An Assassin Across Narratives: Reading Assassin’s Creed from Videogame to Novel

Abstract

While recounting his journey to Jerusalem, the French traveller Francois-René de Chateaubriand describes having faced a ‘real embarrassment’: ‘Should I give an exact description of the holy places? But then I will merely be repeating what others have said before me.… But would that not remove the most essential part of my journey, and defeat its end and purpose?’ (Chateaubriand 2011). In a rather different context and a narrative medium that Chateaubriand could not have anticipated, the player of Ubisoft’s cult videogame Assassin’s Creed (2007) faces a similar problem. As the fictional game protagonist, Altair ibn Ahad, perches atop a high tower inside a virtual recreation of the holy city, the same issue arises of representation and comparisons with earlier narratives and narrative media. How does Altair/the player’s experience compare with the narratives of the earlier travellers and storytellers? This chapter will briefly discuss this question; but it will also examine how narratives in the videogames themselves compare with novels adapted from those games. The Assassin’s Creed games and the popular series of Assassin’s Creed novels by Oliver Bowden (a pseudonym used by the author Anton Gill) will be considered here because they self-consciously take their stories across multiple media and into different periods of history. By looking at how narratives transition into particular kinds of media—from the printed book to the digital game and vice versa—this chapter aims to encourage a broader analysis of the ways in which ‘narrativity’ operates in literary and cultural terms.