The original Assassin’s Creed featured several fresh ideas when it released in 2007, but none was as trailblazing as the franchise’s parkour mechanics.

According to Alexandre Pedneault, lead designer at Ubisoft Montreal on Assassin’s Creed Unity, the parkour mechanics were established long ago and have been passed down through the generations - not unlike the ancestral memories accessed in the Animus. “It’s the original team that created the philosophy and set the bar for the behavior of all the Assassins,” he told IGN. “They had high ambitions -- and most of them wanted to improve what they achieved in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. […] They really wanted to create a believable video game character.