Making History with Assassin's Creed

Imaginary Worlds

Eric Molinsky

Fiction, Arts, Society & Culture, Science Fiction

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Darby McDevitt is a narrative director and writer at Ubisoft . He’s worked on multiple games in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which spans time periods from Ancient Greece to Victorian England. But what does it mean to be a writer on a massive video game where your character is mostly running, climbing, jumping and fighting? The key to his work lies in historical research, but he is sometimes torn between what would actually happen and what pop culture has trained us to expect from different eras of history. We also discuss his new novel, The Halter, which imagines a future where virtual reality is so realistic and addictive that people abandon their real lives and have to be tracked down. This is the first episode in a multi-part series on video games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This show is supported by Odu. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs
0:06.2	add up, and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that
0:12.8	sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales.
0:18.9	Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way.
0:24.0	You can save money without missing out on features you need.
0:27.5	Check out Odu at O-D-O-O-O-O-D-O-com.
0:31.7	That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com.
0:35.9	This is your latest project.
0:38.3	It's heavy with information, data and exactly 36 pages of waffle.
0:45.3	But with Acrobat Studio, you can create a PDF space, an AI-powered workspace that turns documents into summaries and insights and even generates reports or presentations
0:56.1	out of it. So you can cut through the waffle, work smarter and save time. Do that with Acrobat.
1:03.1	Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create
1:09.0	them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all in lockdown,
1:16.7	and nobody knew when it would end, I would watch videos of people playing Assassin's Creed.
1:22.4	But they weren't really playing these video games. They were just moving the characters all
1:26.8	around to explore the world.
1:29.3	It was like virtual sightseeing and time travel at the same time.
1:34.3	The concept of Assassin's Creed is that there is a device called the Animus,
1:39.3	which allows people to tap into the memories of their ancestors and experience their lives as a form of
1:45.9	virtual reality.
1:48.2	You remember the animus, the machine we use to unravel genetic memories and relive the
1:53.0	lives of our ancestors?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Eric Molinsky, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Eric Molinsky and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.