A bureaucratic monument to screwing over the guy who made Assassin’s Creed
Patrice Désilets was the creative director ofAssassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s cash cow from which all its games seem to be modeled (endlessly reproducable open-world systems from now until end, amen). He left the companyin 2010and went to work on a game known as1666or1666: Amsterdam.
Then THQ crumbled, Ubisoft picked from the carrion, and suddenly owned the rights to1666and Désilets, effectively. The latter wasfired— baseless, he says — and Ubisoft shut down development on his game. Kinda fucked up! Désilets has since startedPanache Digital Games, which is makingAncestors: the Humankind Odyssey.
1666has been dredged back up, though, as Ubisoft recently filed a Class 9 (game software) trademark for “1666.” It’s likely legal house-keeping, doubling down on keeping Désilets from trying to get rights to his idea back (though the trademark makes no mention of “Amsterdam”), or a whole host of other things, rather than Ubisoft suddenly deciding to un-suspend development three years later.
But we can take this small moment as remembrance of Ubisoft being a dick (allegedly).
