UBISOFT Assassin's Creed Xbox 360

The Assassin's Crreed series originated out of ideas for a sequel for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a 3D adaption of the original Prince of Persia games, which was made for PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox and other platforms. It included a number of parkour moves and combat. The Sands of Time was a critical and financial success, leading publisher Ubisoft to request Ubisoft Montreal to develop a sequel, aiming for the seventh generation of video game consoles. The Ubisoft Montreal team decided on taking the gameplay from The Sands of Time into an open world approach, taking advantage of the improved processing power to render larger spaces and crowds. Narratively, the team wanted to move away from the Prince being someone next in line for the throne but to have to work for it; combined with research into secret societies led them to focus on the Assassins, heavily borrowing from the novel Alamut.[3]

They developed a narrative where the player would control an Assassin that served as a bodyguard for a non-playable Prince, leading them to call this game Prince of Persia: Assassin. Ubisoft was not happy with a Prince of Persia game without the Prince as the playable character, but this led to the marketing division to suggest the name Assassin's Creed, playing off the creed of the Assassins, "nothing is true; everything is permitted". Ubisoft Montreal ran with this in creating a new intellectual property, eliminating the Prince and creating the conflict between the Assassins and Templar Knights. Further, in postulating what other assassinations they could account for throughout human history, they came onto the idea of genetic memory and created the "Animus" device and modern storyline elements, which further allowed them to explain certain facets of gameplay, such as accounting when the player fails a mission, in the same way they had done in The Sands of Time