ALTAÏR-NATE PAST

How Assassin’s Creed creator PATRICE DÉSILETS became gaming’s cool teacher

- Jeremy Peel

History loomed over the young Patrice Désilets. Aged three or four, he would meet his mother as she came off the boat from the French fort where she worked on the Richelieu River. The Quebec waterway had been a crucial path for French and English armies in the era of European colonization, and the scene of several battles. But for Désilets, these ruins represented a kind of reverse science fiction.

“The past is like a fantasy land,” he enthuses these days. “It’s so different. Where we are now, it’s as if it’s on a different planet. The 20th century just changed us, totally. But this is where I’m fascinated by us—we think we’re at the end of it. I like to look behind and let a player experience how we were.” It just so happened that, as Désilets finished up the creative direction of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time many years later, Ubisoft’s marketing team was on the same dusty page.

“I received a mandate back then to do the sequel to Prince of Persia, for the next generation of consoles,” he says. “And I was asked to redefine the action-adventure genre. I remember having a discussion with marketing people, saying ‘OK, we just did a fantasy game, and maybe now the next big thing would be history.’”