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The Assassins were supposed to protect the Prince, not steal his crown. If you're a fan of courtly intrigues, or at least courtly intrigue as a metaphor for franchise evolution, I recommend reading up on Prince of Persia: Assassin, a Sands of Time spin-off that was in pre-production at Ubisoft Montreal across 2003 and 2004. Eschewing the storybook morality of its predecessor, the game would have cast the player as a hooded bodyguard armed with pop-out wristblades and a repertoire of vicious grappling moves, escorting an AI-controlled princeling through Jerusalem. This bloodthirsty mixture had promise, but was seen as too severe a departure for the franchise, so Ubisoft greenlit Assassin as a new IP. Thus the seed that produced the 70 million-selling Assassin's Creed series - and through Assassin's Creed, the open world action-adventure genre of the present day.It seems an unwitting piece of socio-political allegory - the transfer of power from an aristocratic hero to an everyman killer, lurking in the crowd - and indeed, the Prince's downfall from Ubisoft's perspective was perhaps his station. "The problem is that a prince isn't an action figure," creative director Patrice Désilets told Edge in 2012. "A prince is someone who's waiting to become king." I feel this misses the point slightly - the appeal of a prince as a fiction archetype is that he has all the status but few of the responsibilities of a king. It's that blend of glamour and relative freedom to go out on a limb (or a ceiling beam) that makes him such an attractive lead for an action game. But discussion is, of course, academic. The Prince of Persia has gone the way of princes in general, not aided by the Heavy Metal misstep that was Warrior Within, while the Assassins have risen in power and splendour, becoming property owners, guild leaders and sea captains, attracting a vast entourage of tailors, carpenters, bankers and celebrity hangers-on. There is, surely, nothing left to learn from the antics of a blue-blooded daredevil who has fallen into obscurity.
Or is there? Among the things I find most fascinating about latter-day Assassin's Creed is its failure to entirely leave the shadow of Sands of Time, the game that created and, you could credibly argue, perfected the blueprint for framing, animation and control in Western third-person action games this side of 2000. Sands of Time may be a fading memory, but its fingerprints are all over the industry: every fluid transition from jump to ledge grab, every expert automatic camera adjustment during a platforming sequence, every light-tinted handhold and of course, every wall-run owes something to the Prince's journey through the crumbling palace of Azad.
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