Opinion  July 12, 2024  Danielle Vander Horst

Reconstructing The Ancient World Through Video Games and 3D Technology

Screenshot taken by user mj.avsa from the Ubisoft Photo Mode Gallery. Copyright Ubisoft.

Image of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s reconstruction of the Athenian Akropolis ca. 431-422 BCE. The famous Parthenon is visible, as well as the ancient Athenian landscape beyond it. 

Envisioning the ancient world as it truly was has always been archaeologists’ greatest dream and greatest struggle. After all, how do we conjure images of a world that is very often represented by little more than a few centimeters of soil? 

While seemingly daunting, this dream has actually become increasingly possible in the digital age of 3D technologies, as some of the most stunning recreations have been realized through video games. 

Since 2007, Ubisoft, a French video game publisher, has been dominating the gaming world with their highly popular, historical action-adventure Assassin’s Creed series. The main plot of the games is concerned with a millennia old feud between the Order of Assassins— who fight for peace through free will— and the Knights Templar, who seek peace through order and control.

This storyline is variously reincarnated in each game of the franchise— of which there are currently 13— keeping the gamer invested in discovering how every new protagonist fits into the wider Assassin's Creed lore. However, a large part of the draw to these games is the masterful recreation of their respective historical contexts. 

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Despite their incredible accuracy and level of detail, the Assassin’s Creed games lean heavily into the mythic stories of Ancient Greece in Odyssey and include characters such as the Cyclops, the Nemean Lion, and other fantastical monsters. 

Ubisoft has long stated that one of their greatest strengths in creating the worlds of Assassin’s Creed has been the close collaborations fostered between their artists, programmers, and game developers with historians, archaeologists and other experts across different fields. 

The results have been nothing short of impressive, culminating in the creation of the stunning landscapes and incredibly detailed cities of various ancient locales. 

Two of the most recent games in particular, Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, have been especially successful in their recreations. The dazzling reconstructions of Pericles’ Athens in Greece (Odyssey) and Cleopatra’s Alexandria in Egypt (Origins) are true testaments to the power of the collaborations between scholars and game developers. 

The precision of detail at every game level showcases just how much care and thought goes into creating these worlds. From the characters’ clothing, to the furnishings in their houses, and even scattered objects in city streets, no detail of what we know about the ancient world was overlooked in the creation of these games. 

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The view of Ubisoft’s 3D reconstructed ancient Athens from the coast. 

Yet, these worlds are not reserved for avid gamers. In both Origins and Odyssey, new non-combat modes of play were introduced, so players can simply explore and learn about the recreated ancient worlds

Even for those without gaming capabilities or interests, Ubisoft North America’s YouTube channel released a series of “Discovery Tour” videos showcasing the historical aspects of their games through jaunts around the ancient cities and vignettes into different aspects of ancient life— from urban living to textile production and agricultural practices. 

Louan Blin, Theo Coutant, Orlane Guillon, Luis Pecot of Western Catholic University of Laval (France)

Oak tree, series; The digital artists and designers working on the CRC and Digital Topiarius projects utilize images from Roman frescoes to create their floral reconstructions.

Games such as Assassin’s Creed, however, can only take historical accuracy so far. Ubisoft has acknowledged that while accuracy is a goal of theirs, it is not their sole purpose. After all, it is not likely that mercenaries in ancient Greece were speed-running through the Peloponnese, fighting secret cults and hunting down fragments of alien technology and the lost city of Atlantis. 

It is also important to understand that the lens through which players experience the ancient world of games is typically one of able-bodied, adult characters. A more diverse array of NPCs (non-playable characters) does exist in these worlds, but only in peripheral ways. 

There are, however, other projects utilizing similar technologies that aim to fill in some of the accuracy gaps left open by video game reconstructions. They also seek to take things further by producing experiential reconstructions in virtual reality.

Louan Blin, Theo Coutant, Orlane Guillon, Luis Pecot of Western Catholic University of Laval (France)

Oak tree, series; The digital artists and designers working on the CRC and Digital Topiarius projects utilize images from Roman frescoes to create their floral reconstructions.

The Casa della Regina Carolina Project (Cornell University; Università di Bologna)* in Pompeii, Italy, for example, has been working to produce a virtual reality, 3D reconstruction of one of Pompeii’s largest Roman gardens.

In collaboration with AOROC-CNRS-ENS-PSL**,  the 3Di program at the University of UCO Laval*** and UCO Nantes/ CJB-CNRS****, the reconstructions of the garden aim to not only showcase how the space might have looked prior to the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but also to demonstrate the various ways in which the space might have been experienced by individuals of all ages, genders, body types, and social statuses. 

At the heart of this goal is the desire to incorporate a myriad of embodied identities that are reflective of the diverse reality we know antiquity to have been, and not the elite, white-washed version previous generations of scholarship painted it out to be.

“When we try to imagine ourselves into the ancient world of Pompeii, we run the risk of introducing modern implicit biases,” says CRC Co-Director and National Geographic Explorer Caitie Barrett (Cornell University). 

“The imagined ‘ancient individual' becomes a mirror of the scholar who is writing the paper— and given historical structural imbalances within academia, that has often meant privileging the experiences of male, white, able-bodied, upper-middle-class adults over others.” 

Louan Blin, Theo Coutant, Orlane Guillon, Luis Pecot of Western Catholic University of Laval (France)

A 3D concept rendering of what the Casa della Regina Carolina garden may have once looked like. The rendering makes use of archaeological data from the site as well as other ancient evidence to support the layout and plant choices. 

The power of 3D modeling, combined with virtual simulation, allows for a diverse array of digital avatars, enabling the project to circumnavigate these traditional biases and investigate the ancient space through any number of differently-abled individuals. 

Although, as Professor Barrett points out, there are still limitations to how the modern, conditioned individual approaches ancient spaces. Regardless, the hope of the project is to make their virtual reconstruction widely available to the public across digital platforms, garnering a larger array of responses and reactions from individuals of a range of backgrounds. 

In the long term, the CRC Project hopes to share its growing corpus of digital ancient objects— including furnishings, clothing, as well as the botanical reproductions from the garden itself— by contributing to the Digital Topiarius Project**, a digital archive of ancient plants. 

Open-access databases such as these not only benefit other scholars, but also provide resources for digital design students, artists, and video game developers, allowing for the creation of reconstructions that can be enjoyed and learned from by all. 

*Caitie E. Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics, Cornell University; Kathryn Gleason, Professor of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University; Annalisa Marzano, Professor of Classical Achaeology, Università di Bologna 

**Amina-Aïcha Malek, CNRS Laboratory “Archéologie et Philologie d'Orient et d’Occident" (AOROC) of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL Research University)

***Guillaume Boissinot, Wilfried Thierry, Andrea Trapnell;  Students: Louan Blin, Theo Coutant, Orlane Guillon, Luis Pecot, Western Catholic University of Laval

****Anselme Cormier, Western Catholic University of Nantes/Centre Jean Berard - CNRS

About the Author

Danielle Vander Horst

Dani is a freelance artist, writer, and archaeologist. Her research specialty focuses on religion in the Roman Northwest, but she has formal training more broadly in Roman art, architecture, materiality, and history. Her other interests lie in archaeological theory and public education/reception of the ancient world. She holds multiple degrees in Classical Archaeology from the University of Rochester, Cornell University, and Duke University.

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