Closer inspection of what Ubisoft presents to the player raises interesting questions around historiography, as Syndicate’s London proves to be an interpretation as much as a recreation, projecting the expectations of contemporary audiences on to its simulated historical city. In what is presented, however, questions are raised over the neutrality of such representations. Set in mid-Victorian London, the game offers a living city as a playground, which is populated, changing and fully traversable. This faithfulness to setting, which grounds the wilder excesses of the Assassin’s Creed plot in a tangible and immersive historical world, is particularly apparent in the latest iteration of the series, 2015’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. The increasingly convoluted backstory has elements taken from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (hidden bloodlines, religious conspiracy), Chariots of the Gods? (the presence of technologically advanced ‘alien’ species directing humanity in its historical infancy) and (as filtered through other examples of popular culture, such as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) occult history in the shape of ‘the pieces of Eden’, historical religious artefacts with arcane power which serve as the MacGuffin for the quest narrative of most of the games.Īgainst this alternative history of conspiracies, secret wars and anachronistic technology, the Assassin’s Creed series has developed a reputation for the level of attention to detail in the open-world historical cities in which the game is set: the player may discover a vault of alien technology under the Vatican, as in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, but St Peter’s above it will be accurately represented, with fidelity in architectural details and other elements of the mis-en-scene, down to its state of construction and interior decoration. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series has, in the span of nine major games released within just nine years, developed a complex mythos based on ideas liberally adopted from the ‘canon’ of pseudohistory.

Duncan Milne is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh Napier University working on Robert Louis Stevenson and late nineteenth-century literary and critical networks.

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