Gaming
Games
10 amazing Assassin’s Creed facts
We’ve used Eagle Vision and leapt from tall buildings to hunt down these fascinating trivia.
Ezio Auditore is coming to current gen consoles
© Ubisoft
Ubisoft may be giving Assassin’s Creed a fallow year in 2016 for the first time in almost a decade, but it’s not leaving the series alone entirely. Alongside Watch Dogs 2, this month sees the release of Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection, a remastered and repackaged bundle of PS3/Xbox 360 era games from the series starring the charismatic and stab-happy Florentine noble Ezio Auditore da Firenze.
Next month, meanwhile, see the release of the Assassin’s Creed movie, with none other than Michael Fassbender rocking the hidden blades and hanging out in large bales of hay. In other words, despite no new playable instalment to get stuck into this winter, the franchise is poised to only get bigger. Like a murderous Renaissance-era hipster, you might have been there before it got big, but did you know all these surprising facts about the franchise? Read on and see.
1. The franchise started by accident
While Assassin’s Creed is a household name today, it almost ended up as something very different. As DidYouKnowGaming? reveals, the original crusade-era set game was due to a Prince of Persia game known as Prince of Persia: Assassin, with a prince’s bodyguard as the protagonist. Ubisoft top brass, unhappy with the idea of a Prince of Persia game not being about a prince (oddly, Nintendo don’t see an issue with when it comes to Zelda), insisted on a new brand, and Assassin’s Creed was born.
2. The game’s back story stretches 2,500 years
While the story of the mainline games stretches around 821 years, from the original Assassin’s Creed in 1191 to around 2012 and Desmond Miles’ modern day story, Ubisoft has created a massive, Star Wars Expanded Universe style backstory stuffed with lore and interspliced with historical events. According to the publisher, the first known assassin was Xerxes, who killed King Darius of Persia according to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, meaning the tradition stretches back millenia.
3. Assassin’s Creed is more successful than FIFA
By some metrics, anyway. Granted, stealth versus soccer simulator is hardly apples with apples and Ubisoft isn’t seeing the astonishing revenue EA generates with Ultimate Team mode each season. But given that both series are near annual, it’s an interesting comparison nonetheless. More than 93 million Assassin’s Creed games were sold between 2007 and 2015 – whereas it took EA 16 years to sell through 100 million units of FIFA, a milestone it hit in 2010. That makes Assassin’s Creed the faster-selling of the two series, while sales of both in recent years have been roughly on par – until the unfortunate failure of Assassin’s Creed: Unity, anyway.
4. There have been 20 games on 15 platforms
While there have been nine mainline Assassin’s Creed games so far – if you count 2014’s Rogue but exclude the Ezio trilogy remaster – there have been a further 11 spin-off games, from 2D sidescrollers to isometric adventure titles, across a staggering 15 different platforms: PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, DS, PSP, PS Vita, iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and webOS,
5. The series has spawned 10 novels
As well as a host of spin-off comics, Assassin’s Creed has spawned a long-running series of novels set in the game universe. Eight were written by English historian Anton Gill under the pen name Oliver Bowden, while the second of two young-adult-focused novels, Assassin’s Creed: Last Descendants is due for release in January.
6. Black Flag’s world is so big you can’t walk across it
While Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate’s open world is sprawling – a roughly 3.3km square approximation of Victorian London – it’s far from the biggest map in the series. That goes to Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which is so large that sailing across it at full tilt takes half an hour. You could swim that, technically, but it would take you an unfathomably long time.
7. Evie Frye isn’t the first playable female assassin
Victorian era assassin Evie Frye
© Ubisoft
The lack of playable female characters in Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s co-op multiplayer caused a minor scandal online before the game’s release, so it was no surprise to see one of the two protagonists in 2015’s Syndicate was a woman, the level-headed (for a prolific killer, anyway) Evie Frye. Evie was not, however, the first female assassin you could play as. That honour goes to Aveline de Grandpré, daughter of a former slave and star of the 2012 PSP game Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation as well as the star of the Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag DLC, Aveline.
8. Ezio can assassinate fighting-game characters
As well as the premeditated murder of many historical figures – including a Catholic Pope – Ezio Auditore is also responsible for the deaths of some of Bandai Namco’s most famous fictional characters. Repeatedly. That’s because the dashing assassin has also appeared in a beat’em up, fighting it out with the stars of one of the Japanese publisher’s most popular series in Soulcalibur V for PS3 and Xbox 360.
9. There’s a game of the game
Without spoiling too much, the games from Assassin’s Creed IV onwards start poking fun at themselves with the modern day Templars trying to take over the world by turning the Animus into a series of video-game experiences. Yeah, it’s all a bit meta. But not as meta as the idea of a board game of a video game about a video game inside a video game. Assassin’s Creed: Arena, which takes place on the rooftops of early modern Constantinople, is exactly that. It’s not even the only AC board game, either, since there are Assassin’s Creed-branded versions of both Risk and Monopoly you can also play.
10. The next game is going back in time
We’re not expecting a new Assassin’s Creed game until late 2017, and though Ubisoft hasn’t said a peep about it officially, we’ve got a very good idea of where it’s going to be set. According to Kotaku, which has reliably reported on the settings of new AC games early for years, the upcoming Assassin’s Creed: Empire will be going back to ancient Egypt. That marks a first for the series, which has been gradually moving closer and closer to the present day, with levels set during World War I and II in Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Syndicate. Can it recapture the magic of fan favourites like Brotherhood and Black Flag?
For more games coverage, follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
