Poix and the development of Just Dance, check out the full feature on the site now.

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