With Montreal turning into the new North American hot spot for video game development, it is no surprise that Eidos has come to Montreal; following studios such as A2M, Cynanide, Electronic Arts, Strategy First and Ubisoft. Today Eidos Montreal held their official grand opening to media. General manager Stéphane D’Astous welcomed us to the event with a big smile and some facts about the “new” Eidos Montreal office that opened roughly 9 months ago.

– They are officially working on Deus Ex 3 for undisclosed platforms, released first teaser trailer

– Deus Ex 3 is currently ahead of schedule

– Eidos Montreal is aiming for 80 developers per game title, ensuring a tight knit feel and a rough 24 month development cycle for each game (do the math for Deus Ex 3…2009)

– They are currently at 80 developers/qa people working on the office

– This Montreal studio will only develop A list titles from the Eidos

– The QA team will be also testing other games other than just Eidos titles

– There will be three phases of expansion including using the floor below.

– They have over 3000 job applicants at this new office without any advertising.

Our tour guide was Ricardo Viana, Lead Level Designer for Deus Ex 3, a quite tall fellow whom you can catch a glimpse of in the breakroom photo. We were lead out of the conference room and into the main hall way and into the server room area where all the data goodness of Deus Ex 3 is being stored. The server room had quite a few racks of servers with a dedicated data line to the mother Eidos office of course.

The Q&A area had employees busy testing various titles, none were really identifiable or was Deus Ex 3 much to my dismay (they must had turned it off when we walked in). To the right of the Q&A team is the management offices with nice views of the downtown core and Boulevard de Maisonneuve.

Just beyond the management offices is the nitty gritty of the operations, the development area.

No development office is complete with a punching bag in the middle of the room, wait a punching bag? 1) It’s a great stress reliever 2) It’s better than an office dog that is much more distracting and doesn’t chew on network cables.

Next to the breakroom is a full shower facility for those downtown core dwellers who bike to the office during the summer months. The lunch room is quite large with a great view of the downtown core for the next year; that is until a condo project next door comes up and they’ll end up looking into someone’s bedroom (buy curtains folks).

That pretty much sums up the press event, there was a great amount of delicious food and drink to satisfy the fairly large crowd attending the event. For those of you who happen upon this page seeking to apply for work for Eidos Montreal, they launched a website just for you http://www.eidosmontreal.com/

With Eidos and Deus Ex 3 so close to Gametactics home base, we’ll be sure to get the low down on the game! All the photos we took are on the right hand side and be sure to check out the Deus Ex 3 teaser trailer that Eidos Montreal released today.