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. Assassin’s Creed began life as a Prince of Persia game, expanded and reimagined for a new generation of consoles. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Assassin’s Creed had nothing but nine missions and a world that was your playground. Playing in the world was itself the reward.

Ahead 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. 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.

Redefining a genre is no mean feat, and doing it before you know the technology you have to work with is harder still.

Prince of Persia: Assassins

Fresh from a holiday break after shipping the critically-acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Patrice Désilets and six other senior staff at Ubisoft Montreal got the news that kicked everything off: they were to start work on a new entry in the Prince of Persia series for the upcoming, as-of-then-unannounced next-gen consoles — the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 — that would redefine the action-adventure genre.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) We’re in January 2004. Just finished Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in November of the year before. And so I come back from vacation — Christmas holidays — and I’m asking, “OK, so what’s next?” And I was told, “Let’s do a Prince of Persia, but for the next generation of consoles.” So in 2004, January, we don’t know what [the new consoles] will be, right? We have no clue that the PS3 will be a PS3 and the 360 will exist. And I received a mandate: “So it’s like Prince of Persia: Next Generation, but try to redefine the action adventure genre into the next generation of platforms.” .... This is how it all started.

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) I remember that the Prince of Persia core team wanted to stay together and create something bigger. At first we thought that we could do a Prince of Persia open world. We did not [yet] have the concept of an assassin fighting in an open world — we didn’t have the engine to build that type of game.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for main character Altaïr) What we wanted to do basically is take the Prince of Persia acrobatic gameplay and push it into an open world. […] The confidence was really there inside the team because we just finished Sands of Time, which was a good game. So we were really trying to push the borders, or the limit.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) It was about doing a more mature, a little bit cinematic Prince of Persia game. We were between two consoles, two generations of consoles. So it was the chance for us to make the graphics evolve — you know, make the whole game evolve technologically.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) The first year was all about that mandate and how do you do that in game design? How do you do that technically? And [I’ve] said it before, but since I’d just finished a game with a prince, I wanted a different character. I wanted the prince to have a different job than just being there waiting for mom and dad to die and take their place. 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. And so I looked around and I stumbled upon a book about secret societies that I read in college. And it was kinda like a little book of all the myths surrounding super-secret societies. And the first story was about the old men of the mountain. About the assassins. 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 [other] than a Prince of Persia game.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) I remember [Désilets] was saying a lot, “What is a prince other than someone that is waiting to be a king?” And so that’s how the assassin, which was a more interesting character, came in.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) I remember the first kind of game footage we did — you know, it was kind of simulating the visuals of the game [...] — where we showed the editorial [team at Ubisoft] what we wanted to do as a game. And the thing was we had two assassins that [were] kind of saving the prince as a kid, as a baby. So the prince was there, but ... the assassin story was really appealing for us.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) The first fake game footage that I did was with an assassin and a prince. So you had the prince — you were playing the assassin, but you had to carry the prince around.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) A few things were really exciting [in the fake footage]. The wall climbing that they had was really cool. 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 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 [Dumas], who was the guy who programmed the original prince on Prince of Persia. I remember seeing that in the fake footage and remember that as being especially incredible. And then I also remember the horse. At the very end of the fake footage, there’s a sequence where there’s two assassins and they escape after the assassination, after a chase, and they jump over a city wall and they escape on horse. That was really cool. But I just remember the fluidity of the motion. Like, you know, this was a big step up from Tomb Raider, which was sort of the state of the art at the time, and [Uncharted:] Drake’s Fortune I think hadn’t quite come out yet. [...] I really think the animation and how it connects to your thumb — your almost physio-psychological side of interfacing with the game — is just absolutely key. I remember seeing the footage and I’m thinking in my head like how do you create that at this level? That’s what really impressed me the most.

Defining “next-gen”

It’s one thing to say you’re going to make a game that redefines the action-adventure genre for new consoles, and it’s quite another to do it. In an attempt to do so, the team soon nailed down the key pillars of its concept: it’d be open world with crowds, freerunning, assassins, believable cities and realistic animations. (And no critical paths.)

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) With the new consoles we had the chance, creatively and technologically, to make a bigger city. So the wall running and all the Prince of Persia [features were] already some kind of backbone, but [now] the crowd became something very important. Sort of all of those aspects of the game creatively drove us, you know — make sure we can have a big crowd, make sure we can have a big city. So we had to take a more modular aspect instead of just like what we see on screen. [There was] a lot of research on my part about all of those cities at the medieval time, during the Crusades, you know, to make sure we were doing something a little bit more realistic than fantasy. When you work with history, you need to take it a little bit more seriously, I think. And without, you know, making sure that everything is like the history. We had to let ourselves open windows on that side, creatively. [...] We needed to be credible instead of being authentic on the visual aspect and the gameplay aspect. Also, you know, the assassins don’t jump — they don’t do crazy jumps like the Prince of Persia can do.

Sacha Viltofsky

(junior programmer) The buzzwords at that time were “free will” and “sandbox.” [It was about] building your own experience, exploring the environment and allowing the player to go everywhere. Of course this was ambitious, but when I got in about one year and a half prior to shipping, it was actually already on track.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) I remember just, you know, going back to everything I wanted to do in The Sands of Time that I couldn’t do. Like at the beginning of Sands of Time is this scene of the hourglass of time exploding and it shakes the palace and everything. And I wanted a crowd — I wanted that palace to be lived in, and I wanted the crowd to exit the main room and go everywhere in the palace, so they would be transformed into enemies. But we could only draw eight characters at the same time on the screen. So my crowd was the prince, Farah, the sultan and four other people running. And that was the crowd. And there was also a region we designed in Sands of Time that was called the village, and you would jump from rooftop to rooftops and we couldn’t do it — we had to cut it in the middle of production. So I took those two things that we left aside for Prince of Persia: Sands of Time: a crowd and the village that you can do rooftop-to-rooftop gameplay. And I said, let’s make a city this time — and with next-gen I could actually draw 100 characters — and let’s do a crowd. And let’s play and do everything I wanted to do — not everything, but a bunch of things I wanted to do in Sands of Time. And let’s do it in one setting. And it was, you know, it was the golden years of GTA where GTA was telling us as game designers that freedom and openness is a good thing. So I said, OK, let’s combine what’s really hot these days. ... And let’s do social stealth in the crowd, instead of stealth in shadows and light. And so that’s really the beginning of it all. And then it’s like, oh, it’s a Prince of Persia game, so you will be able to interact with the 3D world in a way; you’ll be sword fighting. And I remember sword fighting, also ... this time instead of just having like big huge like hit balls [where the] detection zone is bigger than the visual sword […] I wanted really actually [to have] swords hitting each other. And so we developed also a system about that. So that’s really the — you know, you put me back in January and that was all the thought process, and it took around nine months, 10 months, to actually have the Assassin’s Creed that somehow you see now, with the Animus [the game’s sci-fi hook — a machine for accessing a person’s genetic memories and reliving them in a virtual world].

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) We spent lot of time building and designing the game on paper. We knew that we were good to build levels that required traversal, but we had no idea how to make [the game] open wide. A linear level full of traversal is easy to do because we were controlling the path and the pacing. Creating an open world is much harder because we were not controlling every time where the player wanted to go. We had to come up with guidelines and rules to make sure that player would still have fun just to move around the city the way he wanted.

Removing the prince

With the basic concept down, the Ubisoft Montreal team saw no need to keep the prince around. But it still had to seek approval from Ubisoft’s upper management that this was the right thing to do.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) For the first year in all the documents and everything it was called Prince of Persia: Next-gen. After maybe a year of working on that, before having a greenlight, when we presented it in [Ubisoft executives in] Paris, we never mentioned the name Prince of Persia. It was all about assassins. Our main reference was the book Alamut, which was about the assassins at the time of the medieval crusade. And from there, Paris was a little bit surprised because they were aiming to have a new Prince of Persia game.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) It took a while before they actually got it. It took two years before in all [the] documentation and [our] presentations, “Prince of Persia” was gone. So for our first two years, it was called Prince of Persia: Assassins. And eventually, remember, I think it was GDC 2006, marketing came up with the name: “So, what if it’s called Assassin’s Creed?” “Oh, yeah, yeah.” Because when I started studying the assassins, right — they existed for real, the Ismailian faith and group. And so their motto was “nothing is true; everything is permitted.” And I said, “That’s great for a game.” Well, it’s great for life, by the way, but it’s perfect for our game. So the assassin’s creed is really important. People tend to forget the creed, and the creed is what the franchise like stands upon — that you can do what you want in an Assassin’s Creed game. Even though there’s a story, there’s like — you’re being not dragged but pulled into this narrative, but somehow you can be any character you want. You can play with it the way you want. And so at first it was like — I remember having big discussions with producers about, “Yeah, but it’s a Prince of Persia game.” And I’m like, “Ehhh, we’ve got better than the Prince of Persia. I give you an assassin with a hidden blade!” I don’t really care about the prince at the end of the day, but Prince of Persia was the franchise, and we needed a game. So that’s why that was a bit of a struggle, between the two. And I think I had also another vision, and it was less action-y than some people wanted it to be. There was a lot more — which is funny, because now they’re doing it — but there was a lot more RPG elements.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) We had a bit of a whole thing back from Ubisoft, like we were going in a new console launch, so they were afraid that maybe is it too risky to go with a new IP on a new console? Shouldn’t we stick to the original one? So we [had] all those debates at the same time. What are we going to do with with the franchise? Are we going to stick with the Prince of Persia?

