Note: It should go without saying, but this article contains major spoilers for plot and gameplay points that happen in the first half of Assassin's Creed III. Read at your own risk.

"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." So said Ben Franklin, and it's a particularly apt quote for the game industry. Not that it tries that hard to keep many secrets—the modern game marketing machine controls a slow and steady drip of information about the biggest titles that can start years before release. It's gotten to the point that an avid gaming news reader can know practically everything there is to know about a game months before it comes out. And even when a publisher wants to keep some information to itself, journalists will leak any surprises they can get their hands on—Kotaku's major Modern Warfare 3 leak last year is a prime example.

I figured I had a pretty good handle on what to expect from Assassin's Creed III before I got my hands on a review copy. After playing the game briefly behind closed doors at E3, and seeing plenty of hands-off demos at events like PAX, I knew I'd be controlling half-Mohawk assassin Connor as he fought off redcoats during the revolutionary war. So I was as surprised as anyone when the opening cut scene ended and I was instead in control of a proper British gentleman named Haytham, who seemed to have all the requisite assassin's skills. Through over two years of development and months of non-stop marketing, a team of over 200 developers inside Ubisoft had somehow managed to keep one of the biggest twists in gaming history from leaking out to the public.

"Believe me, I'm surprised, because it feels like nothing is ever kept secret and things always winds up leaking," Assassin's Creed 3 lead scriptwriter Corey May told Ars Technica. "It was very hard to keep it a secret. Fortunately I work with amazing people who were willing to do it."

That includes the Ubisoft marketing department, who May says were surprisingly OK not listing "multiple protagonists" on the standard bullet-point list of Assassin's Creed III features before the game's release. That's despite the easy marketability of what May called Haytham's "debonair flair [as] sort of a colonial James Bond, in a way."

May says he didn't even discuss the big reveal with his closest friends or family—he just "couldn't take the risk." While he could talk about Haytham with other members of the development team, that didn't really relieve the stress. "All we would end up doing was riling ourselves up. We were on this thing, and we were all having the same fears and anxious nervous anticipation. That didn't make it any easier."

Keeping such a huge secret amongst a group of hundreds of developers was only possible, May said, because the entire team "believed in the idea of saving the surprise. Most of the people who work on games are themselves gamers and can appreciate coming into something fresh and unspoiled. People on the team try, and often fail miserably, not to spoil themselves too much, so if you have people who are working on sections of the game themselves that don't require them to watch the cut scenes, they'll skip through them during production so they can keep it fresh for their first play through. I think it was a combination of people being gamers and just respect for the audience in general."

That doesn't mean there weren't points where the beans almost got spilled. "We had close calls every now and then, or what I thought were close calls," May recalls. "We'd have press events and we would have versions of the game and I would get nervous. What if someone selects the wrong thing and starts wondering 'Who is this person?'"

Outside of gameplay events, there were more close calls. At one point during the development, a novelization that prominently featured Haytham leaked out briefly, but was quickly squashed before anyone asked too many questions. Then, just weeks before the game, Kotaku posted a leaked third-party video showing the first 20 minutes of the game, though Ubisoft PR got them to take it down before details spread very far.

Even when early review copies went out to dozens of outlets (under a strict embargo, of course), there was nary a stray tweet revealing the secret (though of course many release day reviews mentioned it, often with prominent spoiler warnings). "There were fears, but I also suspected that if it was new and a surprise for the reviewer, they would want to keep it as a surprise as well," May said. "I crossed my fingers that they would keep the surprise but that was really the extent of it."

The value of surprise

Despite these close calls and potential leak points, May says he thinks a lot of potential players deliberately avert their eyes from this kind of thing. "There's always been a strange back and forth to me, especially amongst our hardcore fans," he said. "They always want to know everything, but then when they find out things too soon, they become upset that they've been spoiled, so there's this weird desire to know but this regret or guilt after you know. I've watched that every now and then on the boards because I find it really fascinating. ... In my mind there is something special about encountering something unexpected, something you haven't been told about, and that experience isn't quite the same if you're going into the game knowing it's going to be there."

