16 Mind-Blowing Things You Didn't Know About Assassin's Creed
From origins as another franchise, to a world-slaying household name.
Do you remember when Assassin's Creed first got announced?
All we got was a slickly-cut trailer showcasing a hooded figure with his hidden blade dangling precariously out a sleeve, as UNKLE's brilliant Lonely Soul played out in the background. It was like some Matrix-goes-old-school hybrid, and it immediately became one of the coolest concepts in gaming history - essentially overnight.
Come the release of the first game some were still in love, whilst others lamented the repetition of certain tasks to pad out the runtime, but it had enough awesome narrative hooks - what was Desmond's purpose? How much does Lucy know? What's Abstergo's long-term plan? - to dig its hooks in, leading to Ubisoft delivering one of the best sequels of their career (twice in a row) with the spectacular AC II and Brotherhood.
Following that it's taken a bit of a nosedive, with Revelations being a pretty phoned-in affair aside from a really emotional end to hero Altair, and aside from AC III and last year's Unity whose launch was dogged with bugs, glitches and questionable business practices, Black Flag's been the only one worth checking out about half a decade.
However, 'hooded team of time-spanning super-ninjas with cool gadgets' hasn't become a well-known concept without quite the media clout behind it, and over the last decade or so Ubisoft have quite the selection of stories to tell from their many miles travelled.
16. Ubisoft Have 29 Development Teams, 10 Of Which Work On Assassin's Creed
With their 'need' to stick to an annual release model, development has to overlap between each game, so the team that worked on one would immediately get started on whatever was second down the line, and so on.
Unity was actually in development since 2010 from the team behind Brotherhood and some of AC III, but with team sizes in the hundreds all across the world contributing to one singular vision, it's no surprise wires get crossed and things release less than perfect in the end.
Thankfully, Ubisoft have said they know how they're going to handle the end of the whole thing, but when they get there is anybody's guess.