GAME · 2007
Assassin's Creed
- Platforms
- PlayStation 3, Microsoft Windows
47 archived facts 5 topics 2 sources Last reviewed Sep 2026
All facts (47)
- #001
Altair's Arabic given name means "Flying one" or "Bird of Prey", while his surname ibn La-Ahad means "Son of No-one".
- #002
Development of Assassin's Creed began in January 2004, when Patrice Désilets was instructed to start work on the next Prince of Persia game after finishing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time near the end of 2003.
- #003
As a joke, the game's designers hid an image of Optimus Prime (Transformers) as an easter egg on some buildings. The image appears as two boarded-up windows above a three-shuttered window, and can be seen on many buildings in more than one city.
- #004
Assassin's Creed was initially developed as a PlayStation 2 title with the same linear approach as The Sands of Time, because Microsoft and Sony had not yet revealed their next consoles.
- #005
Contains a major spoiler — show
Contrary to popular belief, Lucy Stillman only bends her ring finger backward to reveal that she is an Assassin; her finger is not missing.
- #006
By September 2004, as more details emerged about the capabilities of the next-generation consoles, Patrice Désilets' team considered expanding the Prince of Persia acrobatic gameplay into an open world suited to the newer systems.
- #007
Assassin's Creed began development under the working title Prince of Persia: Assassin, also referred to as Prince of Persia: Assassins. The project drew inspiration from the life of Hassan-i Sabbah and made heavy use of Vladimir Bartol's novel Alamut.
- #008
At the start of the game Altair is 26 years old, the same age as Desmond Miles.
- #009
The game originally included a crossbow for ranged attacks, but Ubisoft removed it because playtesters preferred ranged attacks over close combat, and to make the game more challenging. It was also removed because it was historically inaccurate. Although the crossbow is no longer in the game, evidence of its presence remains in the opening trailer, where Altair carries it on his back along with a quiver of arrows.
- #010
The Assassin character in Assassin's Creed was developed iteratively across the game's three-year development period.
- #011
For Assassin's Creed, the team had a rough idea from Alamut and other historical works that the character wore all-white robes with a red belt, but still had to work out how to detail this in the game.
- #012
It was originally conceived as a Prince of Persia spin-off titled Prince of Persia: Assassin, in which you played as the Prince's bodyguard during his childhood. UbiSoft disliked the idea of a Prince of Persia game in which you do not play as the Prince, so the game was turned into a new IP instead.
- #013
An early concept sketch by animator Khai Nguyen proposed a bird-of-prey motif that the Assassin's Creed team embraced, leading to the name Altaïr, Arabic for "bird of prey", and extensive eagle imagery tied to the Assassins.
- #014
Lucy Stillman was designed to resemble Kristen Bell, the actress who voices her.
- #015
Altaïr was conceived as a heroic figure with a rough edge, and the artist drew on the G.I. Joe character Storm Shadow, a similarly skilled hero, for elements of his design.
- #016
Before composing the music for Assassin's Creed, composer Jesper Kyd worked on Eidos Software's Hitman video game series, which features an assassin as its main character.
- #017
Because rendering long flowing robes was impossible on the newer hardware, the Assassin's Creed team shortened Altaïr's robe and gave it a more feathered look that echoed the bird-of-prey imagery.
- #018
There is a star named Altair.
- #019
The Assassin's Creed team traded realism for playability, making Altaïr's parkour moves believable while allowing maneuvers that would be impossible in real life; leaps of faith into hay piles and hiding in hay to evade guards were borrowed from Hollywood films, and Désilets noted that Alamut described similar actions by the Assassins.
- #020
Before he was kidnapped, Desmond's profession was bartending.
- #021
It was originally going to be a Prince of Persia game.
- #022
The Assassin's Creed team initially found it humorous that everyone would fight over an apple, but their research changed that view. They found many medieval paintings in which royalty and other leaders held spherical objects similar to a globus cruciger, representing power and control.
- #023
The Assassin's Creed team recognized that an artifact named the Apple of Eden would fit well into the concept of spherical objects symbolizing power and control.
- #024
The Animus concept in Assassin's Creed emerged after the development team chose to center the game on the Assassins, with the team reasoning that players would move through multiple cities and possibly revisit assassinations spanning a thousand years, including John F. Kennedy's.
