Page 2 of 2
A crossbow for ranged kills was in the game at one point, but Ubisoft pulled it before launch. Playtesters were leaning on it too heavily instead of engaging with the melee and stealth systems, and it wasn't historically accurate for the setting either. You can still spot Altaïr wearing one on his back in early trailer footage.
As an in-joke, the level designers tucked an image of Optimus Prime's face into the architecture of certain buildings, formed by a triple-shuttered window with two boarded-up windows above it. It shows up more than once, across more than one city, if you know to look up.
To wield the Hidden Blade, Altaïr had his left ring finger amputated, letting the blade slide cleanly between his other fingers when triggered by a cord-pulled ring. It was both practical engineering and a symbolic rite of passage into the Brotherhood, one later Assassins like Ezio wouldn't have to go through once the design was improved.
The game's E3 reveal trailer shows Altaïr crossbow-shooting a bodyguard before assassinating a Templar mid-hanging. None of that scene actually plays out in the finished game, and crossbows weren't even a usable weapon yet, Ubisoft has said the swap was deliberate so the trailer wouldn't spoil real story beats.
That now-classic open-world habit of climbing a tower to reveal the map and unlock collectibles started right here. Plenty of players found it repetitive even at the time, but it became such a genre staple that even other Ubisoft series like Far Cry and Watch Dogs borrowed it later.
Outside a couple of recognisable names, the voice cast for the original game was made up largely of actors with little to no prior acting experience, a pattern that stuck around for a lot of the series' early entries.
After Al Mualim strips Altaïr of his rank for a botched mission, he's handed a hit list of nine targets scattered across Damascus, Acre, and Jerusalem to earn his way back into the Brotherhood. Each kill drips out a little more of the game's Templar conspiracy, right up until the reveal that Al Mualim was pulling the strings all along.
Altaïr's movement was built from more than 4,000 individual character animations, an enormous amount for 2007, all in service of making his climbing and parkour feel fluid rather than robotic across the game's rooftops and market stalls.
Rather than assigning buttons to specific moves, the original game tied each face button to one of Altaïr's limbs, so the same button could mean climbing, grabbing, or attacking depending on context. It's an unusual scheme the series moved away from almost immediately after this game.
Assassin's Creed launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in November 2007, but PC owners were left waiting until April 2008 to get their own version, a gap that became a fairly common pattern for Ubisoft's console-first releases in that era.
