Assassin's Creed

• 1. Introduction

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  Assassin's Creed began as a game about a prince who wasn't a prince. In the early 2000s, Ubisoft Montreal set out to make a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and the team quickly decided they wanted to ditch the prince himself. What they landed on instead was a fictional conflict stretching across centuries between two secret societies: the Order of Assassins, who fight for peace and free will, and the Knights Templar, who pursue peace through control. That pivot gave rise to one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, with over 200 million copies sold across fourteen main installments between 2007 and 2025.

  Created by Patrice Désilets, Jade Raymond, and Corey May at Ubisoft Montreal, the series draws from the historical Hashashin sect of medieval Iran and takes its philosophical creed from the 1938 Slovenian novel Alamut by Vladimir Bartol. The franchise spans games, comics, novels, art books, and a live-action film. How a rejected prince became a brotherhood of assassins, and how that brotherhood built an empire of its own, is a story worth tracing.

• 2. From Prince to Assassin

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  The phrase that would define the entire franchise came from a marketing team trying to solve a problem. Ubisoft's developers had built a prototype they called Prince of Persia: Assassin, in which the player escorted a non-playable prince through medieval settings. Ubisoft's executives were uneasy releasing a Prince of Persia game where the prince wasn't playable, and the marketing division suggested a new name: Assassin's Creed, drawing on the creed articulated in Vladimir Bartol's novel Alamut: "nothing is true; everything is permitted".

  With the prince removed, the team built a new intellectual property entirely around the Order of Assassins and the Knights Templar, set in the Holy Land during the 12th century. Their research into secret societies led them to the historical Hashashin sect of Ismaili followers of Shia Islam, who operated under Hassan-i Sabbah during the Crusades. The historical depth gave the fictional conflict a texture that would underpin every game that followed.

  To explain why players could retry failed missions, the team invented a device called the Animus, a machine that lets users relive ancestral memories stored in DNA. That one narrative invention solved a gameplay problem while opening the door to centuries of historical settings. The first game, released in November 2007 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, set the template: a historical assassin, a modern-day framing story, and a race to recover powerful artifacts called Pieces of Eden before the Templars could use them.

• 3. The Ezio Era and Series DNA

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  Assassin's Creed II, released in November 2009, introduced Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young Florentine nobleman forced into the Brotherhood after his father and brothers are killed by Templars. Ezio would go on to anchor three consecutive main games, a run that shaped what the broader series would become.

  For the sequel, the Ubisoft Montreal team felt parkour had been underused in the first game and redesigned the world around what they called freerun highways, rooftop networks built to make movement feel fluid and purposeful. They also studied Hitman: Blood Money to refine the concept of social stealth, using crowds as cover rather than relying only on combat. The mission structure from the first game, widely criticized as repetitive, was replaced with a blend of story sequences, side activities, collectibles, and secrets that became the template not just for Assassin's Creed but for other Ubisoft games including Watch Dogs, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon.

  Ezio's home base, the Villa Auditore in Monteriggioni, introduced a management layer where players could invest in the surrounding town to generate income. Brotherhood, released in November 2010, expanded this to all of Rome, adding a recruitment system that let Ezio train civilians as Assassins and dispatch them across Europe. Brotherhood also introduced online multiplayer for the first time in the series, casting players as Abstergo employees reliving the memories of Renaissance-era Templars. Patrice Désilets, one of the franchise's three original creators, left the series after Brotherhood, marking the end of his tenure as creative director.

• 4. Naval Combat and the Kenway Saga

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  Assassin's Creed III, released in October 2012, introduced a gameplay element that would define the next phase of the series: naval combat. The ship-to-ship system originally came from an unattached project at Ubisoft Singapore. When the main team settled on Colonial America as the setting for the game, they incorporated the naval mechanics into the story, giving the player command of a warship called the Aquila.

