Video Games in 2017 Take History Really Seriously

Note: the author was invited to the game developer's media event in London and plied with wine.

It was 2015 when Apple decided that it would no longer sell apps or games that included the Confederate flag. As an Apple Store spokesman told BuzzFeed, they would remove anything that used the flag in an "offensive or mean-spirited way" unless developers could prove it served "an educational or historical use."

Ultimate General: Gettysburg was one such game that disappeared from the Apple Store, even though its makers claimed that the flag was educational. Apple promised to reinstate the game if the flag was removed, the developers refused, standing by their commitment to historical accuracy. In the end Apple backed down and historical accuracy won out.

The story serves as an illustration of how games developers increasingly view history as core to their franchises, instead of just being cosmetic. Total War, Battlefield, Civilisation, Hearts of Iron, and Assassin's Creed are all games that put history at the heart of their gameplay. But crafting interactive open worlds isn't easy when developers set themselves the added challenge of recreating details from thousands of years in the past.

"I've just spent the last four years creating Cleopatra's Egypt," explains Maxime Durand, who is an in-house historian working with the team from Assassin's Creed. Fittingly we're in the Egyptian section of the London museum where developer Ubisoft is launching the franchise's tenth instalment, Origins. "We went very deep on this one," he says. "We looked into the details of every landmark—what kind of tiles were on what buildings, what paintings were on the walls. Temples in different regions of Ancient Egypt were dedicated to different gods, so they all used different tiles. We wanted even these tiles to be accurate."

For Maxime, this dedication to accuracy ws integral to making the world of Origins believable. Games are no longer about just completing a level. Since Grand Theft Auto: Vice City introduced the idea of open worlds, games are increasingly about letting players explore. And Maxime believes that it's the details that make exploring exciting. The costumes, the tools, the buildings, and even the particular sunlight of an ancient sky.

Of course, getting this level of detail right isn't easy. Maxime spends his days trawling books and museum archives and consulting specialists. "History is like a puzzle," he says. "Lots of the pieces are missing but we need to cover all the spaces."

It's this dedication to historical recreation that sees Assassin's Creed attract an unusual amount of history nerds. Maxime says they get a lot of emails from both fans and critics. "One person went to Venice because of Assassin's Creed 2," he recalls with a laugh. "They learned how people made costumes back then and then got in touch to tell us how we could have done the fabrics differently. Emails can be both good and bad."

It's due to fans like these that Ubisoft has formed a new feature. The latest edition of Assassin's Creed comes with something called Discovery Mode. This is a version of the game that strips out the gameplay, leaving players free to wander the Nile Delta. It's a geographically and historically accurate rendering of Egypt in around the year 50 BC. Egypt was under Greek rule at the time, and Giza's great pyramids were already 500 years old and slipping into ruin. For fans of history, it's like exploring a playground in a time capsule.

Indeed, for many players, it's this sense of time travel that makes games like Assassin's Creed so enjoyable. You're not just exploring a place but a culture and time, and getting it all right makes the experience more believable.

Asked what details he's personally most proud of, Maxime mentions the sphinx, which the development team remodelled over and over to get right. "We even used data from NASA to understand how the sunlight worked in ancient Egypt and how that would have affected its colour," he explains proudly. "Maybe that is the type of detail that people won't notice but for us it's important."

Assassin's Creed: Origins is available in stores and online from today.