The escalade mechanic was something that took many years to develop - like, it was just incredibly complex and it was the brainchild of this one engineer, Richard, who was the guy who programmed the original prince on Prince of Persia. I remember the wall climbing - in French we called it l’escalades des murs because we spoke French very often on the shop floor. The wall climbing that they had was really cool. And so I said, “Oh, you could be a number two of that organization, and it would be the prince of the assassins.” And I started to study the subject matter and then suddenly we had something else than a Prince of Persia game.Ī few things were really exciting. And the first story was about the old men of the mountain. And so I looked around and I stumbled upon a book about secret societies that I read in college.Īnd it was kinda like a little book of all the myths surrounding super-secret societies. So I wanted to have an action character - something that in his title, it was a job where you could actually see action right away. I wanted the prince to have a different job than just being there waiting for mom and dad to die and take their place.

The first year was all about that mandate and how do you do that in game design? How do you do that technically? And said it before, but since I’d just finished a game with a prince, I wanted a different character. Redefining a genre is no mean feat, and doing it before you know the technology you have to work with is harder still. What follows, in their own words, is a story about discovering a concept with near-infinite potential and then struggling to realize even a fraction of it. Playing in the world was itself the reward.Īhead of the 11th main entry in the series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, releasing this week, we tracked down nine people who worked on the original game and talked to them about how it all began.

Assassin’s Creed had nothing but nine missions and a world that was your playground. It was a game like nothing before it, and oddly - given its far-reaching influence - also like nothing since, with a simplicity of design that almost seems quaint today, in a world where open world games are filled to the brim with missions and side quests and secrets and collectibles and all sorts of stuff that you can mark off of a checklist.

And unlike the GTA games that preceded it, it aimed to recreate the cities it was set in - Acre, Jerusalem and Damascus - rather than parody them. Its world was made for unprecedented freedom - your character being able to run, jump and climb anywhere - and filled with bustling crowds and 12th century street vendors. Its labyrinthine fiction twisted the modern day with the past, offering a science fiction tale of genetic memory and end-of-the-world conspiracies intertwined with another story of a master assassin coming to realize his own ignorance. Today, Assassin’s is one of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but back then Assassin’s Creed was something new. You might say it even ended up feeling like one, though Désilets’ creative interpretation of Ubisoft’s mandate layered on many additional challenges for the team at Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin’s Creed began life as a Prince of Persia game, expanded and reimagined for a new generation of consoles. It’s perhaps fitting that a game with the tagline “nothing is true everything is permitted” emerged from creative director Patrice Désilets bending the rules.

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