Everyone, welcome down to SoC history. It's that time of the week when we celebrate one

of the other of the history hits table. The brilliant specialist history podcast we offer

people who are such big fans of history that they want more and more of the particular

era in which they specialize. This one is Gone Medieval. It is presented by Matt Lewis

and Kat Jarman. They divide up the middle ages between them that's playing to go around

and this is an episode I know you're going to love. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval.

I'm Dr Kat Jarman.

How many people history is something you'll learn at school or in a museum, read about in books or

maybe get through one of your favourite podcasts? But for others, history might be accessed in

quite a different way. I'm talking about computer games and especially the huge popularity of

a historical gaming. But exactly what goes into these games? How are the fictional words created

and how much care if any at all do they take to represent a historical period realistically?

In this episode, we're going to be talking about one of the most famous of them all.

The Assassin's Creed franchise developed and created by Ubisoft. It's the latest version of

the game that came out in 2020. It's called AC Valhalla and is set in the Viking Age.

Something that's unique about this particular game is that it also exists in a version that aims

to be educational, the Discovery Tour, where you both play the game but also learn about the

history behind it as well as how the game was created in the first place. I'm really delighted to

have with me today to talk about this Maxine Durand, a historian who is the world design director

for Ubisoft's Discovery Tours. Maxine, thank you so much for joining us on Gone with Evil today.

Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. Great and I should just for the record here say that I

really didn't have work together in the past because I did actually work as a consultant when

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