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) For sure the game changed over time, but the overall experience was always the same: Giving a living and breathing world filled with crowd gameplay, athletic traversal and spectacular fight moves.

Growing the team

As the concept became more concrete and the team entered deeper into the pre-production and production phases, the team realized it needed help. Lots of it — it’d take an army to build a game this ambitious. What began as a small core team of seven quickly ballooned into the dozens.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) We spent the first three years doing conception, pre-production, also starting production. Raph Lacoste, who is still now with Ubisoft — with the Assassin’s franchise — came in after the E3 [2006] demo. And then after that, I was more responsible for the cinematics, because the marketing aspect of it started to be big. The team also was starting to get really big. The conception stage was a really small team, really open. Then in the pre-production we started to look at the tech — how are we going to do the things? It was a little bit busy bringing new people [and] new ideas across to define that big IP.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) In April 2004, I left [Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone studio] Warthog Games. I was totally burned out and I didn’t do anything for some time. And a friend of mine, who was supposed to go to Australia, actually, I asked him, “Did you get your visa for Australia? Are you going?” He said, “Yeah, I got my visa, but I’m going to Montreal. I changed my mind. Ubisoft is recruiting and I’m going there.” And I’m like, “Oh, OK, cool.” “So what about you?” And I say, “Well, nothing still — I’m just, you know, taking the time to feel OK to work again.” And he said, “Well, you should really consider these guys. They are really pro; you know, they made Sands of Time.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, I know.” And he gave me the name of a recruiter there. [...] And when I arrived in October, 2004, on my little card was written Prince of Persia: Next-gen. So, really quickly, shortly after, the game became Assassin’s Creed. And when I arrived, [producer] Jade [Raymond] had just arrived. I think Yannis [Mallat], who is actually now the CEO of Ubisoft Montreal, was the executive producer. He was the producer on The Sands of Time, I think, or something like that. I was sitting next to Sebastien Puel, who was at the time [the] marketing guy. He ended up being the executive for the brand, after being the producer on AC2. And yeah, the core team basically.

Elspeth Tory

(production manager for animation) When my work on [Prince of Persia:] The Two Thrones was complete, I was approached by the team working on Assassin’s Creed, which I had heard was going to be a continuation of the PoP franchise. It was right before I joined that the decision was made to branch out into a new IP. They were looking for someone to head up their “Behaviour” team, which would pair each animator with a programmer in an effort to adjust to this game’s open-world action. With lots of experience animating the prince, and my management background from [French games company] Microids, I felt up to the challenge — though admittedly intimidated. This new type of inter-disciplinary team took a bit of getting used to for everyone, but the dynamic was fun and exciting. The animators lovingly called the programmers their “pets.”

Sacha Viltofsky

(junior programmer) I had been working for Gameloft for three months when they decided to fire 33% of their staff due to bad quarter results. HR transferred all the CVs to Ubisoft and I first got a technical exam, then two interviews for specific projects: Assassin’s Creed and a Ninja Turtles title. It went well with both, but the AC team had top priority so I got a job proposition. [...] Frankly, when Ubi called me to tell me that I had the opportunity to work on AC, I had no idea what that was and asked them for a week to think about it since I had other offers from other companies outside the video game industry. They made it pretty clear that this was an opportunity of a lifetime, that a lot of experienced game developers would kill to have the same opportunity, and they gave me 24 hours to call them back. I took a few hours to investigate, saw the E3 video and I called back to accept the offer!

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) Back then Ubisoft didn’t really have a very good reputation. I had a bunch of friends who worked there. Some of them were happy; some of them were not very happy. The studio hadn’t put out many good games yet. It was right about the time also that Ubisoft had sued the guys who left the Splinter Cell team to work on Army of Two, with the noncompete and all that. So I sort of had struck out Ubisoft to myself for working there, and then I played Sands of Time and I thought, “Oh, OK. OK, I want to work there. I want to work especially with that team. These guys must be so good.” So I applied at Ubisoft, as simple as that.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) I was paying my rent by writing bots for Diablo and farming items, and just doing anything I could to make some money. And I was sort of disillusioned a bit from the game industry. And oddly my ex-girlfriend ended up at Ubisoft as a game designer, and she dropped me a line one day and said, “There’s this person named Jade Raymond and she’s working on a game and she’s looking for a lead programmer and I mentioned you to her, and she wants to talk to you.” And I remember this not being very well received, first of all because it came from my ex-girlfriend and second because it came from Ubisoft. So, at that time, and I think it’s still similar today, Ubisoft was basically the giant mothership in Montreal. They hired everybody and paid them, you know, no money and — you know, it was all the bad rumors about Ubisoft were all the things in my head, right, about it being a sweatshop and all that stuff. And so I was like, “ehh, Ubisoft, forget that. I don’t wanna go work there.” But my ex-girlfriend was very insistent. She said, “You need to meet this lady Jade [Raymond]. She’s got a really great experience in the game industry and her project’s really cool.” So I decided to accept the offer. So I had supper with Jade. [...] Then we went up the street, we get into the studio and she sat me down and she showed me the fake footage for Assassin’s Creed. I remember sitting there, completely kind of like walled off from the whole concept of working in a big game studio — especially Ubisoft. I remember looking at this thing, just the fake footage, and after it was done I turned to Jade and I said, “This game is impossible to make.” Like this has never been done before. I said, “When can I start? This is like the most exciting thing ever.”

Elspeth Tory

(production manager for animation) I also greatly appreciated being on a project led by Jade Raymond. There are so few women in the gaming industry — especially at the time — and she was a great role model.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) They had this core seven people and this is like a brotherhood of seven. This was the original Prince of Persia team that were basically the core team for Assassin’s Creed. And Jade said, “You are going to be interviewed by these people and if you don’t pass that interview, like, you’re out.” Like, “I don’t get to make the decision, and you need to understand that you’re going to be the boss for a bunch of these people. So they’re basically interviewing their own boss. So, you know, you should be aware of that.” I was like, “Yeah, no problem.” Like, you know, “I’m awesome. I’ll totally rock this interview.” And when I got into the interview, it was very, very intimidating. You understand that this group of seven were people who were — first of all, a lot of them were, when the Montreal studio was founded, like they were hires that happened within the first few months of the studio. And secondly, these were people who had lunch together every single day for like seven years. Like they were finishing each other’s sentences. They all knew each other’s work style, and the interview was very, very stressful. And I remember, you know, just trying to be very honest with my answers, and they would kinda give themselves these little hand signals and eye signals during the interview. It was very intimidating. But at the end they brought me on board, and I remember growing from that team that was grown around the core team of seven-plus — I think there was a few extra engineers and artists and stuff, like an extended team, but we were probably about 25 or so, and I think at the end of the project we were well over 150.

