The following contains spoilers for Assassin's Creed: Origins.
Last year Assassin's Creed became another in a long line of video games to be adapted into films, and while the movie wasn't well received by fans or critics, the newest game in the series has officially brought the movie into the mythology. Assassin's Creed: Origins is available today, and as part of the new title, we learn that the events of the Assassin's Creed movie have had a noticeable impact on the world of the games. It was also a character in the new game which allowed the events of the movie to happen at all.
Fans of the Assassin's Creed franchise know that the games generally take place in two parts. The primary gameplay has you take control of a member of the Brotherhood of Assassins during some major historical period. However, that part of the game is actually just a simulation, being experienced by a person in the modern day. In Assassin's Creed: Origins the modern day period sees the player take on a new character, an Abstergo employee name Layla Hassan. There's a lot of world-building material in the form of emails and pictures on Layla's computer that flush her out as a character, but among those emails are several pieces of correspondence between Layla and Sofia Rikkin. Fans of the movie will remember that name as the character played by Marion Cotillard in the film who was running the Animus project that used Michael Fassbender's character.
There's more to it than simply the characters knowing each other, however. One of the more interesting creations of the film was its version of the Animus, the technology that allows people to experience historical memories. In the games, the device has always been a table that the character laid down on or a chair they sat in. In the Assassin's Creed movie, however, the machine was a big arm that allowed the user to physically move in space while they experienced the memory. It turns out, that Layla was actually the one that gave Sofia the idea to build that version of Animus.
Layla receives no credit for her work, something she's more than a little annoyed about.
The game also makes reference to the event at the end of the Assassin's Creed movie which resulted in the death of Sofia's father, Dr. Alan Rikken, played by Jeremy Irons. In case you're interested, his death is being covered up by Abstergo and was blamed on a gas leak.
For fans of the overall canon of Assassin's Creed, these connections are fun, even if the movie itself wasn't. Whether we'll see more Assassin's Creed films is anybody's guess at this point, but if we do it will be interesting to see if a future movie builds off of the new game in turn.
