Assassins Creed — Ezio Auditore in white hooded assassin robes with Rome skyline in the background

Assassins Creed

2007video game franchiseclassic

Published August 15, 2026

Assassins Creed is Ubisoft Montreal's action-adventure stealth series that launched on PS3 and Xbox 360 in November 2007, then grew into a full-on internet fandom of parody trailers, parkour tributes, and long-running dev-team roast jokes. Its hooded silhouette, hidden-blade kills, and Leap of Faith into a hay bale turned into some of gaming's most recognizable visual shorthand.

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Overview

Assassins Creed is an action-adventure stealth video game series developed by Ubisoft Montreal, first released in 20071. Players take on Desmond Miles, a bartender descended from a long line of assassins who relives his ancestors' memories through a virtual reality machine called the Animus4. Gameplay mixes rooftop parkour, hidden-blade takedowns, and open-world exploration across historical cities like Jerusalem, Florence, and Paris1.

Beyond the games, the series turned into a fandom meme engine. Its hooded assassin silhouette, the Leap of Faith into a hay bale, and the credo "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" turned into recognizable shorthand across forums and reaction images3. Character ask-blogs for Desmond, Ezio, and Connor filled Tumblr, and thousands of fan art submissions piled up on DeviantArt4.

Origin & Background

Platform
PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 (YouTube and Reddit for meme spread)
Creator
Ubisoft Montreal
Date
2007

The first Assassins Creed launched on November 13, 2007, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 3601. Ubisoft Montreal led development on the mainline entries while Gameloft and Gryptonite Studios handled the early handheld spinoffs4. The debut showing at E3 2006 swept multiple category awards, including Game Critics' "Best Action/Adventure Game" and IGN's "Best PS3 Game of the Show"7. By April 2014, the series sold more than 73 million copies across 14 titles1.

How It Spread

The Assassins Creed Wiki opened on July 28, 2007, collecting more than 4,900 entries in its first seven years5. On November 17, 2010, the /r/assassinscreed subreddit launched as a hub for fan theories, screenshot dumps, and patch complaints3.

Parody and fan videos pushed the brand into mainstream YouTube meme circuits. On September 2, 2010, Tobuscus uploaded a "literal trailer" for Assassins Creed: Brotherhood that pulled tens of millions of views and over 114,000 comments in the years that followed2. On September 3, 2012, devinsupertramp released an Assassins Creed themed parkour tribute that hit more than 36 million views and 73,000 comments within two years3. A Facebook page for the series, created on October 30, 2013, drew 9.2 million likes in its first eight months6.

The franchise also stumbled into meme-worthy controversy. Around the launch of Assassins Creed Unity in 2014, Ubisoft technical director James Therien told the press that adding a playable female character would have required prohibitive extra animation work1. Fans latched onto the "8000 animations" quote and mocked it with viral tweets arguing that the swap was closer to "a day or two's work," a joke that lived on in Ubisoft criticism for years3.

How to Use This Meme

The Assassins Creed template typically leans on visual and phrasal callbacks rather than a single image macro. Common conventions include posing hooded figures on rooftops, editing the Leap of Faith into unrelated footage (dumpsters, pools, awkward office chairs), and captioning stealth-kill screenshots with mundane grievances. The "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" line often gets recycled ironically, and the "8000 animations" quote is a go-to when mocking corporate excuses in gamedev.

Frequently Asked Questions