At the end of 2003 Patrice Désilets had just finished Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as its creative director, and Ubisoft wanted him to make the next one. He could not get excited about it. “The problem is that a prince isn’t an action figure,” he told Edge. “A prince is someone who’s waiting to become king.” He remembered a book about secret societies, and his favourite chapter, on Hassan-i-Sabbah, an 11th-century missionary who founded the order later known as the Assassins. What if the player were an assassin, not a prince?
For a year the project was still called Prince of Persia: Assassin, with an assassin escorting a computer-controlled prince through Jerusalem. “I was asked to do a Prince of Persia game and I didn’t,” Désilets said. The prince was gradually squeezed out, and in November 2007 Ubisoft Montreal released Assassin’s Creed.
Fast facts
- Developer: Ubisoft Montreal. Publisher: Ubisoft.
- Creative director: Patrice Désilets. Producer: Jade Raymond.
- Released: November 2007 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; a PC version followed in 2008.
- Setting: the Third Crusade in 1191, in Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem, with a frame story in the present day.
- Music: Jesper Kyd.
- Sales: more than ten million copies, Edge reported in 2012.
An assassin, not a murderer
“I didn’t want to make a game where you were a murderer,” Désilets told Edge in 2006. “I wanted to make you an assassin.” The hero, Altaïr, belongs to the Order of Assassins, which in the game sides with neither the Crusaders nor the Saracens; his nine targets are, in Edge’s words, “simply those who profit from and perpetuate the conflict”. He must find each one by scouting the city from its highest towers, then pickpocketing, eavesdropping and interrogating, and finally strike and escape across the rooftops.
Désilets had wanted to be an actor before he studied film, and he wanted players to perform the part. “You control him like a puppet,” he explained when the game was first shown, with each face button controlling a different part of Altaïr’s body. To him the running and climbing had a precise model: “I wanted to replace the car of GTA with a third-person action character. The pleasure of driving a car in Liberty City should be the same as the main character in Assassin’s Creed.”
The cities were built around that idea. Anything that stuck out more than two inches could be climbed, Edge reported in 2006, and the lead level designer, David Chateauneuf, made sure that “almost everything was climbable”. The game’s huge cathedral in Acre is “100 per cent climbable”. A leap of faith from a high perch ends in a bale of hay, a moment Désilets fought for: “The fantasy of hiding in a hay bale, like in the movies, was so great that it overcame people’s disbelief.”
Crowds and the Animus
The new consoles made crowds possible. On the PlayStation 2, Désilets said, Sands of Time could not draw more than six or seven characters at once, with its 32MB of memory. Assassin’s Creed filled its streets with a crowd of pot-bearers, scholars, beggars and drunks that could hide Altaïr, by blending in among a group of scholars, or give him away. The team, which started with about 20 people, most of them Sands of Time veterans, had grown to around 120 by the end of three years’ development, and it built a new engine on the way.
The game’s biggest secret was its frame story. Altaïr is a memory. In the present day a bartender called Desmond Miles has been kidnapped and is reliving his ancestor’s life through the Animus, a machine that reads “genetic memories”. Désilets took the idea from a documentary about DNA. “I am a justification freak,” he said; the Animus explained the menus, the on-screen display and why a dead player could start again.
Reception
Edge called Altaïr “a triumph of animation in videogames” and the three cities “beautifully realised”, but gave the game seven out of ten. The missions repeated themselves: “most missions are simple to complete”, and the crowds and architecture were rarely used to make the assassinations harder or cleverer. “It’s as if Ubisoft Montreal has failed to find a game worthy of its stunningly realised main character and sumptuous setting,” the review concluded, though “for all its failings Assassin’s Creed deserves to be played”. Looking back in 2012, Edge described a backlash on release, with the repetitive mission structure and the science-fiction framing among the complaints. The game still sold more than ten million copies. “For an 80 Metacritic game, that’s a lot,” Désilets said.
The series
Assassin’s Creed became Ubisoft’s biggest series. Assassin’s Creed II (2009) moved to Italy, to Florence and Venice, with a new hero, Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Désilets called the first game “an amazing toy” and the second “the real game with rules and missions”, but he preferred the first: “It’s pure.” Later games travelled across history; Wireframe called Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (2018), set in Ancient Greece, the high point of the series. In July 2026 Ubisoft said the series had sold more than 250 million games since 2007.
Sources
- Edge issue 164, July 2006, p. 31: E3 preview (Désilets as director; “You control him like a puppet”; anything that sticks out more than two inches can be climbed).
- Edge issue 169, December 2006, p. 43: feature (Désilets on assassins and murderers; his role on The Sands of Time; the Order of Assassins).
- Edge issue 177, July 2007, p. 36: preview (producer Jade Raymond; the Assassins’ side in the war; their targets).
- Edge issue 183, Christmas 2007, pp. 82–83: review (Altaïr’s animation; Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem; nine targets; the Animus and Desmond; the missions; seven out of ten).
- Edge issue 244, September 2012, pp. 124–127: “The Making of… Assassin’s Creed” (Désilets’s acting and film studies; Prince of Persia: Assassin; Hassan-i-Sabbah; the team, engine and development; the Third Crusade in 1191; GTA’s car; crowds and the PS2’s limits; Chateauneuf on climbing and the Acre cathedral; the backlash; ten million copies; the Animus and the DNA documentary; the hay bale; Assassin’s Creed II).
- Edge issue 209, Christmas 2009, p. 86: Assassin’s Creed II review (Ezio Auditore da Firenze; Venice and Florence).
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, p. 56: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey review.
- For the music, see Jesper Kyd and its sources.
- KitGuru, “Assassin’s Creed hits new milestone with over 250 million copies sold”, 13 July 2026, and Tech4Gamers, 12 July 2026 (web, secondary): Ubisoft’s statement on the series’ sales. https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/mustafa-mahmoud/assassins-creed-hits-new-milestone-with-over-250-million-copies-sold/
- Wikipedia, “Assassin’s Creed (video game)” (web, secondary): the 2008 PC release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed_(video_game)