Albert Lamorisse

Albert Lamorisse (January 13, 1922 - June 2, 1970) is game designer who is one of France's most award-winning film directors. However, he is known to board gamers for having invented the mass-market world conquest game Risk.

Lamorisse's main career was in making elemental and exquisite short movies, such as the now classic films Crin-Blanc (White Mane, 1953), earning the Cannes Golden Palm, and Le Ballon rouge (The Red Balloon, 1956), accorded a second Cannes Golden Palm, plus a US Academy Award for screenplay. Yet around that very period he found time to conceive and develop a board game of "global conquest" (see La Conquête du Monde). After publication in France in 1957, this game was proposed to Parker Brothers, revised somewhat, and from 1959 onward issued and identified as Risk.

Lamorisse’s luminous foray into board game design does not seem durably to have affected his main career. He proceeded to make films as before until 1970, when his life came to sad and abrupt end in a helicopter crash while he was filming in Iran.


Sources


Wikipedia:
Albert Lamorisse
Risk