Ubisoft
The original Assassin’s Creed resolved the franchise’s historical inconsistencies as part of its own plot
The controversy over Yasuke in Assassin’s Creed Shadows brings to the fore a conversation from the first video game in 2007 that already justified all the historical inconsistencies of the saga.
The announcement of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the next historical fiction game in Ubisoft’s fruitful saga, was not without controversy due to the inclusion of Yasuke, a black samurai whose real history is the subject of debate. Indeed, the key to this video game series is historical fiction, something that has been present since the first Assassin’s Creed, released in 2007, and justified as part of its own plot. Or, to put it another way, since its inception, the saga has not been 100% faithful to history, because although it uses real historical events and characters, the facts told are ultimately purely fictional, and also tend towards pure and hard science fiction.
This conversation from the first Assassin’s Creed justified the franchise’s factual errors as part of its plot
In the original Assassin’s Creed, released in 2007 on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, we play as Desmond Miles in the present day, a young American kidnapped by Abstergo as part of a convoluted plan to obtain artifacts of unknown origin with great power: the Fruits of Eden. In order to determine the whereabouts of one of these artifacts, Miles is forced to enter a machine called the Animus, which allows him to reproduce the memories of his ancestors encoded at the genetic level within Desmond himself.
This revolutionary device allows him to experience firsthand virtual recreations of the life of one of his ancestors, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, who lived during the High Middle Ages between Masjaf, Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus. After one of the first sessions in the Animus, Desmond discusses his experience with Warren Vidic, the scientist in charge of this quest.
The Animus and several variants of this machine have been used in later titles of the saga as an element that allows the existence of two timelines to make sense on a narrative level: the present and the one showing the life of one of Desmond’s ancestors or another past character who was relevant.
In this way, the scriptwriters of this first video game made sure that both this and the rest of the franchise would justify their possible historical inconsistencies in this peculiar way.
Because in real life, Ezio Auditore did not have a fistfight with Pope Alexander VI, as seen in Assassin’s Creed II, nor was Pythagoras an immortal being who lived in Atlantis, as seen in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
From the very first title, the intention of the saga has been exactly that: to create science fiction stories based in part on real historical figures and events, but always with fantastic content as the foundation.