This week I interviewed the co-writer of Assassin’s Creed 2, Joshua Rubin. Joining me was a fan of the game from Egypt, Karim Ayman Youssef. I had also picked a couple questions asked by other fans on Facebook.
Some of the stuff we talked about…
- how the Hollywood movie making crowd is awed that’s he’s working on video games
- the possibility of an Assassin’s Creed movie
- how the young DaVinci from the game could be an ancestor to Bond’s Q
- “it was great fun to design the beating of the ****.” (spoilers inside, be warned)
… … … …INITIALIZING TRANSCRIPT… … … …
Incolas: Ok it’ll start now!
Josua Rubin: Karim, are you in Egypt?
Karim Ayman Youssef: Yes.
Josua Rubin: Where about? I’ve been to Cairo, and down the Nile.
Karim Ayman Youssef: Nice, I am from Alexandria. :)
Incolas is checking google maps
Josua Rubin: Wow. Cool. So we have Alexandria, Paris and Santa Monica represented here.
Incolas: Welcome to the both of you!
Karim Ayman Youssef: I wonder if Assassin’s Creed 2 is based on real-life stuff.
Josua Rubin: Well, you know much of it is based on historical fact. That’s what sets the game apart from many others out there. Many of the characters and events are real characters and events from the Italian Rennaissance. But of course, the Assassins and Templars and their secret war against each other aren’t real. : )
Incolas: The historical elements in Assassin’s Creed 2 seem to be very accurate. How do you get around all the work on documentation? How many people are there doing this?
Josua Rubin: We worked with an Italian Renaissance specialist, who checked over everything we did. All of the game levels were built around actual events that happened. For example, we knew we wanted an event that put you in the middle of the real life Pazzi conspiracy in Florence – and knew that it needed to happen before the events we wanted to put you in in Venice, during the real life conspiracy to kill the Doge. So we made a list of real life events, built an actual time based on that – and that’s how we realized that the game needed to stretch over 20 years, in order to fit them all in. And that’s how we began to sketch out the idea of a character, Ezio, who would age 20 years – from teenager, to bitter but mature assassin.
Of course, all of the team went to Florence before the game design started, and visited all the places they wanted to include. Took hundreds of pictures. Drank too much Chianti. : )
Incolas: Florence is ok. : ]
Karim Ayman Youssef: I wish I were with you. :)
Josua Rubin: I actually wasn’t there either. : ( I came on later in the process.
Incolas: How many people wrote such a huge story? and the dialogs?
Josua Rubin: There were two of us. Corey May is the primary story writer. He wrote the first game by himself. He called me in to help him with the second game, and I worked for about 4 months with him, to help craft and shape the scenes. I wrote about 50% of the dialogue. Another writer, Jeffery Yohalem, created all the in-game encyclopedia entries, as well as all the Glyph/The Truh mini-games. When I arrived, there was no script. There was just a world, basic game design, and a plan for what the sequences would be like. I really worked with the whole team to create the details of what happened in each sequence, how the cut scenes were shaped, and what people said.
Karim Ayman Youssef: What can you tell us about Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood?
Josua Rubin: I’m not working on that game. I know a few things about it, though.
Incolas: Do you know secrets??
Josua Rubin: Try me.
Incolas: Joshua… Gamocracy has tons of money in the bank for you. If you know what I mean.
Josua Rubin: Honestly, I doubt I’m allowed to say much. What I know is that it’s not an “official” sequel to the game. It’s actually a continuation of Ezio’s journey in Renaissance Italy and it is much more of a multiplayer game.
Incolas: Yep, this we already know… Too bad you’re not allowed to say more! Back to Assassin’s Creed 2, I have a couple questions from AC2 fan Derek Richardson, who lives in the United States:
“Was the concept for what direction to take the series in already fleshed out when making AC1? Or did the idea come while making the later games to add in “the ones who came before” as the creators and original users of the “Pieces of Eden”?”
Josua Rubin: Wow… I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint. I can’t really comment on what was known during Assassin’s Creed 1, since I worked on Assassin’s Creed 2. My understanding from Corey, however, is that he knew all along what he was doing. He once showed me a master document of the entire “true” history of the “ones who came before.” It’s pretty incredible. He sketched this really magnificent history – really a pre-history – of our world. It ties together all these true events we know, with a kind of underground meta-mythology that brings in the earliest incarnations of the Templars and Assassins.
Incolas: Somewhere I read an author needed to know more about his world than he would ever reveal to the public.
Josua Rubin: True. Of course. though I’m doubting the creators of LOST ever knew much more. : (
Incolas: Haha! But is it the same in games?
Josua Rubin: Like with LOST, in the making of Assassin’s Creed 2, there was always a feeling that you, as the creator, need to know just a little bit more than the player: enough to create mysteries. But you don’t always need to know the answers to the mysteries. Half the fun of creating a continuing franchise is discovering the answers to the mysteries as you go along, along with the player.
Incolas: Another one from Derek Richardson:
“What inspired you to have such a religiously charged storyline?”