Dream team

With a core team that led the critically-acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Assassin’s Creed had high expectations to live up to. And the new recruits would very quickly conclude that The Sands of Time was no fluke.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) I wasn’t hired to be the smartest guy, and by far I was not the smartest programmer. There were a couple of things I did on the team where like I fixed a bug or something like that that the team was blocked on, and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s brilliant.” But it was peanuts compared to what — just the caliber of the people that were on that team was insane. Just completely insane. Some of the top game developers in the industry were part of the project.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) My first impression was, “Wow, OK, this is the real deal. It’s not smoke and mirrors. It’s actual raw talent. And I am certain that the guys who made Prince of Persia are going to do it again.” They are going to do something that will change the world again, and so I was very, very happy and very pleased. And of course I met Alex Drouin, who you’ve talked to — who ended up being a very good friend in the long run. And I realized just how talented an animator can be. It’s just insane to watch the guy work — the speed at which he works and the ability he has at communicating through the character. That was extremely, extremely interesting. So it was like a fairy tale to me, to be perfectly honest. It was my fifth or sixth year in the games industry, working on fun games but, you know, mobile games. Before that I worked on Syberia, which was a pretty OK game but not very challenging technologically. That was a simple point-and-click adventure game with pre-rendered backgrounds. And so then I’m sort of thrown into this. [...] The next-gen consoles were coming out in two years, the 360 and PS3, with an insane budget of RAM of 256 megs, which back then was insanely a lot. And it was like a fairy tale. And that was a long honeymoon with that team — like I could easily say like a year and a half of pure fun and wonder. A definite sense of wonder, seeing just how — like watching us change how games would be made in the future. It was already obvious, as we were doing it, that we were doing something special.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) The really key strength of this project, and of this idea, really lay — in my opinion — between two guys: the main character programmer [Richard Dumas] and the main character animator [Alex Drouin], who were really close to one another, professionally, and they work well together.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) As an animation director, I was working closely with a programmer. We were working really as a duo, full time together, so me and him were trying to push the boundaries of the interaction with the environment without putting too much constraint on the level designers. Because sometimes when you have to interact with a 3D world, you end up having a lot of constraints put on rules. “I need that distance to do this between the two 3D blocks” or whatever. So we were trying to minimize those constraints so it would free the level designer to create a different type — so we’re working on the climbing, how can we make climbing possible without having too much constraint? How can you climb any type of wall? How can you jump in any direction? [And] while we’re doing that, in the old days, we’re doing it in the engine that we did The Sands of Time, because the other engine was not done. They were doing it. So we had maybe two years of waiting, if I remember — something like that — before starting to work in our new engine.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) Shortly after I arrived, I remember the main character programmer passing by my desk and he said, “Do you want to look at my prototype?” Or I asked him, I don’t remember — “Can I look at what you’re doing?” And basically he had the mesh of the prince, a bit higher [resolution] than on The Sands of Time, a bit better done, a bit better modeled, but it was the prince in an empty gym with a tower and like some, some stuff that you could hang onto. And basically it was at the foot of the tower. [...] And I pushed the joystick and I’m talking early 2005 or end of 2004, and what I just saw basically was what you saw in 2007 when you played the game: the system of climbing for the main character. And it was mind-blowing at the time. I was like, “What the fuck am I seeing?” I was not believing what I was seeing. It’s like “What!? What is this? This is amazing.” Because I’d never seen anything like that. It was already the next stage [past] Sands of Time. But you could see why the bet — and I’m going to go a bit more business here, but the bet of [Ubisoft CEO] Yves Guillemot was really audacious and thought through, in my opinion. He knew that this team could deliver something close to an open-world action-adventure game that would, you know, be in the same ocean as GTA, basically, which was on its own.

The assassin

Main character Altaïr was set to be a whole new kind of prince, with a more believable athleticism and a characterization inspired by history — his identity shaped by the secret order of assassins he was born into. Defining exactly how he looked and moved and behaved, however, was a slow process.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) When I joined the team there were already two engineers working on the main character. One of them was working on the fight system, and the other one was working on the navigation. So the free running. So when I joined the project, it was one simple character — like the ancestor of Altaïr — doing basic stuff on the ground, but doing it very impressively, like walking correctly with no foot sliding and stuff like that. It was really, really well done. Already it was very attractive. So when I joined the team, I immediately was put on the fight [system]. The guy who was doing the [fighting] ended up doing the horse, and they gave me the fight system. And I started working with [main character programmer] Richard Dumas. And that guy, I would say, is the sort of the genius behind the assassin. He’s the guy who gave it life, I would say. And he’s the guy who did the prince in Prince of Persia. So I talked to him. We sat down. We ended up clicking — we really get along well, and we really ended up with complementary skills. I assisted him in formulating and structuring his code, and in exchange he would sort of show me how to think [about] the mathematics behind an animated character.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) It took us almost three years to define Altaïr. The first one — you know, to make sure he was unique and make sure he was standing in the crowd as a kind of a hero, as a new protagonist of a game.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) It was really an iterative process. I read on the assassins that they wore white with a red belt and that they had a hoodie, and so we used that, and then we’re like, OK, so in marketing or even in general, when you write your character you try to define the character with stuff. If your character — you know, if he was a mammal, what would he be? If he was a bird, what would he be? And a car, a book, whatever. You do a list. And eventually we decided he would be a bird of prey. That was the idea, and then — now I find it a bit cheesy, but all the names of the main characters of Assassin’s Creed are birds of prey. Altaïr means bird of prey in — I don’t remember — I think in Persian language. And you go around and they’re all named like that.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) It makes sense when you stop and you think about it. Altaïr, he’s more — he [spends a lot of time on rooftops]. He jumps on people. He’s observing. He needs to be discreet. And you look at how he dresses — because the assassin already had a dress code, kind of, that we [had] read about. And we had Khai Nguyen. He drew the first assassin sketch and it ended up being really close to that — really, really close. And he’s an animation director now on For Honor. So he evolved to something else. But he did one good run and he nailed it really quickly. And this may also have an influence on the bird of prey thing.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) That eagle is always somewhere. So those trailers and cinematics were helping us to define the IP itself. Because when you play that game, you don’t necessarily see that eagle. You don’t necessarily see all of those elements. But when you saw the cinematic in the game, it put you in the mood. It puts you in the context of the game.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) I don’t think it was a good idea [...] I think it stuck a bit that the character was really a master assassin, already. He was good at it. He’d spent his entire life inside Alamut. He was a monk. He didn’t know life outside of the assassins group. But it was a mistake because for players, they are not. So it was tough to teach the player, through that character, how to become an assassin. Because why would Altaïr always be ... learning when he knows? That’s when, like Ezio [in Assassin’s Creed 2] — it’s so much easier to tell the story of Ezio when the player will live the same story, the same story arc, because the players are learning and Ezio is learning at the same time.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) We wanted to have someone that was really highly trained and highly skilled, but at the same time this was happening in the 12th century. So we didn’t want him to be too much, also — like he was not an acrobat. He was not a ninja, you know — we didn’t want him to be that skilled. We wanted him to be a bit rough. And sometimes we compared him to a more of a wrestler — like WWE wrestling. So they’re good. But sometimes they are a bit clumsy. Can I say that — clumsy? Or it might be a bit too much. But we wanted him to be more of a brute force, more of a beast, more than a really agile — not too much skills. Some skills, but a bit more of a brute.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) The idea behind the assassin in general back then was it has to be realistic. It has to feel like a human could do it. No somersault jumps — like the prince over the back of the characters in Sands of Time. A really, really athletic character with infinite stamina — a very talented human with infinite stamina is what we were trying to do. Not a superhero of any kind. It was the same with combat. So if you got hit by the blade, you’re dead. That was the original thing — like you’re hurt, then you’re dead. Obviously that ended up being not so fun, so we changed it. But the original mandate we had was that it has to feel realistic, and the way to do that, to make that realistic, was to not have the characters just watch the blades come to them. They have to react to the blade before the hit arrives at the character. So the mandate was roughly that — like how can you make a character that feels real? How can you make a combat system that feels real? The great thing about my job is that that’s sort of the high-level thing we get. And then from that the gameplay programmers, we go in and we sort of fill the holes. So the way we did it is we always had about 350 milliseconds of warning given to the target of a sword hit. So when I would go and swing at a character, when you press the button, the character who was going to receive the hit already knows about it — like he’s warned about [it]. It’s like, “Hey, I’m going to hit you in this much time,” which allows the character to do whatever he wants. So he can completely ignore it. In social and software engineering terms we didn’t want to have Altaïr playing animation on the character in front of him. That’s like rude. Like you don’t go and plug an animation to the character in front of you. You ask him to do it, politely. [Laughs] So the messaging system is a way of communicating politely between entities that might be running right now on different cores, because of multi-processors. It was one of the first times we had a console with multiple cores, and so that’s how we ended up being able to put 90 characters on screen — because every frame, we would distribute those 90 characters on the cores. So at that point that means that it’s really important that if I ask in front of me, “please play this animation,” he needs to have time to finish what he’s doing before answering back. That’s called asynchronous programming, which is almost standard now in web and stuff like that. Back then it wasn’t. [...] That was roughly the mandate we had: how do you make it realistic? And we did it by adding anticipation to emotions and making sure that the characters were warned in advance of what was going to happen to them.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) We all knew that we had that character in a white robe. He was looking more like a monk than a warrior. So we had a lot of work to do to make him a little bit more badass, edgy. One of my main influences there was Storm Shadow, the G.I. Joe. You know, he’s a ninja, he’s white, and I remember the design teams saying, “OK, you guys, it’s interesting but now on the concept we only have a knife. And we need six of them for the gameplay. Oh, let’s have six knives.” But if I put six knives on you, you look a little bit more badass, and it starts to be less accurate — historically less accurate, more gameplay oriented.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) He is like the ultimate badass and you feel like you’re that badass. That’s really sort of what we were trying to convey.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) And then the animation team’s like, “Hey guys, your big white robe, we cannot animate that. It’s too long.” So we kind of cut it. And at the end, it looks like the feather of an eagle, if you see what I mean. So we kind of transformed the character from a medieval, historical point of view, to a hero. A game hero. And it was kind of the goal of the conception team to make sure that we had a character that was standing out in the crowd and was standing out in the game, and if you put him on Game Informer with all other heroes of the game industry, you see what I mean, he can stand out also.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) I remember back then looking for parkour on videos. There was only a few guys. I think there was that French guy. I don’t remember. […] These days, you just type parkour and you have like a zillion of videos. But right from the get go it was our idea. And I guess, you have, it’s following the Prince of Persia. And so I had already made a lot of research on that. We just wanted it to be a bit more believable. The keyword here is “believable.” Not realistic. It’s subtle, but there’s a kind of a difference between the both of them. So as long as you believe it could happen, we’ll make it happen. So “believable” is the keyword here. I don’t know if you could believe that a guy could jump down five stories into a bale of hay, but hey, we made it believable somehow. [Laughs]

