Ancel's first demo, "Mechanic Warriors", was developed for software house Lankhor. Ancel joined Ubisoft as a graphic artist after meeting the game author Nicolas Choukroun in Montpellier at the age of 17. He made the graphics of Nicolas' games such as "The Intruder", "Pick'n Pile" before doing his first game as both programmer and graphic artist "Brain Blaster" published by Ubi Soft in 1990. In 1992, he began to work on "Rayman", his directorial debut. It was released in 1995 for PlayStation, Atari Jaguar and Sega Saturn.