One of the world’s largest video-game makers is one step closer to producing content for the silver screen after it purchased the Montreal FX company behind the movie translation of Frank Miller’s Sin City series.

Paris-based Ubisoft Entertainment announced Tuesday that it’s buying Hybride Technologies, an 80-employee company that does special effects for films, TV shows and ads.

‘This alliance is a true first for the industry. We are doing it because we don’t have a choice. Film and video games are destined to come together. We want to create common technologies,’ the chief executive officer of Ubisoft Montreal, Yannis Mallat, tells Playback Daily.

Ubisoft is present in 27 countries and has over 1,000 Montreal employees. Among Ubisoft’s game titles is Assassin’s Creed for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, plus several best-selling games based on Tom Clancy’s spy thriller novels.

Mallat says Hybride will help Ubisoft create one of ‘the best 3D animation studios in the entertainment industry.’

Ubisoft, whose largest development shop is located in Montreal’s trendy Mile-End district, says it wants to be ahead of the pack when movies and video games inevitably converge. With a boost from the federal and provincial governments, the company announced last year that it would expand its Quebec operations, creating 1,400 jobs by 2012 and launching a film studio, Ubisoft Digital Arts Studio. The Quebec government promised $19 million to finance tax credits and job training, while the federal government pledged an $8-million loan for the film studio.

The company won’t say how much it paid for Hybride, but says it expects the purchase to generate the equivalent of about $10 million to $11 million in sales.

‘This deal will first and foremost help us to make better games,’ says Mallat. ‘Hybride can help us create environments that today we only find when we watch films.’ While Mallat admits that Ubisoft ‘doesn’t expect to become movie producers overnight,’ he says his company is moving in that direction ‘slowly, surely, and smartly.’

The founder of Hybride, Pierre Raymond, believes much of Ubisoft’s technology can be applied to film, and he hopes the partnership will ‘generate a new environment on film’ that will have an ‘interesting influence on the future of cinema.’

For the 2007/08 fiscal year, Ubisoft generated sales of 928 million euros — or about $1.5 billion.