Josua Rubin: hhmmmm…I can only speak for Assassin’s Creed 2, though the question is valid for both games. In Renaissance Italy, the Pope and the Church were the primary power structure. And this game is about conspiracies, and unraveling large power structures to discover the truth underneath the surface. The assassins are an underground brotherhood protecting us from those that would assume power to control us. Those assuming power in the time frame of the game were the religious leaders. So it was never really a question of attacking religious figures in general that led us. And the most evil and vicious of the real life criminals at the time was Borgia, the Pope. That said we did have a lot of fun designing a final level where you got to beat up the Pope. : )
Incolas: No kidding… Keeping on with Derek Richardon’s questions:
“Were those involved in making the game worried about how the public would react to the views of the characters and story when it came to religion? Or fear of the gamers who may be religious to be put off by the direction the game has gone?”
Josua Rubin: That was never a worry that we discussed. And clearly, if you look at the sales, it hasn’t been a problem. : )
Incolas: That’s what’s really interesting I think.
Josua Rubin: But certainly, there’s a reason for that line that comes up on the screen at the beginning of the game, something like: “This game was created by a multi-cultural staff of many religions and beliefs.”
Incolas: You’re not writing for games only. Do you think you could have had the same type of story in other formats? (with comparable budgets/sizes)
Josua Rubin: Can you be more clear, Nicolas? Other formats… You mean, movies, comic books, TV?
Incolas: I mean that making the pope the arch enemy is not common in mainstream western culture.
Josua Rubin: Oh, interesting.
Incolas: It can be so in alternative stuff, but not in what sells to millions after TV promotion.
Josua Rubin: And yet the game did sell to millions… go figure. I mean, think of it this way…. Nowhere in the ads for the game, or even in the description of the game, does it say: “This is a game about killing the pope”. That doesn’t come until the very end. And by that point, you’re already invested in hating this evil character. And the truth is, this very evil person, Rodrigo Borgia, did become Pope. And he was a very evil Pope. One of the worst human beings to ever have so much power on this planet.
Incolas: That’s right, it doesn’t show on the front cover, it’s hidden in there. I’m amazed that some people managed to get that through at Ubisoft…
Josua Rubin: So, in the end, it wasn’t about killing a pope. It was about saving Italy from an evil man who had taken a position of power. Look at the Rodrigo Borgia Wikipedia entry, you’ll be shocked at how awful he was.
Karim Ayman Youssef: What about Da Vinci’s inventions? I heard that those in the game were really designed by the genius.
Josua Rubin: Da Vinci’s designs for assassin weapons based on ancient codex pages are fiction. What he did design is the flying machine, it’s based off of his real notebooks. But whether it ever worked, or was just a prototype, we don’t know. I worry about the guy whose job it was to jump off a building with the thing to try it out for the first time. I think if it HAD worked, we wouldn’t have had to wait for the Wright Brothers many hundreds of years later to have a working plane.
If you’ve never looked at Da Vinci’s notebooks, you really should. They’re exciting and inspiring. He had so many ideas, and drawings of concepts, that were way ahead of his time. Here are some examples.
Incolas: Da Vinci looks so young in the game… In my mind he’s always been an old genius. Did you make him that young to fit the real time frame you mentioned earlier?
Josua Rubin: Yeah, we had some fun with that, making Leonardo a young man. And, yes, we did it to fit the time frame, because we wanted to be as true as possible to the real dates of events and characters.
The idea of making Da Vinci like Ezio’s Q (a Bond reference) was too much fun. And when we realized he’d have been a young man at the time, it was really exciting to think of them as friends – and getting to see the character in a stage of his life where we never think of him.
Incolas: Switching topics, what are you doing outside of writing for games?
Josua Rubin: As you can tell, gaming is a very new field for me. This is the first game I ever worked on. And I’m obviously VERY lucky to have gotten to start at such a high level, on such an amazing franchise. Honestly, when I got the call to come help Corey with the game, I had to go out and buy a Playstation in order to play the first one. My focus for the past ten years has been in film and TV.
Karim Ayman Youssef: Will Assassin’s Creed become a movie one day?
Josua Rubin: I believe so. Many people would love to make it, and many producers have tried to option the rights from Ubisoft. But they’re hoping to produce it themselves, and have it be their first film.
I’ll tell you an interesting story. I live in Los Angeles, and everybody here works in film and TV. The other night I went to a party and was telling people that I write video games – and nobody really could understand what I was talking about. It’s like, most people can’t even conceptualize that video games need a writer. And yet, they were all totally fascinated. If I said I was writing a movie, they’d yawn. But I said I’m writing a video game, and they’re mouth hung open. : ]
My wife pointed out that I’ve really penetrated a young man’s field. And then we both made jokes about the pun… “penetrating a young man’s field.” Very dirty. And very appropriate for Gay-Mocracy
(happy)
Incolas: Ahhh, now you’re doing the mean pun again!! And from looking at the time, looks like it’s unfortunately on this pretty bad piece of humor (no, I ain’t biased!) that we’ll call this interview an end. :)
… … … …TRANSCRIPT DONE… … … …
Thanks Karim for coming around with your questions.
And a very big thank you to Mr. Joshua Rubin for taking some time to discuss the writing work on Assassin’s Creed 2 with us. I heard you’re at it with another game – a pretty big one which officially doesn’t exist yet – so let me wish you the best of luck for that.