Sitting, as they do, at the intersection between “real human history” and “stabbing the shit out of a ton of powerful assholes”, the team at Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed games have always been inherently political, almost by default. After all, it’s built into the concept, before you even jump into games that specifically deal with topics like slavery, political revolutions, or racist villains: these are games about assassinswhich tend, as a general rule, to target people who are isolated and protected by the societal structures within which they exist. Difficult to make this completely apolitical.
But damn, if people don’t try, as a new report from a former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo suggests today. Totilo wrote for his newsletter Game filereporting that Ubisoft had actually canceled a Assassin’s Creed game last year, largely due to the current political climate in its target markets. For some reason, the company apparently thought it might have trouble selling a Assassin’s Creed game about a freed slave planting knives in the necks of members of the Ku Klux Klan in the midst of rebuilding the South to Americans living in the mid-2020s. Weird, right?
According to anonymous sources who worked on the project, the untitled film Assassin’s Creed The game would have taken place in America in the 1860s, briefly touching on the Civil War before focusing primarily on the postwar period, with its hero returning to the South to secretly fight the forces of oppression and division. (Among other things, the game was apparently intended to demonstrate how “racial tensions can be manipulated as a means of controlling a society.”) Although the Klan—founded in 1865 as a racist backlash against the end of slavery and the granting of voting rights to black men—would not have been the game’s only villain, it certainly seems like our hero would have had to deal with its rise, probably in knife-style fashion.
The game was apparently in the early stages of development, having passed the initial stages of approval from senior officials at the France-based company. (The developers were apparently excited, both by the unique setting and by the chance to say something meaningful with the game.) But then, in July 2024, the verdict was in: the game was canceled, apparently due to concerns about political tensions in America, which was eroding a plot of Assassin’s Creed games. To quote an anonymous developer, the game would have been “too political in a country that was too unstable.”
There is probably were other factors at play: at the same time, Ubisoft suffered negative reactions from Online Gamer Types by announcing that its game in Japan Assassin’s Creed: Shadows would feature a black man, Yasuke, as one of its protagonists. Still, insiders cited in Totilo’s newsletter point out that “anxiety related to the political climate in the United States” was the main factor preventing the release of the reconstruction-focused game. Instead, Assassin’s Creed-which previously covered the United States in two different games from 2012 and targeted the slave trade with the 2013 one. Cry of freedom…completely abandons North America. The next game in the franchise, named Hexwould focus on the witch trials in the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century.