The first Assassin’s Creed was the start of something that became absolutely massive. When it came out, this wasn’t an established series with a formula everybody already knew.…

The first Assassin’s Creed was the start of something that became absolutely massive. When it came out, this wasn’t an established series with a formula everybody already knew. It was a new idea being put in front of people, and for me, what it did was nothing short of revolutionary. Climbing through those cities, moving across the rooftops, disappearing into a crowd, figuring out how to approach a target and then get away. The historical setting was already interesting, but putting all of that inside Desmond’s story and the Animus gave it another layer. You weren’t just playing through the Third Crusade. You were trying to understand why someone in the present needed these memories in the first place. It also came out of work that began around Prince of Persia. The team behind The Sands of Time was looking at what it could do with the next generation of hardware, and that eventually grew into its own series. Looking back at how many games, characters, and settings followed, that first step was a hell of a thing. It had problems. The investigations could get repetitive, and there are plenty of quality-of-life improvements in the later games that you notice immediately when you go back. Even Ubisoft’s own retrospective acknowledges how much repetition there was and how much ACII needed to improve. That doesn’t take away what the first game started. It shows how much room there was for the series to grow. If you want to revisit it, you aren’t limited to the original consoles. The Xbox 360 version is playable on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S through backward compatibility, with FPS Boost on Series consoles, and the Director’s Cut is still available on PC. Altaïr’s first game can feel rougher than what came after it. It’s still the foundation for one of the biggest series in gaming, and I think it deserves to be remembered for how much it opened up, not just for the things the sequels did better.