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) When we did the bales of hay, one of the effects artists — I know it’s just silly, but it makes me laugh. One of the effects artists made it so that the character would turn a tiny bit yellow when you came out of the bale of hay, but just a tiny bit. But as I was working on it, I was doing some testing coming in and out, in and out of the bale of hay. But what happened is he didn’t reset the initial value when you would go in the bale of hay. So if you did it repeatedly, like about 20 times, you ended up with this bright yellow canary-looking assassin.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) The bales of hay, that’s the fantasy that you’ve seen in a lot of Hollywood movies where you just jump into a chariot full of hay and then suddenly the guards don’t know where the hero is, so we just used that. I re-read a bunch of stuff. I think it was the second month or third month I read Alamut, the book that people think was the starting point — but it wasn’t. We were already in it. And it’s part of the book about who were the assassins. It’s just this novel written by like a Slovenian in the 1930s and you should read it. I guess this is where I took the idea of — like the master and the disciple relationship is really strong in Alamut. And so that was where the Al Mualim [Altaïr’s mentor, the leader of the Assassins] and Altaïr relationship came from. We had this idea that maybe another master is using Altaïr. But the myth of the old man of the mountain is so powerful. You know, jumping into a bale of hay is cool because of the fantasy and whatnot, but it’s part of the myth of the old man. The old man would ask his warriors to jump off of cliffs to show their faith, and so that’s the myth of the old man, and that they would like kill without being like even noticed before or after.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) I remember a time at Ubi, maybe a year before the game’s release, I had a couple of people concerned [thinking] maybe our [character's outfit was] too white. I was like, “Yeah, but it needs to stand out. It needs to be unique.” And we had references and we were like, “I think we’re pretty sure about what we’re doing but OK, let’s do a month of concept with other colors.” We were doing concepts and we were looking at them like, “I’m not sure. I think we lose personality, we lose uniqueness, we lose edginess.” And then I remember myself going back to the boss’s office and showing him the concept of the white one [from] a month ago and saying even though we worked for a month, it’s still the best one. If I’d let that kind of thing go, at the end of the day [Altaïr's outfit] could have been brown and maybe we wouldn’t have had the impact we have today.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) By the end we were like five engineers working on Altaïr — and Altaïr being sort of the prototype for all the other NPCs, too, by the way. All the NPCs in the game are tiny Altaïrs — something that people might not know, but we didn’t encode another character for the NPCs. All the NPCs were running the same code as the assassin. And so we all helped each other out with little bits of code.

The Animus

What began as a story conceit to explain why your character can die and yet not be dead soon morphed into the sci-fi hook that has allowed the series to survive more than a decade of new releases. The Animus is a machine that can access the “genetic memories” locked in people’s DNA, passed down through their ancestors, and translate them into a simulated reality — in this case, the Holy Land during the Third Crusade.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) I think it was kind of there since the beginning in Patrice’s mind. I think it was really the way to explain all that travel, you know, because since the beginning we knew that we wanted to do more than one place. It was, “OK, let’s maybe explore all the main assassinations that happened during like the last thousand years,” you know? I remember one meeting [we were] talking about John F. Kennedy — you know, everyone that has been assassinated — and now it’s funny to see all those games and be like, “Oh, what’s going to be the next Ubisoft choice?” It’s always interesting to see. We never saw Japan, but can you imagine it as a ninja? It’s so easy to imagine.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) The Animus was a bit also — in Sands of Time, you played a story told, basically, just like the prince was telling the story to Farah in the future. And then you do at the end, uh, I don’t know if you’ve played Sands of Time until the end, but yeah, so the big rewind. I wanted the same narrative device, so at first it was somebody telling a story. It was the old assassin telling a story of his life while he was like recovering from an injury, but it was a bit cliché — too much like The Sands of Time somehow. And then one night I saw a TV show about DNA on a history channel. I don’t remember where. And I thought, “What if there’s a machine that could actually read memories of your DNA, and that your ancestor lives through your DNA, not only biologically, but really like memories?” And I thought, “Oh, so we could have this machine that lets you relive the lives of your ancestors through your DNA.” So that’s the Animus. But the Animus is the same narrative device as the prince telling Farah his story. And that was to justify all the — you know, the HUD, the “Oh you’re dead, but it didn’t happen that way.” So basically it’s true that somehow Assassin’s Creed is a Prince of Persia game. Alamut is set in Persia — the first castle. So it is like Altaïr is a prince of Persia.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) Marketing was a little bit cold about the idea. They were not sure about it because if you want to sell a medieval game, do people want to go back in time and realize that it’s not the true experience? They weren’t sure about it. If you look at the first E3 trailer we did, it was all about medieval aspect of it. The under siege city. You enter that big city, but at the end of it, in the last seconds, we added a glitch — a modern glitch.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) This is not a historical game. It’s a sci-fi universe in which you play in a historical setting. And that’s important. Assassin’s Creed, I said it before — it’s a sci-fi story. You go through the Animus. The end of the world is not in the medieval time. The end of the world is in the present time. You’re trying to save the world of the present time, and then Altaïr’s story is a different story. He’s got this mission, but it’s not about the end of the world. It’s just go through, like we said, this idea of like who am I? What is going on? Oh, like, I leave my house, which is Alamut, the castle, and I discover — and plus the person I trusted the most is using me, and that’s his story, but Assassin’s Creed is about the Templars and the assassins through time. And that’s the present time. And we started right away. People thought they were buying this only like sword fighting, medieval game. And we started with, [makes explosion sound] nope, you’re in a machine. There’s DNA, and this like — I know a lot of people said, “What the? Where am I?” And then again also when you finished and we raised more questions than we answered them, and so people were like, “Whoa, what’s going on?” And that was great.

The apple of Eden

Games that leave a mark on the industry often draw on a wide range of external influences. Assassin’s Creed was no different. Besides Prince of Persia, Alamut and Désilets’ well-worn copy of a book on secret societies, the team looked to all sorts of sources in film, literature, history and beyond.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) We’re 10 people together for nine months to a year, trying to figure it out. I remember that meeting of like, “OK, what would be that thing that everybody wants? And it was, if I remember correctly, Philippe Morin, who’s now head of Red Barrels, the guys who are making Outlast — we worked together, and he said, “What if we used the apple of Eden? This apple, let’s say the apple existed.” That’s a neat idea. And it’s funny, somehow. Everybody kills each other to get an apple. But it’s the apple of Eden, right? It’s the apple of knowledge. It’s the apple. And then we looked around [in] all of those [medieval] paintings and we saw the [royal orb — a spherical object portrayed in the hands of rulers to symbolize faith, the globe and world domination, in reference to the biblical apple].

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) It was really interesting to do all this research and, you know, blend that past and the modern aspect. It was for us a creative aspect. The art direction, you know, the modern aspect was really clean. It was kind of the iPod look, the iPhone look at the time, you know? Remember they were all white in the mid-2000s? All the iPhones were white. Everything was white. So we went for that for the present room, and the medieval aspect was more gritty. At the same time, we’re not doing like a classical medieval game where you construct a castle and blah blah blah. So we didn’t want that kind of look. We wanted a modern look, something edgy.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) The glitching, you know, wasn’t a big technical challenge. Most of it was trying to make it look — kind of even the present day thing was mostly about style. So Mathieu Leduc — I became really good friends with him on the project. He was like the frontend artist. He did all the menus, but he’s also really much like kind of the style guy. Not only how the menus look in terms of style, but how the present was supposed to look as a style, and how the glitching would work as a style, because that was sort of where the, you know, the fact that you were in a machine kind of came in. And he did these really, really amazing mockups that made it look really good. He did it with a lot of the same tools we used for the user interface, kind of glitching up the screen. [...] From the game’s point of view, it was just another level. Like when you go into present, you’re just in a level where it’s the same gameplay mechanics as when you’re in, you know, Damascus or whatever. We just had a whole different stylization around it to make it look really kind of futuristic and cool.