At the same time, May said he understands there's a certain appeal to wanting to find out about an upcoming game as early as possible, a phenomenon he's experienced personally. "I remember doing the same thing when I was younger around the release of Ultima VII. We barely had the Internet, but we had Prodigy and AOL boards, and every now and then little bits of information would slip out, and I was always so tempted, do I want to read this, do I want to know, or do I want to wait and stay fresh. There's sometimes a desire to have the information ahead of time and brag about it."

More than his early experience with Internet spoilers, though, May said he was inspired by the masterful bait-and-switch pulled off by Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2 (Warning: Additional spoilers for an 11-year-old game coming). Konami promoted that game for months with beautiful trailers and a significant demo featuring Solid Snake, the hero of the first Metal Gear Solid. In the final release, though, players spent the last two-thirds or so of the game playing as Raiden, a whiny, inexperienced, somewhat effeminate agent that was practically the polar opposite of Snake. Fans were alternately disgusted, intrigued, or confused, depending on who you talk to.

May recalls playing MGS2 with a persistent belief that the action would eventually return to Snake after what he expected to be a short section with Raiden. "And then I see the end credits," he says. "That was a very important moment for me, it's something I still remember to this day. I love the game but I was very motivated to get back to Snake, and I felt very weird—not disappointed, just weird—when it was all of a sudden end credits."

Assassin's Creed III's switcheroo isn't quite that significant—Haytham is only playable for the first third or so of the game, though he's a major player in the story throughout. And while May said he'd ideally liked to have had one more Haytham sequence, he didn't want the surprise to overwhelm the core game. "I felt secure in keeping the secret in that the game itself wasn't different from the trailers, it's that there was this significant additional content that was being kept a secret, not that the actual premise or content of the game itself was different than what had been advertised," he said.

But having Haytham be playable was key to getting players to see him and his fellow templar recruits as human beings with believable motivations, not just as cartoonish supervillains. "To me, it was more interesting to try and let you truly spend time with them in a more organic and fun ways, whether it's being on a mission with them, or talking with them in a bar, or to build up the people that would become the antagonists," he said. "I wanted to show the templars are not that different from the assassins—they're not simply sitting around in a smoky back room plotting world domination because it was cool."

Oh, did I not mention that Haytham is actually an antagonistic templar, and not one of the assassins players have controlled throughout the series? The game doesn't mention it either until you've been gleefully killing people as Haytham for four or five hours. For May, keeping that twist a secret was at least as important as hiding Haytham from public view in the first place.

"At the end of the day, I would have been fine with news of Haytham leaking out," he said. "For me, personally and professionally, it was, 'Can I pull off the reveal that he's a templar?' ... I got a couple of messages from reviewers as they were reviewing the game saying, 'Nice,' so that gamble, at least in my mind, paid off."

While this is the first time May has been able to surprise his audience to this extent, he admitted that in the past he's floated the idea of outright lying to the audience in order to keep a secret. "I prefer not only to not be spoiled, but I would also be a fan of putting out disinformation," he said. "I remember a long time ago I was working on a Prince of Persia game, The Two Thrones. We knew the fans really wanted Farah to come back. What I wanted to do at time was have marketing take the stand 'No, she's not back, she's not going to be in the game,' so that when she showed up people were pleasantly surprised. I don't think [the marketing] people agreed with my idea to tell a lie."

It wouldn't have been the only time a developer actively lied to the press. Back in 2010, developer David Jaffe said in a May 24 interview that he was not working on a new Twisted Metal game, and that his company wouldn't even be at the next month's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Fast forward three weeks, and Jaffe and crew literally rolled in as surprise guests at Sony's press conference to show off a fully playable build of a new Twisted Metal game that had obviously been in development for quite a while.

Jaffe defended his deceit as an effort to recapture the "sense of wonder, of discovery, of sheer surprise," of past E3 shows, where "you’d walk onto the show floor and have no idea what new games and new ideas you’d find as you traveled from booth to booth." I respect the effort, but still stick by my initial response that we should never believe another word out of David Jaffe's lying mouth.

For May, though, the strain of effectively lying to the world by omission was a nerve-wracking experience that he's not eager to experience again. "We knew Haytham existed for over two years now, and to have said from day one, 'We're going to work to keep this a secret,' it's there in the back of your head every day and it makes you a little crazy. I don't know if I have the mental energy to do something like that again. ... I'm glad that we managed to do it and that for the most part people have found it really interesting and fun [but] it was a massive undertaking and a lot of stress."