If you’re into video games, you’ve probably heard that the third installment of the wildly popular Assassin’s Creed series is set during the American Revolution. I’m not sure what a member of an eleventh-century Islamic order is doing in eighteenth-century Boston, but the folks behind the game apparently did their homework.
The first time I heard anything about this sect was in a college class on the medieval Middle East, when my professor assigned Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins. Now every kid with a video game console is familiar with them; it’s the Velociraptor-Chamberlain effect at work, I suppose. How many questions about the Assassins do you think the guides at Colonial Williamsburg will be getting because of this?
Past in the Present 
Color me skeptical. It seems a universal practice for any game set in an historical time period to get fawning reviews of ZOMG it’s the most accurate thing evah! I actually have the “making of” DVD of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, where the prop guy goes on and on at length about how historically accurate the whole production is.
All-righty, then!
You know, I’d really like to see an accurate pirate film. There’s a great novel about Black Bart Roberts called The Requiem Shark that somebody should adapt into a screenplay.
–ML