Five things to know about 'Assassin's Creed'

PARIS – With more than 200 million copies sold, a star-studded spin-off movie and a Grammy Award under its belt, "Assassin's Creed" has become a video game juggernaut since its launch in 2007.

As fans await Thursday's release of the latest edition, "Assassin's Creed Mirage", AFP takes stock of the game's unique journey.

From the bazaars of the Holy Land in the era of the Crusades to revolutionary France via the snowy Nordic coasts of the Viking period, the "Assassin's Creed" series has served up a wild ride through time and space.

For the latest edition from its publisher Ubisoft, the game goes back to its Middle East roots, this time to ninth-century Baghdad.

But whatever the time period, the basic gameplay always involves a lot of killing.

Players hack with swords, slay with arrows, decapitate with shields, strangle, bomb and beat to death anyone who gets in their way.

The main character, often a hooded and stealthy assassin, handily has a machine that allows him to access the DNA of long-dead relatives, meaning the possibilities for mayhem are unshackled by time or science.

The series was a hit from the start, with the first game selling more than eight million copies worldwide between its 2007 release and 2009, when the second episode was launched.

And the longer it has gone on, the more popular it has become.

France-based Ubisoft said the last release in 2020, "Valhalla", was the most successful so far in the series, generating revenue of more than one billion euros ($1.05 billion).

"Valhalla" broke new ground in other ways too.

In February 2023, it won the first Grammy music industry award dedicated to video game scores for its American composer Stephanie Economou.

The game's take on history has not exactly proved universally popular.

French leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon accused the makers of 2014's "Assassin's Creed Unity" of "propaganda against the people" for its depiction of the nobility during the French Revolution as "poor little people".

"And the man who was our liberator at one point during the revolution, Robespierre, is presented as a monster," he said.

Ubisoft said it employed "dozens of historians, sociologists and other social science