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) One of the main [style] references was the film Black Hawk Down, you know, where the image is really colorful, really, you know, if you are at that place, it’s really cool. The image is really blue, so we [used those kinds] of filters on the screen to differentiate the cities within the game. So all those aspects, to make sure the game was not looking like an old medieval game, but something modern and something edgy — even though our setting was old. [...] Kingdom of Heaven came out when we’re already in production or in pre-production or something so, you know, we already had models of templars and all those elements. So for us it was kind of a validation from Hollywood, you know? We had a setting that was really more — maybe a little bit more European than American. All the boss fights had French names. So it’s not something usual in games. It is not “bad guy.” It’s Robert de Sablé. So it doesn’t look that bad. You know what I mean? So we were like, is it still a good idea to use those names? But when the movie came out then that validated our choices, plus it gave us a lot of references from the customs for the backgrounds — you know, the background layers and all that stuff. [...] So it was really interesting for us that that movie came out. We went there with the whole team in the movie theatre. Everyone was there.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) I received a bunch of fan messages about, “Oh, I was in Florence and it’s like as if I had already been here before — so I found this, I found that.” And it’s funny. Five years ago I went to Jerusalem for the very first time. We didn’t go — I don’t know why we didn’t go back then, but we didn’t go for Assassin’s Creed 1. But I went back in 2013 and I looked and said, “Oh, we did a good job. It’s — yeah, it works. I feel like I’ve been here before.” I spent four years of my life trying to redo that city and it worked.

A living world

The game’s design called for a living, breathing world — one that could be explored freely and that felt like it was there before the player and it would continue to beat with or without their presence. This presented a new challenge for a team accustomed to making linear games.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) Choices are tough in life, but fun in games somehow. And different. And so that’s why after — it seems so easy to do a linear game, but it’s not, because it has to work. [...] Like the room here has to be finished and cannot break because there’s another one attached to it and another one and another one and it’s kinda like — it’s true, it’s a looong movie to write, somehow. And then when you give freedom to people, it’s more about systems, and the system will take care of a bunch of narrative moments. If your system is narratively-driven, as much as possible, you let the player finish all the chapters. And I found that more interesting than just following what somebody else asks me to do. It’s a personal taste, but you can see that people actually enjoy that. So the guy that goes around hitting everyone, I guess he’s enjoying it. And so we’ve done our job. And somebody who’s trying to be really be an assassin can play the same game, too, in different ways. So I pleased two people instead of only one.

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) We were used to placing all the athletic ingredients at specific points to match the animation of the hero. And we were used to controlling the sequence of gameplay. With Assassin’s Creed, we had to think in full 3D. Think as a 3D grid. We had to fill the streets [and] the façades of buildings with lots of objects in order to give lots of option to the player, so he would never get stuck in his path. Also, we had to think about objects that would make him go up, objects to make him go across big gaps and objects that would allow the player to go down — like the famous haystacks.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) I remember when AC3 came out, I was not at Ubi. I’d left Ubi by that time, already, but one of my designers told me. He said, “Ah, I finally killed a wolf.” Because in AC1, on paper, there was that living and breathing world, but also in the kingdom, the idea was to have like hunting and fishing and a bit of a survival where before you go into the city you would prepare in the kingdom, and eventually they did it, but almost four or five years after we actually designed it. So AC1 was a bit bigger. So the struggle was not only about the prince and the assassin, but also what would be an Assassin’s Creed game. And I had, you know, other ideas than just an action game. So that was a bit — some people said, “Ah, I just want the action! I want the action!” And it’s like, OK, but there’s other pleasures in life than only killing everyone. [...] It was all about contemplation as a pleasure that you’re finding in Assassin’s Creed, which is important for the games I make. And that was also a struggle. “So why do we have that? It’s not fast enough! There’s not big explosions!” So, yeah, but gaming and fun can be wider than just going around with a sword and killing everyone, even though you can do that — because nothing is true; everything is permitted.

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) For the levels, we approached it differently [to what we were used to]. From a top-view perspective, we highlighted the places that were critical. For example, between two objectives, between the assassin’s cache to an objective, the fastest way to get to a certain landmark, etcetera. Once we had the picture of all the places that the player will be more prone to take, then we spent more time polishing the fluidity in those zones.

Elspeth Tory

(production manager for animation) This spectacular world was being created for our characters, so we had to ensure that the people in it looked like they belonged there and weren’t just robots with a small set of constrained movements. Managing and coordinating the creation of such a massive number of animations was a big challenge, as was knowing when to stop!

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) In AC1 you never lose control over the character. Never. There’s no real cutscenes in Assassin’s Creed 1. And so you can always move the character inside cutscenes, and me, I was always, when I played, never looking toward the character who was talking to me. I was always giving my back. I don’t know why. This is how I played the character. I thought really, that guy’s not afraid of anything, so even like, “Yeah, look, you can attack me from the back if you want to, but I’m so fast that I’ll be ready.” Like in hockey when you’re the goalie sometimes you’ll say “Yeah, shoot here, shoot here,” and he’s ready to catch it. So it’s a bit the same. But I guess, yeah, it was this character thinking that, and then maybe it was me at the same time — it’s the character thinking that he is an adult, then figuring out that, oh, he’s not at all. Adulthood is elsewhere and people are using you, my friend. The real adult is using you.

A blade in the crowd

Whether posing as a monk or gently pushing his way through the throngs, Altaïr was meant to blend in at will, but also to spark into action at a moment’s notice. The team had to make dense crowds filled with individuals that could believably both walk the streets as if going about their business and react suitably to Altaïr’s unpredictable behaviors.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) Some people were doing the pathfinding; some people were doing the editor stuff. I was more helping with the behavioral core thing. We knew we wanted a crowd. Our tagline was “a blade in the crowd,” very, very shortly after. So we knew you will be playing kind of a ninja in a crowd killing people, and there will be fights. So I did a bit of all that, actually — laid out the stones for the systems that would support behaviors, and then the reaction system as well. I mean, and I’m not talking about implementing them, but I’m talking about the foundations for supporting the implementation of the engine stuff. Engine stuff with the AI mindset. So basically what that means is, like you could call it decision trees, could be state machine, could be anything, but these kind of things.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) We wanted to have a different tempo in the games — so walking was also really important. Walking in the crowd and being an assassin. Always being in the action.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) Having a realistic crowd, that was the mandate. So knowing you’re a third-person action-adventure game, and you will have to go through the crowds — how does this work? So we designed the interaction with the main programmer, as well, because he was doing from the main character point of view, you know, the pushing people, hand on the shoulder kind of thing. So basically detecting people at runtime, making sure that, you know, people are looking at him. But more importantly, the first challenge was displaying and supporting so many people. First, because we didn’t know what the hardware was. It was really a saga in that sense, because you not only — usually you don’t know where you’re going when you’re making a video game, but here, especially, building a brand new engine, brand new AI, on the brand new hardware, that’s pretty extreme.

Elspeth Tory

(production manager for animation) We had banks and banks of animations — many more than anything any of us had ever worked on! Sylvain Bernard was the one with the vision for the non-playable characters. I helped to coordinate the massive amounts of animations required to make it work.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) We procedurally generated the [crowd] characters using a system that was kind of — we call it like a Frankenstein system. So we would have like a library of heads, hairstyles, bodies — upper bodies, lower bodies. And we would have animations that were designed in such a way that they would fit all of the body parts. So the proportions were within a certain tolerance to make the animation look good.

Elspeth Tory

(production manager for animation) We had lots of motion capture sessions to help populate the animation bank, but of course everything needed to be manually polished by a team of animators. The blends needed to be seamless and the animations needed to interconnect. They weren’t the most exciting animations to work on, but were so essential in creating a believable world.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) And the outer shell — what we call the envelope of the characters — was designed in such way that when the animations would flex, regardless of what the wrapping around that was, the flexing wouldn’t cause distortion or artifacting. So each piece was like a Lego brick — in fact, everything in Assassin’s Creed was a Lego brick. Even the city itself. Everything was basically — in movies they call it kitbashing, where, you know, there [were] just different pieces that were sort of assembled. So we did the characters that way. They weren’t procedurally assembled in the way that probably a game would talk about today, where the animation is kind of synthesized out of nothing or synthesized out of a much more abstract concept of locomotion or bio-mechanical movement. But we had a more restricted form of that, which was pieces that we knew worked together so we could kind of kitbash a character, and because you have to generate hundreds of them we had — I can’t remember what we called them, but they were kind of character definition sheets that would say, “In this particular area of, let’s say Masyaf or Jerusalem or whatever, in this particular area of the zone, here’s the sheet that you use to generate merchants or pedestrians or guards.” And that would restrict the pieces that we could select to create those characters. So we could have an area that appeared more rich and a zone where people appeared more poor. But essentially we had this giant kit and we would just sort of have recipes to figure out which Lego bricks could you pull and what were the rules for assembling them so that we could get different styles or different types of crowds in different parts of the city.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) Once they were spawned, they were spawned, so then they needed to behave. At first it was just about the people were going on a path doing some kind of animation and that’s it, and that was really, really dramatic. And then we allowed for only one reaction. So basically they saw you climb on the building and so they have to leave because they’re afraid or whatever, or you do something that you punched someone and everybody leaves. So the really the first kernel of that system was really, they have a basic behavior and then they react and that’s it. And the idea is that they go far away and we spawn them. If you play AC1 again and you and you follow one, you will see that he runs forever. [Laughs]

Everything is permitted

Patrice Désilets repeats it over and over when he talks about Assassin’s Creed: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” The creed of the assassins was meant to permeate through every facet of the game’s design.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) My first role in the early days was to try to understand everything that people were working on and how to make their lives easier. I saw myself very often as more like a monk or a healer, you know, than like a warrior or an assassin on the team. [...] I focused initially on getting all of the code and building it and trying to live the day-to-day of what the team was doing, and trying to live and understand what the pain points were. And what I realized really early on was, you know, this was a really big project with a lot of really complex stuff. And the biggest thing that was preventing us from achieving our vision was all of the processes and bottlenecks of like building the code and iterating. Our pipeline was really sophisticated but not efficient. And very often engineers would spend, you know, 20, 30 minutes waiting for a build of the game, for example, and to me that was completely unacceptable because that’s 20, 30 minutes where, you know, somebody’s basically essentially shut down from being able to interact with the code or play the game.