  The game concluded the storyline of Desmond Miles, the bartender-turned-reluctant-Assassin who had been the modern-day protagonist since the first game. Desmond sacrifices himself to activate a global aurora borealis device in the Grand Temple in New York, blocking a catastrophic solar flare but dying in the process.

• 5. Reinvention and the RPG Turn

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  After Assassin's Creed Syndicate underperformed at launch in 2015, Ubisoft stepped back entirely. In February 2016, the company announced it would skip a new release that year to re-examine the franchise's direction. Ubisoft's CEO noted that the annualized release cycle had become a liability, and the team was given time to rebuild from the ground up.

  Assassin's Creed Origins, released in October 2017, was the result. Set in Ptolemaic Egypt, it followed Bayek of Siwa, a Medjay, and his wife Aya, who together founded the Hidden Ones, the precursor to the Assassin Brotherhood. The game replaced the franchise's longtime social stealth mechanic with a hitbox-based combat system and restructured mission delivery so players received quests from characters in the open world rather than through a linear Animus interface. The modern-day storyline returned to a single named character, Layla Hassan, a former Abstergo researcher.

• 6. Mythology Beneath the History

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  Every Assassin's Creed game runs two stories simultaneously. Beneath the historical settings is a science-fiction framework built around an ancient species called the Isu, or Precursors, who created humanity and used artifacts called Pieces of Eden to control human minds. When the first hybrid Isu-human beings, Adam and Eve, proved immune to the Pieces of Eden, they stole the artifacts and triggered a war. That war ended when a massive solar flare devastated the Earth, wiping out most of the Isu while humanity survived.

  Three Isu figures, Minerva, Juno, and Jupiter, attempted to prepare humanity for a second solar flare they knew was coming. Using a device called the Eye, Minerva and Jupiter left messages guiding humans toward the Grand Temple, which housed a protective shield for the planet. Juno, however, viewed humanity as a threat and sabotaged the plan, having her consciousness trapped in the Grand Temple by her allies, who were unaware she had modified the shield device to free herself upon activation.

  In the modern era, the Templars operate the mega-corporation Abstergo Industries and use the Animus to mine ancestral memories for Pieces of Eden. The extended use of the Animus creates a side effect called the Bleeding Effect: users gain some of their ancestors' skills but begin to confuse ancestral memories with their own, eroding their mental stability. This mythology, established across the first five games through Desmond Miles, fractured after his death in Assassin's Creed III. Executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté acknowledged in 2024 that the modern-day storyline had become haphazard due to the lack of a central character and the number of studios involved. The Animus Hub, introduced with Assassin's Creed Shadows in 2025, was designed to re-establish that narrative thread across future entries.

• 7. Shadows, Structure, and What Comes Next

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  Assassin's Creed Shadows, released in March 2025, arrived as the first installment of what Ubisoft called a third development period for the franchise. Set in Japan during the Sengoku period, it follows two protagonists: Fujibayashi Naoe, a kunoichi, and Yasuke, an African samurai based on the historical figure of the same name. Developed by Ubisoft Quebec, the game was the first to include the Animus Hub, a feature integrated directly into the game rather than a separate launcher.

  The Animus Hub had been publicly teased earlier as Assassin's Creed Infinity before the name changed. Marc-Alexis Côté, who described it as a "new design philosophy" for the series, left Ubisoft in October 2025. He stated his departure was tied to the series lead being transferred from him to a new position within Vantage Studios, a separate subsidiary created by Ubisoft and Tencent in 2025 to manage Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.

  Looking ahead, Ubisoft announced Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe in 2022, rumoured to be set in Central Europe during the 16th century. A remake of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, titled Black Flag Resynced, is scheduled for release on the 9th of July 2026, developed primarily by Ubisoft Singapore using the latest version of the Anvil engine. The remake adds updated visuals, manual crouching, recruitable officers for the Jackdaw, and dynamic weather effects that influence ship handling, all built on the original game's open world spanning the Caribbean.