Montreal video game maker Ubisoft announced today that its developing a wholly original video game franchise under the name Assassin’s Creed or the Playstation 3.
The first game in the Assassin’s Creed series will be set in the year 1191 AD, during the Third Crusade. Players will take on the role of Altair and will have the power to “throw their immediate environment into chaos” and influence historical evens. The game will be shown at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles and will be released to consumer in 2007. Ubisoft is describing the game as an “epic experience,” offering new forms of play, superb graphics, and an engrossing storyline.
“Assassin’s Creed is going to push the video game experience as we know it today into an entirely new direction,” said Yannis Mallat, CEO at Ubisoft’s Montreal studio. “Assassin’s Creed’s compelling theme and storyline experienced through the next-generation console will captivate audiences and affect them on the same level as an epic novel or film.”
Ubisoft describes the Assassins as “shrouded in secrecy and feared for their ruthlessness,” and has the group trying to end the never-ending fighting in the Holy Land by suppressing both the Muslim and Christian sides. Historically, the assassins (or Hashshashin) were a sect of Ismaili Muslims who famously established a stronghold south of the Caspian Sea in the late 1000s and attempted to take down the Abbasid Caliphate by murdering its elite. Saladin, himself a primary figure in the Third Crusade, was repeatedly targeted by the group, although he eventually reached a détente with them. Two Christian rulers were murdered by Assassins, but, for the most part Christians never had significant contact with the group (although there is a persistent story that Richard the Lionheart hired the Assassins’ who killed Raymond II of Tripoli). Much of the Christian legends of the Assassins stems from a (likely apocryphal) 1273 visit to the Assassin’s stronghold by Marco Polo