Elspeth Tory

(production manager for animation) With a wide open world, the possibilities were endless. Add that to what had now become a new IP, and the scope became even wider. But having the close connection between animators and programmers allowed us to push boundaries in a way that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) So we definitely had a lot of freedom in terms of how it would play. At the end, of course, Patrice would take that and say, “You know what, a bit more of this, a bit more of that,” and we would tweak it, but at some point it was like we can’t because of this and that, and if we do this, we’re gonna lose other things. Then at the end, of course, he would make the final decision, but for most of the time he would agree and just maybe without giving us the solution, just giving us more of a, “Oh, let’s try a bit more towards there,” but we would end up coming up with a lot of the answers.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) The prince is about trying to figure out what designers in Montreal have planned for the players. So you can run on walls but on particular walls it’s better to do it. You have to follow the path. Now [with Assassin’s] you open it up, you want to open the world, so how do we do it? We said, well, there shouldn’t be any path.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) It was absolute hell [to implement]. I mean, it was an idea that we almost gave up on at almost every critical moment in the project. One of the things we had a lot of difficulty with was — well, there’s two main challenges with that. So the first challenge we had was: how do you create an open-ended world where you can navigate everything consistently? Normally when there’s a critical path it works really well because you can hone the collision volume and what we call the guidance. So guidance are things that say, for example, this is a walkable area, or this is a thing you can grab, or this is the thing you can do a pull-up on. So normally if there’s a critical path, a lot of the guidance and the collision mesh is done in such a way that it’s kinda honed and tested over and over and over so it works. But when you are building, you know, Jerusalem, nobody’s gonna have the time to go and debug the collision volume in the guidance for the whole of Jerusalem. It’s impossible. On top of that, the way Jerusalem is assembled is a series of repeatable pieces, right? So if you really look at an Assassin’s Creed level, it’s a bunch of Lego bricks that are just kind of combined in variations to make it look interesting and draw the eyes’ attention away from the fact that the same thing is being used over and over. Because of that, the guidance doesn’t always fit together perfectly, right? So the artist put pieces together to make it look interesting. But the guidance might bug out [...] and the AI would get confused. The way we resolved that is by doing a whole bunch of automated guidance optimizations. So once the Lego bricks were put together, we would do like a smoothing pass over all the guidance to kind of merge them together. [...] The other problem was — this was a key one. It was a game design problem. You have a completely open world. How do you make it fun, right? How do you make a challenge when you can go anywhere? And that’s when we brought Maxime Béland into the project, later, as the lead game designer. Originally Patrice was creative director and in charge of game design. And then when we got further along with the project, we realized that Patrice was much better at kind of the creative part, but he didn’t have as much experience on like the hardcore kind of game design mechanics. We brought this really great guy in, Maxime, and we brought Patrick [Plourde] and a couple other guys who worked with him into the project. And Max basically built the game design Bible. Just really, really amazing stuff. One of the things we did that was really eye opening was we started doing Flash animations — like just 2D lines where we would put like a bunch of dots at: here’s some guards, here’s the target, and, you know, the assassin comes in here, you distract the guards, and then you can go here and create a distraction. Go and talk to the target. We did these super basic cheap and cheerful gameplay mechanics that showed the types of things you could do in an open world, where you could have creatively solved the problem without needing to have the geometry or the configuration of the level being a big part of that.

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) We tried to create choke points that the player [would] not really feel. Around a target, we put more enemies on the roof. And on the ground level we managed to create streets and big gates that [would] lead the player towards his target so we could control a little bit the amount of enemies that the player might encounter. We also made sure, again in a top view perspective, to draw all the hiding places that should be put in the city. We had to consider that the player needed to break the line of sight and then get inside the hiding place as soon as possible.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) This is the beginning of parkour, also, so we went on the web and we saw those guys in France doing this crazy shit. So I said, “Oh, let’s use it.” But technically it cannot be about the texture. It cannot be about something we placed. It has to be about the ruleset, and let’s use architecture for real. And so just like in GTA, where you can go from point A to point B and there’s not a lot in between that — instead of having a car, let’s have a character that can go everywhere. And this is how it all started, basically. So it’s parkour, but it’s not parkour, because we didn’t use all the parkour moves. So it’s still this like assassin doing climbing and jumping, rooftop to rooftop, gameplay. That was brand new, this idea of like let’s have a character that, if he runs straight, nothing can stop him in the architecture.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) It was press forward and hold the button, and you’re going to look cool. And you can cross the whole city.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) And then, again, next generation, so the architecture is if something sticks out more than 10 centimeters from the plane then those became points of anchor for the animation system and whatnot. And then suddenly, really quickly, it was cool.

David Chateauneuf

(lead level designer) Climbing and exploring were playing a big part in the Assassin’s Creed experience, so we wanted to give the player a reason to reach a higher level: revealing the map. We got lot of inspiration from real pictures of towers that existed at that time.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) The climbing was something that was quite unique, I would say, when it came out. I mean, you could definitely — it didn’t exist in any game, climbing with a 3D environment that actually interacts with the wall and with the 3D pieces. That was quite a challenge. We were quite proud of the parkour, also — the way he interacts with the 3D environment, jumping and having all the targeted jumps would make him really look real, and I could feel they generated a realistic feel, a believability of feel of the character. We were far from Mario in terms of look. [Laughs] [...] We didn’t know how a character that interacts with the 3D environment open world should feel. There’s a lot of possibilities and not many buttons. [Laughs] This is where also Patrice had a lot of input — into how to map the action. That’s always a complex question when you at least attempt to make a bit of a new genre. How can you map them? The idea behind the assassin was the puppeteer. I guess [Patrice] talked about it. So the feet, the hands, mapped on the pad. But it’s hard to stick to it all the time because at the end, they are really movements that you mapped on the pad, and there’s a lot more directions than there [are] buttons. So sometimes there’s conflicts: Where should we put that action? Is it maybe the hands, or the feet? So there was a lot of arguing.

Understanding intent

What players want to happen isn’t always what they get, especially in a game as open-ended as Assassin’s Creed. The Assassin’s team tried what it could to at least anticipate the intent — if not the explicit desire — of a player’s input. And of Patrice Désilets’ creative direction.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) Sometimes when you make a decision for the player, you never know if you made the right decision. What was his intention? Did he want to do this or that? So you make a choice for him. And what is important in the end is that if you make the wrong choice it doesn’t give him a negative feedback. If you put him in trouble because you didn’t do what he asked for, that’s bad, but in the end, in AC1, if you wanted to jump there and you jump a bit there — if in the end it doesn’t change much for you, you are still getting away, who cares? Your experience is not ruined.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) I always considered Patrice kinda like the other lobe of my brain in a way because Assassin’s Creed was his baby. He was very, very emotionally attached to it. His vision for what Assassin’s was going to be was the north star for the project and he had such a passionate vision for what he wanted to achieve. So I didn’t feel like I had to make big contributions to that. Unfortunately, most of my job was figuring out how to say no to him in ways that helped the project to move forward, but also to understand how to do that — where if I had to chip away at the fringes of the vision versus take something away at the core, you know, that was what I had to do. I’ll give you an example. We had this really big offsite at one point, shortly after the project was delayed. And it was basically a [time to] go back to the drawing board and figure out, how do we use this extension we were given to actually ship this thing? So how do we pare the game down so we have a realistic chance of shipping something? And I remember being in that workshop and being absolutely adamant the horse has to go, that we cannot do the horse. Like “horse is cut” — I don’t care what you say. Like the technical challenge of doing the horse was, you know, not achievable in the time we had. And I had tons of data to back it up. And I remember in that meeting Patrice literally telling me, “Listen, look around you. There’s cars everywhere. Back then, the car was the horse. This game does not sell — it is not believable — unless there’s horses everywhere.” [...] And he said it’s not negotiable. It’s not a game mechanic. It is part of the world. It is part of the living, breathing world we’re trying to create. And I remember that was like, I just couldn’t argue against that.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) Well, you have to know that my job is to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Because at the end of the day I’m not making it. I don’t care, really, how long it’s going to take, how tough it’s going to be. Then I’m a good salesman. That’s basically it. That’s my job. I’m a good designer, though — you know, I can put stuff together and it makes sense, but I don’t really care. And it’s the same today with my team. It’s like, just find a way. And the horse was a tough thing to do, for sure. What I really actually wanted — and eventually they did it [in the later games] — was to have a horse in the cities. This is where I had a hard time. I didn’t get it. Often what I feel with people like Mathieu is like they see the technical side, but they put into this also their feeling about [how it’s] not going to look good and it’s not going to be fun. And I’m like, “Just do the technical side. Let me evaluate if it’s fun or good looking.” And so they have to, actually, because it goes both ways, right? So I’m selling the idea of like, “Let’s have a horse in the city.” And it was like, “Yeah, that’s going to be weird,” and I said, “Yeah, but it’s important.” And then they have to find a technical reason not to do it. And in that case they found it. [...] There’s one entrance to Jerusalem [in the game]. You ride there, and you have to leave your horse there, which goes against “nothing is true; everything is permitted,” goes against the freedom. Suddenly you cannot go inside the city with the horse. So I couldn’t convince Mathieu on this because he actually showed me that there would be a problem about the speed at which the horse goes. It [would] be tough inside the city, if I remember correctly, to load up fast enough some of the textures and the people, and so there would be too many things popping up. So I said, “OK, we cannot fix it in time, so let’s leave the horse [at the gates].” Because a city was a lot more dense than the kingdom and that.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) Another thing he was very attached to is that there should be children in the game — because if you notice, there’s no children. People are all one size. That was because we didn’t have the animation resources to make people of different sizes because, all else being equal, people at different sizes move their bodies in different ways and it just meant more work to do children.

