Skip to main content

Jetsetter: Ubisoft now owns 1666, the brand new franchise from the director of Assassin’s Creed

Image used with permission by copyright holder

 Welcome back again to Jetsetter, Digital Trends’ weekly column that reaches into the far corners of the world to let you know about the games you otherwise wouldn’t. The United States is the biggest video game market in the world, with more people making, playing, and spending on games than anywhere else. It’s Jetsetter’s job to look beyond our borders, to places as close as Canada and as far away as Finland, to find the choices video games around. From big to small, from the Indian publishing schedule of Electronic Arts to a weird bootleg from the Philippines, Jetsetter’s got its finger on the global pulse.

It was a rough week for the global video game market. Two major plays, namely THQ and Funcom, saw their business shrink, and disintegrate completely in the case of the former. THQ’s demise means that the biggest non-American video game publisher in the world has a valuable new studio in its arsenal.

Recommended Videos

* THQ Montreal snatched up by Ubisoft alongside Assassin’s Creed creator’s new game.

French gaming giant Ubisoft was rumored to be considering a complete buyout of THQ, including all its properties and worldwide publishing operations. When THQ went up for auction, Ubi only bought a tiny slice of the company. In addition to picking up the publishing rights for South Park: The Stick of Truth, Ubi also bought Canadian studio THQ Montreal. The acquisition is actually a sort of homecoming. The head of THQ Montreal is none other than Patrice Desilets, director of Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II. Desilets abandoned the acclaimed series to start a new studio for THQ and create a brand new franchise codenamed 1666. Now 1666 is Ubisoft’s property. The team is apparently thrilled. “This is the first time in my life that I have to a studio that was just newly acquired, given a speech to everyone, and then have everyone applaud,” said Ubisoft Montreal chief executive Yannis Mallat of his first meeting with Desilet’s studio. What is 1666 about? No one knows, but that was the year of the Great Fire of London (pictured above), a historically significant event perfect for inspiring of the creators of Assassin’s Creed.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

* Funcom closes Beijing studio in massive restructuring.

The publisher and creator of MMOs The Secret World, Age of Conan, and Anarchy Online Funcom had a mediocre 2012. The Secret World didn’t even sell 1 million copies after more than half a decade of development, and the company was forced to layoff a number of employees. It announced on Friday that it’s now shutting down some of its international operations. Funcom Beijing, responsible for building much of The Secret World, will be closed by the end of the year. The Beijing team’s loss is the Funcom Canada team’s gain, though. As a result of the restructuring, Funcom’s Montreal studio will now be able to work on new projects, namely a swath of mobile titles.

* New red and blue PlayStation 3s for the United Kingdom.

Damn those Brittons and their snazzy new PlayStation 3s. While we have to settle for boring old black—and a dull, ugly black on the newest models at that—the United Kingdom gets two flashy new PlayStation 3 models come February. The Azurite Blue and Garnet Red models will have 500GB hard drives rather than the 12GB of flash memory on recent European models.

Anthony John Agnello
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…
Assassin’s Creed Shadows delayed into 2025 as Ubisoft overhauls launch plans
Yasuke in Assassin's Creed Shadows fighting an enemy. He's dressed in his samurai armor.

Ubisoft is making some big, last-minute changes. The next game in the Assassin's Creed franchise has been pushed into next year, according to a statement the company published Wednesday, due in part to the lower-than-expected performance of Star Wars Outlaws.

Assassin's Creed Shadows, which is set in feudal Japan and has two playable protagonists, has been delayed from November 15, 2024, to February 14, 2025, to give the developers more time to "polish and refine the experience."

Read more
Ubisoft responds to Assassin’s Creed Shadows online backlash
The two heroes of Assassin's Creed Shadows stand side by side.

Ubisoft is addressing backlash it's received from players about one of Assassin's Creed Shadows' main characters with a lengthy statement concerning how it handles history.

The studio released the statement on X (formerly Twitter) and on its website, saying that it's received criticism from a lot of areas, including Japanese players who leveled accusations at the developer for skewing history with Yasuke, a legendary African samurai who's one of the game's two main playable characters, the other being the Japanese shinobi Naoe. In response, Ubisoft stated that its Assassin's Creed games are primarily historical fiction made with the help of historians, other experts, and in-depth research.

Read more
All Assassin’s Creed games in order, by release date and chronologically
The main character of Assassin's Creed: Mirage perches on a ledge and looks out over the city of Baghdad.

After a humble beginning in 2007, Assassin's Creed has become not only one of Ubisoft's most successful franchises but one of the biggest in gaming as a whole. Originally meant to be a new Prince of Persia game, the series was instead allowed to be a new IP that focused on a secret order of assassins in a centuries-long conflict with the Knights Templar.

What made the series so appealing was the setup. Through the use of a fictional machine called the Animus, people could relive the memories of their ancestors to learn secrets from the past to help in the present. That opened up endless possibilities for places and time periods the series could go. With over a dozen games in the series and counting, we've been all across history at this point.

Read more