Need to start from the top here for the non-gamers in the audience: Assassin’s Creed is a 2007 video game published by French studio Ubisoft that has since spawned a series that of 13 full-length sequels and 15 or so spinoffs and mobile phone games, plus a not-very-well-received 2016 film starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and the late great Michael Kenneth Williams.
The premise is hard to explain but as tightly as possible here it is: In every game, players take on the role of a member of the Assassin Order, who for thousands of years have been battling the Knights Templar for control over powerful artifacts left behind by an ancient alien civilization being ruthlessly sought by all sorts of historical villains. The settings have jumped back and forth between, no joke, Greece during the Peloponnesian War, Roman/Ptolemaic Egypt, Abbasid Caliphate Baghdad, Britain during the Viking invasions, the Levant/Turkey during the Crusades, Renaissance Italy, Feudal Japan, the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy, Revolutionary-era America, Revolutionary-era France, and late Victorian London. And that’s just the main, fully-priced entires in the series.
The games have had their highs and lows over the years in terms of reception from gamers. Being a demographic rife with MAGA-adjacent or just actual MAGA inceldom, the complaints haven’t always been about the actual quality of the $200 million+ productions so much as the usual shrieking and stomping over various “woke” creative decisions made by Ubisoft. It’s in that context that the latter of two politics-adjacent chickenshit moves behind the scenes surfaced this week on gamer site Kotaku, relayed from their former editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo’s paywalled Substack. It’s the more recently reported one that will (hopefully) make the other more accessible, so starting from there:
DEI kills art
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2024
Elon and his fanboys were, sur-fucking-prise, outraged.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows hit stores in March of this year after a delay from last November, but that was to make time for more testing and technical polish. Not the removal of co-protagonist Yasuke that complete scrotum Malaysian MAGA influencer Ian Miles Cheong was agitating for back during its initial marketing rollout in April 2024 (Fun fact: Cheong has never set foot in the United States).
Yasuke’s still very much in the game, which you can pick up and play now, and most of it allowing the option to switch back and forth between the Black samurai and the native, ethnically Japanese female shinobi Naoe as you slash, slit, and decapitate your way across 1580s Japan.
The thing with Yasuke is that Ubisoft didn’t just make him up. He was a real historical figure, a slave from Africa, brought by a Portuguese sailor to Japan, and then trained as a samurai. For a series that shoehorns contrivances like that the secret grandchild of Sparta’s King Leonidas protected Socrates from malign enemies – and then that warrior’s descendant fought in the conflict between Julius Caesar and Marc Antony – just having a co-protagonist be a Black samurai isn’t really all that wacky.
The game’s creative team stood by their decisions and refused to back down, with producer Marc-Alexis Cote telling Totilo in June 2024 that he had wanted to get into it with Ketamine Brain right then and there but decided to take it slower. “That tweet generated emotions, that… the first thing I wanted to do was go back on X – that I had deleted – and just tweet back. And I just took a step back. I have a mindfulness app on my phone. And I did a bit of mindfulness to try to explore the emotions that this tweet created. For me, Elon, it’s sad, he’s just feeding hatred. I had a lot of three-word replies that came to mind,” said Cote while the circlejerk was still raging.
The next month, on July 23, 2024, Ubisoft was by then dealing with bitching from Japanese gamers (more likely Caucasian-American incels using anime characters in their online names), and put out a statement saying they had “to address a few points to clarify our intentions and creative decisions:”
We have put significant effort into ensuring an immersive and respectful representation of Feudal Japan. However, our intention has never been to present any of our Assassin’s Creed games, including Assassin’s Creed Shadows, as factual representations of history, or historical characters. Instead, we aim to spark curiosity and encourage players to explore and learn more about the historical settings we get inspired by.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is first and foremost, designed to be an entertaining video game that tells a compelling, historical fiction set in Feudal Japan.
Our team extensively collaborated with external consultants, historians, researchers, and internal teams at Ubisoft Japan to inform our creative choices. Despite these sustained efforts, we acknowledge that some elements in our promotional materials have caused concern within the Japanese community. For this, we sincerely apologize. All game footage presented so far is in development and the game will keep evolving until launch. Based on the constructive criticism we have received, we will continue our efforts until we put this game into your hands – and beyond.
They kept going with this brave and principled statement of being unwilling to back down but you got the gist. This is what they were saying publicly to defend their decision to have a Black former slave as the player’s character in one of their ultra-violent power fantasy games.
Privately, according to Stephen Totilo via Kotaku, execs backed down in a different way by pulling the plug on early development of a future entry starring a former slave in the Reconstruction-era South confronting the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. A source told Totilo the suits were “bowing to controversy” over concern that the premise would be “too political in a country too unstable.”