“Everybody was terrified of touching Richard’s code”

Huge swathes of critical game code — the code that gave Altaïr life — were the responsibility of programmer Richard Dumas, an engineer viewed with equal measures of fear and awe by his technical colleagues.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) The horse. We had one engineer on it who was a little bit more junior, worked on it for pretty much like a year. And then Richard [Dumas], who was the guy who programmed the prince, took it over and kind of brought it over the finish line. I remember Richard used to sit at his desk and he would be programming the horse in like a zen-like state, and he had Shadow of the Colossus [running] and he would just have the horse walking around. He would sit there and he would code, and then he would just play around with the horse a little bit. [Then] he would go back and code. He had kind of absorbed himself into this world of the Shadow of the Colossus horse being kind of his gold standard, and it wasn’t like he was trying to copy it, but he was just looking stylistically at everything the horse was doing. Richard was one of these people who was like a really crappy programmer when you get down to it, like on a technical level, but he could look at something move in a video game and he could figure out how to hack it into code and make it work. [...] Everybody was terrified of touching Richard’s code, but it would always do the most amazing things.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) His code is notoriously dirty [Laughs], but I don’t care about that, personally, as long as it’s contained. And that he’s good at. Like he’s really, really good at keeping things in a box. So what I would do is I would draw these boxes and he would fill them in. So I helped out with, for example, the beam — what we called the beam is the walking on a narrow floor where a character would go and balance there. So I assisted him with sort of creating the structure that represents that beam so that he [could] read that and then adapt the motion to that. [...] Richard did all the great stuff. Like all the climbing on the walls, the beam stuff, the whole freerunning and the leap of faith.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) He looked at everything coming from the joystick as an intention, and then he would look at the intention and then he would look at the current biomechanical configuration of the character and figure out what is the most logical translation of that intention based on the current biomechanical disposition of the character. So he would look at all the possibilities and he would pick the one that looked the most natural. He had all this really complicated logic, but it all came down to that. And then once the result was picked, he would then figure out the sequence of animations that it would take to actually do that. And that might involve kind of like a small jump or just shifting the body weight. We used this middleware called HumanIK to basically — we’d run the animation, but we would then massage the animation with HumanIK, which would sort of resample the animations instead of just blending between the animations. HumanIK would actually put things like shifting weight and, you know, your joints don’t all move linearly when you’re doing this versus when you’re doing it to the side. So HumanIK would kinda like smooth out the joint movements and apply different amounts of energy to the joints, depending on what you’re doing and what was most natural to the human body. So he integrated that in and that was kind of like another layer on top. Like the first layer was “I pushed the joystick; I want something,” and then figuring that out and translating that all the way down to the very lowest level of blending animations together to make it happen.

Combat choreography

Ubisoft Montreal built a motion capture studio during Assassin’s Creed’s development. The animators wasted little time playing with their new toy in the quest to make a game that looked and felt believable — if not quite real.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) I don’t know if Alex told you about this, but he would go and practice — choreograph these things in the garage downstairs.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) I recall we were, at the beginning, using mocap a bit more intensively. Ubisoft had just built a mocap studio as we were doing the game. So we started using it, and we were our own actors. We were not hiring stunt men. We would do it like — for most cases, I’m Altaïr. I mean, I was doing martial arts back then, like kung fu. So we did all the choreography ourselves of the fight. We were going in Ubisoft’s garage, with the cars, because this is where we had space to swing a sword — with me and the other animator — and then we would go to the mo-cap shoot and dress ourselves and beat the crap out of [each other].

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) That was amazing to watch — to watch these guys. They had these foam swords, these sort of props, and they would go in the garage and they would try out moves with the camera and it was “OK, that’s sort of the moves that we’re going to do.” And then they would go to the mocap studio that had just opened back then and they would capture all that, come back and inject that into the systems I made.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) As an animator, when you mocap it’s good because you just act what you want to animate. You focus on the movement and you don’t care about the timing because you’ll bring it back and you’ll re-edit the timing as you want. So even if you make it slower, now you do it and you look like a beast.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) What I do is I create sort of the slots for these guys to fill, and they would sort of fill the slots and I would get their data integrated. I would just be like completely flabbergasted by how it looked. I had no idea when I did it that it would look so good. And then they would go, “OK, we’re going to do another session” and they would go again and I would get all excited because I knew that in a few days I would get more moves. And it was like that for a few months. It was really, really great.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) The fight system, which I supported for a long time, and played with it for a long, long time — it was really weird because the system has been really criticized, as you know.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) There was this expectation back then that more casual gamers were going to be buying the next-gen consoles, which did end up being rather true. So we wanted to have a game that’s easy to play, and that looks good. It was sort of a blockbuster ambition that we wanted to have. [...] And it’s really the hardcore players that criticized that, and I completely understand their criticism. It completely makes sense. It’s like the exact opposite of Dark Souls when you think about it, and it’s really a trade off that you have to do. It’s really, really hard to get both things looking amazing and not being a little bit cooked and preordered — and get the frame-perfect finesse of a fighter game. That’s not what we did at all, but it felt good in the counter attacks.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) You can play the game without fighting, in theory, because you’re a ninja, basically. You’re a blade in the crowd. You’re not supposed to be seen. It’s a stealth game more than a fight game, and yet you could trigger a fight anywhere, in any kind of environment. And same for the crowd, so you could be in a narrow street and suddenly trigger a fight, and this had to work. So we had endless bug fixing on pathfinding and on behaviors, and, I mean, you’ve only played the final game, so you can’t really relate to the building of it and the different stages of poorness it was in [Laughs], especially at the beginning. It was the first time I had to face this kind of critique and [decide whether to take it personally]. And it was a really good learning [experience] for me, because people were telling me at E3, I remember, “Well, they seem to be waiting, one after the other. It seems a bit — it doesn’t seem realistic.” And I had tried all of that, basically. We didn’t have support for more than two characters being animated and synchronized at the same time, which is what essentially the combo kill is. And so if two of them were attacking, you suddenly had to synchronize three characters, and the system was not supporting it at the time.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) [At first] it was one-on-one combat. We only did that internally. I think they might have done it for multiplayer a bit later on. But originally it was one-on-one, two controllers, and we would fight each other. And really the idea was that it was [supposed to look choreographed]. So when I swing a blade at you, you sort of have a few milliseconds to get in step towards what we are going to do as a choreography, as a move. So this implies the assassin would step in a few centimeters, adaptively, towards the target. The target would turn toward the assassin. And then there would be two clips started in sync, depending on the outcome. So for example, if the character would block, you would have the character quickly raise his blade to meet the blade of the assassin as it hits. So we had the blade hitting the blade — part of the mandate was we didn’t want to have a classic video game where I swing the sword and as the sword hits the collision of the character, then he reacts. We wanted to have the anticipation before that. And this really came from the original thing where, well, if we don’t react initially, the character won’t have time to block the hit, and therefore he’ll be dead. So that constraint ended up not being true in the long run, but it still guided the work that we were doing.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) So I was telling the [people who played the demo at E3], “No, we tried, but basically you cannot play the game [that way] because you get utterly defeated and you cannot play. There is no fun at all, you know. If they start attacking at the same time, you’re basically — you’re dead.” And it’s not even Dark Souls, because it’s an unfair game. But they couldn’t see it, and I learned that, yeah, we don’t speak the same language. They’re from a different field and they don’t really — they cannot really see it.

