The Assassin’s Creed series tells an alternate history of the world, starting thousands of years in the past, and some of its weirder lore elements aren't common knowledge. It’s managed to sneak some truly bizarre lore into some of its less-popular games or the in-game written materials.
The lore in Assassin’s Creed is fairly dense and complicated. The entire Assassin's Creed timeline follows the same general history as that of the real world, but with the key differences that a war between two ancient orders is constantly going on in the background, and that humanity was created by a race of non-humans who also created superpowered artifacts.
Because of all this strange lore, there's no shortage of details players may have missed or glossed over, especially given that most of these are hidden either in obscure texts in-game or in the side games that many won’t have played. Here are some of the more significant offbeat lore items players may have missed.
Altair’s First Love In Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles Was The Holy Grail
While Altair Ibn La-Ahad, the first playable Assassin’s Creed character, would later go on to marry a woman named Maria Thorpe, she was not the first woman for whom he had romantic feelings. That would be his childhood friend Adha, who appeared in the DS title Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles. She was also mentioned briefly in both the first game and Assassin’s Creed II. Altair’s goal in Altair’s Chronicles is to find an artifact called “the Chalice,” something that could unite factions of people. He eventually discovered that the Chalice was not an inanimate object but Adha herself.
While she’s not explicitly referred to as the Holy Grail, a note in the first game asserts that any powers associated with Jesus of Nazareth were merely misremembered stories of Pieces of Eden, artifacts of the Isu civilization, and Altair’s Chronicles came out only a few years after Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code also theorized that the Holy Grail was in fact a person rather than a literal cup. The Chalice and Grail are either two separate vessels or the same one, depending on the story’s sources. So in a roundabout way, Adha may have been intended as the Holy Grail.
Humans In Assassin’s Creed Were A Purpose-Bred Labor Force
It’s always been implied in Assassin’s Creed's story that the human race was created by Those Who Came Before, or the Isu, to be subservient to them. Several notes that can be found in later games expand on this, and reveal that the human race was commissioned as a docile labor force by something called Project Anthropos. The first Isu to create a human was a scientist named Phanes, who also found a way to evolve the human brain to have neurotransmitters that made them subservient to the Apples of Eden.
Phanes would later pull a Pygmalion and fall in love with one of the created humans, and he removed her neurotransmitters. He eventually fled with her and they became the parents of Eve, one of the leaders of the human resistance and the first to steal an Apple of Eden from the Isu. Hybrids were born without the neurotransmitters, making them immune to Isu manipulation and kickstarting a war between the species.
The Moon Landing in Assassin’s Creed Was A Front To Retrieve An Artifact
In the Assassin’s Creed series, several historical figures are secretly either affiliated with the Templars or the Assassins, and several events were orchestrated by either one group or another. It’s not just long-dead people that the games cast as Templars, either - the still-living Buzz Aldrin is named as a Templar in Assassin’s Creed II, as are apparently the rest of the Apollo crew. NASA, in Assassin's Creed lore, is a Templar front, and the Apollo Moon Landing was largely an attempt to find a Piece of Eden that had accidentally landed on the Moon, backed by fellow Templar ally President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Apple was apparently part of a network of Pieces of Eden shot into Earth’s atmosphere in a desperate bid to protect the planet from the solar flare that would wipe out most humans and Isu alike. It didn’t work, and one of the Apples found its way to the Moon.
These are far from the only strange things found in the Assassin’s Creed series, but hopefully for those who haven't had the time to play through the entire series, or have intentionally skipped a few titles they didn't like the look of along the way, these are some of the more obscure facts that might have missed as a result.