Speaking at a Video Game Masterclass event in Paris this week, an ex-Ubisoft employee broke some surprising news about Assassin’s Creed. The former Ubisoft Technology Director, Julien Merceron, revealed that the first instalment of the blockbuster series originally contained a bug that would let players activate an unfinished multiplayer mode.
Writers from Dualshockers attended the event and confirmed Merceron’s anecdote, in which he explained that the addition of a second active controller during gameplay would activate the bug bringing the multiplayer mode on. They add:
In fact there was a bug: while he doesn’t know when it was patched, at some point, if a second controller was plugged into the console, a second assassin would appear on screen.The team didn’t even test those features as they thought they were disabled, and that’s how the bug appeared.
It’s a surprising revelation about the game that kickstarted the immensely popular Assassin’s Creed series. Couple this with the fact that multiplayer elements have now been removed from the series with Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and you’ll start to see that Ubisoft certainly has a bit of a love/hate relationship with the format when it comes to their biggest franchise.