MONTREAL — When the writer of Avatar: The Game first met James Cameron, one thing was clear from the start: the legendary director is obsessed with details.

‘He knows what he wants and he’s at the top of his game,’ says Ubisoft’s Kevin Short from his office on St. Laurent Boulevard.

As the lead scriptwriter on the game to accompany Cameron’s much anticipated 3-D sci-fi blockbuster, Short, 45, had the challenging task of developing two separate game storylines about the director’s imaginary world.

And Cameron, who has said publicly that he’s been thinking about the planet Pandora and its blue inhabitants, the Na’vi, since he was a child, provided Short with an extraordinary amount of information — including: a Na’vi to English dictionary, a history book detailing their traditions and social structure as well as a description of Pandora’s surrounding solar system.

‘My job was to take all this and create a new world,’ says Short, who led a small team through the grueling creative process. ‘It was lots of writing. It took us over a year. It was a stressful project.’

From the Ubisoft office in Montreal Short and his team sent data to Cameron and his co-producer Jon Landau through a secure ‘digital tunnel.’ Privacy ‘was a major issue,’ says the writer.

The reviews of Avatar: The Game, which was released a few weeks ago, have been mixed. ‘I think that the movie will push people towards the game,’ says Short. The film opens Friday through 20th Century Fox.

This has been a major year for Ubisoft in Montreal, which last month launched a short film by Quebec filmmaker Yves Simoneau to accompany the release of its game Assassin’s Creed 2. The short, Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, produced by Hybride Technologies, was meant to fill in the back story of the game.

The first part of the film, 14 minutes long, was released on YouTube on Oct. 27; two other segments went online in mid-November. The first garnered 1.7 million views in its first day of release, making it the most-watched YouTube video that day, says Ubisoft. ‘People seem to love it. They want it to be feature,’ Simoneau tells Playback Daily.