Did you know that Paul Revere's famous "Midnight Ride" was actually a group of twenty people – a mix of loyalists and patriots? If not, then you're not alone. According to Assassin's Creed III lead writer Matt Turner many people don't know the real story behind the Midnight Ride, or the majority of the American Revolution for that matter.
"There's a really big gap between the public perception of the American Revolution and the reality of what was really going on," Turner said at a London preview event. "It's really crazy, the stuff that people think they know compared to what was really going on."
"For example Paul Revere's Ride is a big famous thing, but one, he was one of twenty people that went on that ride, two, he didn't even make it all of the way there and three, they weren't yelling – they were going from house to house because it was a mix of loyalists and patriots," he explained. "Because in those days everyone was British – there was no America yet. So what they were saying was "the regulars are coming" and they were whispering it because they didn't want the loyalists next door to hear."
Ubisoft did realize that such a well-known, or at least popular if not accurately known, event as the American Revolution would present a challenge in terms of writing.
According to Turner, the challenge isn't in terms of finding stuff; rather, "it's challenging in terms of sorting."
"The gap is much smaller now – we're talking 300 years – and the historical record is really accurate. So there's this ton of stuff on tons of people, and going through that and figuring out what is pertinent to us, what fits into our narrative and how to back it up with other things… there's just so much information on the conflict and that time."
And Ubisoft wants to make sure their portrayal and representation of the time is as historically accurate as possible. Turner revealed the company "actually had two historians in fulltime, two Mohawk consultants working on that as well, linguists and all sorts of people contributing to the validity and breadth of our knowledge of that period so we can make something as authentic as possible."
"I'm not a history buff but when I jumped into this it just blew my mind… the amount of interesting things that were happening."
"There's a lot of that and it was really fun learning about the reality. These were regular guys, right? They weren't heroes; they were just dudes living life, caught in this crazy situation. They dealt with it as well as they could and some were successful and others weren't," Turner concluded.