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One of the multiplayer trophies/achievements in GTA IV is literally called 'Assassin's Greed,' which is obviously just a wordplay dig at Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. Rockstar loves naming achievements after other media, and this one's about as on-the-nose as it gets.
Right after Ezio leaves Masyaf for the first time, there's an Assassin named Jamal standing around who can be silently killed with zero repercussions. It's a deliberate throwback to a nearly identical, consequence-free easter egg buried in the very first Assassin's Creed.
Levantine Assassins are supposed to be missing the ring finger they sacrifice for the Hidden Blade, but the very first Assassin's Creed didn't always bother showing it. Revelations quietly went back and cleaned that detail up, so the animation actually matches the lore this time around.
Before it became its own thing, Assassin's Creed was pitched internally as 'Prince of Persia: Assassin', meant to be a spin-off of Sands of Time. The story drifted so far from the Prince that Ubisoft eventually cut it loose to stand on its own two feet.
For all his rooftop parkour, Altaïr has one glaring blind spot: water. Jump into a river or the sea and he just sinks, there's no swimming animation in this one at all. Later games quietly fixed this, but the original leaves you stranded if you fall in.
Masyaf isn't a made-up stronghold, the castle genuinely exists in northwest Syria and was once held by the real Nizari Ismaili sect. A restoration project between 2000 and 2006 even turned up a hidden underground tunnel and an old bathhouse on site.
Al Mualim is loosely based on Rashid ad-Din Sinan, the real leader of the Hashashin sect in the late 12th century. Ubisoft couldn't use his actual name in the game for legal reasons, so the connection stayed unofficial for years.
One of Altaïr's marks, Conrad of Montferrat, really was murdered in history, just not in 1191, the year the game is set. Ubisoft's researchers spotted the mismatch during development and decided the story worked well enough to run with it anyway.
The model scouted to be the visual basis for Desmond Miles was Francisco Randez, found through an agency search for someone with Mediterranean features. By total coincidence, Randez actually worked as a bartender, exactly like Desmond does before his life gets turned upside down.
Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad translates roughly to 'the eagle, son of none'. It's not just a cool-sounding name, birds run through the whole series as an Assassin symbol, and 'son of none' nods to Altaïr growing up an orphan, raised entirely by the Brotherhood.