- #025
Désilets compared the Animus to the storytelling device established in The Sands of Time, where the game is framed as a story told by the Prince and a player-character death is treated as a mistelling that lets the player back up and retry a segment.
- #026
Ubisoft's marketing was not keen on the Animus idea for Assassin's Creed, believing players would be confused and disappointed that the game was not a truly medieval experience; the first trailer at the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo therefore focused heavily on medieval elements, while later marketing closer to release hinted more directly at the science fiction elements.
- #027
Assassin's Creed had a marketing budget of $10 million, equivalent to $16 million in 2025.
- #028
Assassin's Creed began as an effort to expand several systems from Prince of Persia into an open world concept, developed by a team of 20 at Ubisoft Montreal.
- #029
A new next-generation engine called Scimitar was built to support the open world of Assassin's Creed, taking about two years to complete; the team used the Sands of Time engine during development. Scimitar was eventually renamed AnvilNext and was used for most later Assassin's Creed games and other Ubisoft titles.
- #030
Programmer Richard Dumas and animator Alex Drouin, who had previously worked together on the same elements in Sands of Time, were largely responsible for making wall-climbing more fluid and smoothing other animation sequences in Assassin's Creed.
- #031
For Assassin's Creed, level designers and artists recreating historical structures collaborated so that nearly every building could be climbed while retaining its historical appearance, helping give players a sense of freedom that originated from the success of the Grand Theft Auto series.
- #032
For Assassin's Creed, the developers built cities that felt realistic and accurate to historical information while still giving the player full freedom to climb and explore, in contrast to the predefined level paths of Prince of Persia.
- #033
Outside of special buildings, the Assassin's Creed team crafted its cities like Lego bricks, then made a second pass to smooth out their shapes to aid pathfinding and other facets of the enemy artificial intelligence.
- #034
To encourage exploration in Assassin's Creed, the developers added viewpoint towers that reveal parts of the map, drawing on the landmark towers such cities historically had and turning them into points of interest and challenges that drive players to climb them.
- #035
For Assassin's Creed, the developers used simple animations made in Adobe Flash to lay out the fundamentals of the actions they wanted, then crafted levels and missions around those, balancing player freedom with specific moments they wanted players to experience.
- #036
The presence of crowds in Assassin's Creed led to the concept of social stealth, in which the main character could hide in plain sight as well as stay out of view on rooftops.
- #037
This puppet-like control concept in Assassin's Creed resulted in high- and low-profile actions in gameplay, which partly conveyed the character's emotions and let the player keep controlling the character during cutscenes.
- #038
Jade Raymond joined Assassin's Creed in late 2004 as its producer, contributing to the growth of the team and the direction of the game.
- #039
Assassin's Creed's core gameplay was finished in nine to twelve months, and roughly another year was spent refining it before the game was shown to Ubisoft executives in Paris.
- #040
Ubisoft's management wanted another Prince of Persia title and objected to a game bearing that name without the Prince as lead, while the development team argued that new-generation consoles allowed them to create a new intellectual property; around the 2006 Game Developers Conference, Ubisoft's marketing team proposed the name Assassin's Creed, which Désilets felt matched the themes they had been developing, including the Assassin creed that "nothing is true; everything is permitted".
- #041
After the 2006 E3 presentation and the game's name change to Assassin's Creed, the Ubisoft Montreal team expanded to support the final year of development, reaching up to 150 people by the end of the process.
- #042
Assassin's Creed's development team gained members who had just completed work on Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.
- #043
Former staff recently let go from Gameloft, another publisher owned by Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot, also joined the Assassin's Creed team.
- #044
According to Charles Randall, the lead AI developer for Assassin's Creed's combat systems, the game was initially built only around the main missions of assassinating the main targets and contained no side quests.
- #045
Roughly five days before the final software version of Assassin's Creed was due to be sent for mass production, the team was contacted by their CEO, who said his son had played the game and found it boring and instructed them to add side quests.
- #046
The Assassin's Creed team spent the following five days hastily adding the collecting side quests to give the game more depth and working to ensure they were bug-free in time for the mass production deadline.
- #047
Although a few noted bugs remained in Assassin's Creed, the team otherwise met its mass production target.
Sources & editorial notes
Sources for the entries on this page
- IMDb IMDb kaydı
- Wikipedia Assassin's Creed (video game) — Wikipedia
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