The final catalyst in this fail by Team Assassins? The failed assassination of convicted felon now-President Trump on July 13th, 2024, according to the reporting. The timing on the cancelation isn’t exactly clear but it was within days of when Ubisoft publicly stuck by Yasuke, protecting the sunk cost of creating and marketing the character for their upcoming game while cowering privately.
A game about a Black man killing the Klan being “too political in a country too unstable” is such a fucking sad statement. That they landed on the cowardly, safer side of that judgment call doesn’t make that lay of the land any less true. After the incels freaked the fuck out over a Black man slaughtering Japanese enemies then does anyone seriously think a Black man slaughtering enemies representing the not-that-distant ancestors of a significant portion of the target American market would be received any less controversially? It’d be “political” whether anyone else likes it or not.
Maybe the most fucked up part is that Yasuke is not the first Black Assassin player character in the series, nor is he the even the second as in 2012 Ubisoft released a spinoff of Assassin’s Creed III titled Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation for the handheld Playstation Vita device. Liberation starred the biracial Aveline de Grandpre. What dropped a year later was an even ballsier spinoff to the next main entry, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, titled Freedom Cry and starring a pirate named Adewale.
Yeah that’s Adewale. The guy Elon Musk and Ian Miles Cheong never gave a shit about 12 years ago, liberating slaves by the dozens, laying waste to plantation after plantation. He is not at all merciful to 18th century Carribbean French colonists involved with the trade, some of whom may have been the ancestors of the folks at Ubisoft who developed, produced, and marketed Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag – Freedom Cry, which was first sold as a $14.99 add-on expansion to the main $60 title.
And there’s your bridge to the another cowardly creative decision Ubisoft reportedly made recently.
The recent apex of the series both in quality and content was 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. The base game already packed in Norway, England, Vinland – as in pre-Colombian Viking-colonized North America, and two Norse mythical realms that your character, Eivor, can visit after drinking some magic potion. Then, for $20 each on their release or $35 in a bundle, Ubisoft gave players Ireland and France, the former of the two featuring fucking werewolves while the latter some pretty kickass battles between local insurgents and the Carolingian Empire forces of Charles the Fat.
Then in 2022 there was a $40 expansion titled Dawn of Ragnarok where the player drinks another potion and winds up in some really over-the-top Norse realm and gains all these magic powers…
The point being that these were paid, though Ubisoft is sometimes generous with other extra content, giving it away gratis after the main game is released. Valhalla especially had two giant, completely free expansions between 2020 and 2023. What they’ve never done (except in one unique circumstance too convoluted to explain here) is go back and expand the previous title in the series after the next one is released. They closed the chapter on Valhalla in 2023 and opened up Mirage, a prequel starring Eivor’s Assassin mentor Basim Ibn Ishaq, slashing throats in his native Baghdad, which was then subsequently closed when Shadows hit consoles earlier this year.
Oops, guess not. This week Kotaku reported that the trailer for the new Valley of Memory expansion pack for Mirage, set in Saudi Arabia and completely free, will add a manual jump button, something missing from the series for a while. In that brief item is where they slip in a link to Totilo’s reporting that a certain hardcore gamer in that country had bankrolled the development and production.
Yes. Bonesaw.
From a September 10th article before the Substack paywall:
The most recent announcement of an expansion to Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s crown jewel franchise, has unfolded strangely this year. A big question publicly – and a subject of discussion within Ubisoft – centers on the Saudi Arabian government’s involvement in its creation. Ubisoft announced the add-on August 23, informing much of the world with a 4am ET Saturday morning tweet. That’s not a standard promotional time slot, even for a multi-national company headquartered in Paris.
The news at the time: Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the solidly reviewed 2023 adventure set in 9th century Baghdad – and the rare big-budget video game whose creators worked hard to depict the Arab world with respect – will get a free add-on adventure set in 9th century AlUla later this year. AlUla is located in what is now Saudi Arabia. The timing of the announcement makes more sense in light of a less publicized detail:
The Mirage news was actually broken that Saturday by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, as he spoke on stage in Riyadh at the New Global Sport Conference, a two-day event produced in conjunction with the Saudi-government funded Esports World Cup.
Bad enough that him and fucking Slenderman bought up Electronic Arts, now that sick son of a bitch has his serrated blade to Ubisoft’s fingers too? That’s a very large chunk of the market right there.
Seems like publisher, whose products have a very dedicated longtime fan in yours truly, is hell-bent on submitting itself to the will of both the real-life versions of the violent zealots and murderous tyrants who serve as the antagonists in Assassin’s Creed and other series in their catalog. Who would have thought a company run by French people could be so willing to surrender to fascists?