Fun and games

When you spend four years on a big project, especially with a young team, it’s only natural that you’ll let your hair down from time to time. For the team at Ubisoft Montreal, that often meant parties and beer. And more beer, only now it’s imported.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) I remember one time we had annual reviews and we were reviewing everybody’s performance review, and [...] Claude Langlais was the other major engineering lead. So everything that was like the game engine was Claude and everything that was the game itself was me, but, Claude and I were sort of, you know, the two technical people involved in the game. We both reported directly to Jade. So when we had to give reviews to the technical team, typically what we did, because there’s so much crossover between the game and the game engine [...] Claude and I would do the review of people together. So someone would come in, and regardless of whether Claude was their boss or I was their boss, Claude and I would give the review together, and I remember one year — I think it was the last year project — we brought a bottle of vodka and sat it down on the table, and everybody coming in had to take a shot of vodka before they were reviewed. Claude and I would take a shot of vodka. Then [the] next one would come in, a shot of vodka, Claude and I would take [another] shot of vodka. So as the reviews went on and on, Claude and I had more and more vodka, but the reviews got more and more interesting. We did take it very seriously, but we also made sure, you know, people always knew where they stood. It wasn’t like the review was some kind of big surprise for people. So we had a little bit of fun with it.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) The way it works at Ubisoft is that you have a lot of friends and you have different games and most of those teams have sort of different values. And I think that performance evaluation was not considered very highly by the Assassin’s team, which was the Sands of Time team. [Laughs] They were like, “We’re doing it because HR’s asked us to do it, but we don’t care.” Patrice — usually he would say to his designers, “Did I tell you something bad like any day? No. Well then everything’s fine. You know, just keep working. I don’t care.” But Ubi was very, very — it’s normal, right, when you’re thousands and thousands of people you sort of need to have some sort of HR process. But yeah, the Assassin’s team was a little bit rogue in terms of obeying the rules and the bureaucracy.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) I also introduced [Claude Langlais] to Belgian beers, because I had lived in Belgium. He’s a really tough guy, and he was really eager to find out. He ended up finding somebody who actually imports beer in Canada, in Quebec — Belgian beers from the source. And because in Quebec you cannot buy alcohol outside of what is called SAQ — société des alcools du Quebec — which is the Quebec alcohol society, basically. And it’s basically centralizing everything. There’s little shops here and there, but that’s pretty much it. So you cannot really find everything you want. You had to go through this SAQ thing to order the beer. So he found a woman who actually would do that for us that we would pay and everything was legal. So I told him that we need to buy this beer, this beer, that beer, that beer, that beer, but suddenly we started to have orders in the team, you know, so we said, “Remember guys, we can only order by 12 or 24. So don’t tell me you want that beer or that beer. Tell me you want these 12 beers or these 24 beers.”

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) Claude Langlais, who was not the lead programmer but the boss of the programmers. He was a huge guy. [He played] college football. American football. He was a big guy. And at one point he was running after another programmer with a chair — a big chair — with only one hand, like *raaaahrrr*. I don’t know what he did — it was only a joke, but those guys they were quite something, and they would make a huge a gunfight with foam bullets. But when you have a bunch of guys that have money, then they [are] all gonna go get the big guns. And [Laughs] so you had a lot of big [nerf] guns on the floor.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) I think on one of the main architects’ birthdays — I don’t remember if it was AC1, but I think it was AC1 — they decided to build a house around his desk. [Laughs] I’m not kidding you. And so basically it was during the whole weekend, I think, and in the morning when he came it was his birthday and it was like “happy birthday” everywhere. And he had to open the door to sit at his desk, basically. It was pretty awesome.

Alex Drouin

(animation director for Altaïr) I think he was complaining that it was too much noise because, you know, it’s open floor. So they built a cabin on top of his desk with grass and a garden and that was quite hilarious.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) We were all in our early 30s or late 20s. So yes, there’s not a lot of kids yet, not a lot of dads yet, or moms, so there’s a lot of drinking on Monday nights. Forget Friday. You start on Monday.

Luc Tremblay

(gameplay and behavior programmer) On Monday nights usually we’d go out to drink and close the bar and get back to work at nine on Tuesday. And we did that for like two years straight. It was insane, but it was so fun.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) Sometimes, you know, it was time to relax and we would just do mojitos and like it was 4:00 p.m., you know? [Laughs]

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) We started a whiskey club at one point, which was super fun. That was really great for the team. And for over a year we would — on Friday nights we would all bring different bottles of whiskey and then we would all sample them, and because we were very technical, everybody who took whiskey out of a bottle, we wrote them down in a ledger and we would keep track of how much they contributed and what fraction of what bottle and what dollar amount that translated into, as they actually drank it. And it was of course completely like nobody was holding anyone to account. It was just our nerdy way of experiencing whiskey. And we would do things like we would make up bullshit about what we thought the whiskey tasted like and, you know, compare notes. So the whiskey club was very special. We played poker a lot. We had a poker club, sometimes combined with whiskey night.

Stéphane Assadourian

(AI and gameplay programmer) We managed to craft those relationships — those intimate relationships between ourselves — and we became friends. I mean, not everybody was friends and we weren’t at each other’s houses every day. That’s not my point. But it was really — like, it was more than colleagues. And then suddenly we started to have poker games, you know, at my place or someone else’s place. We started to have, you know, “Let’s go out for beer.” So we wanted to be together after work as well.

Sacha Viltofsky

(junior programmer) I could talk about having beers at 2 a.m. while waiting for the build to be ready for validation, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what people want to hear about.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) There was a lot of sleeping — not sleeping at work, but almost. There was a struggle and a lot of ego on the team. So there’s good days and bad days. I feel like it’s a shame, though, the PoP team was dismantled through this game. So the team who made Sands of Time was not really there at the end of AC1. A bunch of them left, so maybe out of the 10 for the first year, right, of the Sands of Time team, only three were left. Seven said, “OK, let’s go elsewhere. It’s too tough to do.”

Nicolas Cantin

(pre-production art director, art director for cinematics) We had a lot of parties. I think it was part of the DNA. We’re younger at the time, you know, not everyone has kids, has a family, but when we’re doing the first Assassin’s Creed, we had no family, so we were working harder maybe. We’re partying harder also, but it was part of keeping the team close together, because it was not always easy. I remember a time where the artists [were] not able to work on the engines. We had to reduce the size of the team for maybe six months. Those kinds of things. When you release the game and it’s a success you don’t remember that as much, but we had six months where it was not fun, you know? People would go to another project and then come back. Some didn’t come back at all. They were too busy on another project. So sometimes it’s not always easy or fun.

Mathieu Mazerolle

(lead programmer) Everything was hard. The AI was hard. The level design guidance stuff was hard. Performance was just incredibly hard. I’ll give you a small tidbit on performance. We got the Sony dev kits at one point, like the brand new ones, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ubisoft’s headquarters in Montreal, but it’s in an old sweatshop — like literally a textile factory. And it’s a tinder box. Like everything is wood, and the bathrooms were horrible. The toilets clogged. It was not meant for a bunch of engineers. So there was a series of bathrooms near our pit, which was the team’s bathrooms, basically, and the fuse box was right in front of the bathrooms. And I remember we plugged in all these dev kits and we were trying to optimize the game. So all the dev kits were going at full power. I remember walking past the bathroom and just doing like a double take and realizing that there [were] billowing flames coming out of the fuse box. [Laughs] So we put that in a policy. Like, you know, everybody who turned on a dev kit had to say “Turning on dev kits” because if we turned on too many at the same time we would start blowing fuses. So performance was a really tough one.

“We removed all the side quests”

Patrice Désilets today speaks fondly of the purity of the first Assassin’s Creed — filled as it is not with the usual busywork of an open-world game but rather with just nine missions. But it wasn’t planned that way.

Patrice Désilets

(creative director, original concept) The kingdom was supposed to be populated with a bunch of missions. There was supposed to be a lot of side quests, but we didn’t have the tools to do side quests fast enough. [...] That’s why we only have nine full missions. And also the game was designed at first without any cinematics or HUD. Everything is designed around those two ideas, somehow, right? About what’s next-gen, how do we redefine, let’s get rid of the HUD, let’s get rid of cinematics. And so the game, if you play as a classical game, when you play with the HUD on, why would I do those missions? But I said it often — get rid of the HUD and then suddenly you have to be an assassin to go through this game. That’s why you sit on benches and you listen to conversation, because the HUD and the mini-map is not there to help you out, to know where to go next. Listen to what they say and they will teach you or tell you where your next target is. And so you actually have to play like an assassin. So it’s a lot more like a role-playing game. People tend to forget what RPG means. You feel like a role-playing game is about numbers and stats, where it’s about playing your character, playing a role, and in that sense AC1, with the HUD removed, is a role-playing game. You’ll be Altaïr if you want to go through. But that being said, why there’s only nine is because doing one mission wa