From Assassin’s Creed to Just Dance, Ubisoft has always focused on strong partnerships with historians, cultural experts, and museums to create immersive historical worlds in games. Deborah Papiernik, Ubisoft’s SVP of New Business, recently spoke with President of Games for Change Susanna Pollack in the breakout session Preserving Legacy: Reimagining History Through Interactive Worlds, at iicon 2026.
At Ubisoft, Papiernik and her team are a driving force behind cultivating relationships with museums and cultural experts. This culminates in two ways: connecting experts with developers for games rooted in history, such as Assassin’s Creed, and collaborating with third-parties for real-life applications of Ubisoft’s educational content including museum exhibitions, augmented reality apps, documentaries, and more.
For Papiernik, video games are the perfect medium for helping players engage with history in a new and exciting way, as well as one of the largest creative opportunities as it contains many of the pieces needed to craft an immersive world for players while still leaving room for creative liberties.
“History itself is a fantastic playground,” Papiernik says. “It has characters, it has mysteries, it has architecture, it has art, it has evolution of economy, it has pretty much everything. But at the same time, we don’t know everything about History. The further back we go, the less we know because it’s less documented.”
There are times when developers might intentionally choose to take liberties with historical representation for modern audiences. For example, the Notre-Dame cathedral in Assassin’s Creed Unity is the modern iteration of the building, not the one that was present during the French Revolution in the late 1700s, which was much shorter and didn’t have a spire. Papiernik explains that the historically accurate version of Notre-Dame would have impeded global recognition of the monument, while simultaneously disappointing parkour players who would be let down by the shorter architecture. Placing the modern iteration of Notre-Dame in the game solved both problems.
Most recently, Papiernik and her team worked with the Assassin’s Creed Mirage team to develop the free app Discovery Tour: Medieval Baghdad showcasing historical artefacts found in the games Codex, in a way that pays tribute to the production values of the game, and that is both fun and educational for anyone to access. And soon, Echoes of Revolution, two augmented reality apps for the Boston Freedom Trail and the New York Revolutionary Trail will overlay in-game renderings from Assassin’s Creed III on the historical trails. The apps will be available soon for visitors to celebrate the United States 250th anniversary.
Papiernik, who was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 2025 for her work in Ubisoft and across creative and cultural industries, sat down with us to dive into the idea of games as historical immersion and preservation, museum partnerships, and the Discovery Tour series.
Games as Historical Immersion and Preservation
Why is it important for historical games to feel authentic?
Deborah Papiernik: If you remember your history class, it sometimes feels removed from the history it’s trying to teach. On the other hand, we have beautiful stories of people who engage in history studies because they discovered history in Assassin’s Creed! In France, the American Revolution isn’t typically part of the curriculum, but through playing Assassin’s Creed III, many have found an engaging entryway to learn about that history.. People around the world who played Assassin’s Creed Unity have learned about the French Revolution even if it’s not part of their school curriculum. Players are excited because they experienced something compelling in games, and that creates an emotional memory.
Take the Notre-Dame cathedral for example. After the fire in 2019, most of the world ached for Notre-Dame. People all over the world started sharing their photos and videos of visits to Paris, while the gamers among them started sharing videos of Assassin’s Creed Unity. This is how strong emotions can be in-game! Ubisoft, like many companies and individual contributors, donated towards the reconstruction efforts. We also made Assassin’s Creed Unity temporarily free, and my team developed a five-minute, very emotional, immersive visit of Notre-Dame in VR, using the beautiful 3D artwork crafted for the game. Just a few months after the fire, we showed the experience at the Ministry of Culture in France and shared it with the team behind the cathedral’s reconstruction. While they all noticed that it wasn’t 100% correct, they all spoke about how it captured the emotion of physically visiting the Notre-Dame. It was impactful to the point that the Archbishop of Paris asked me if he could lead a mass in that VR experience! We didn’t end up doing it, but it just goes to show the kind of emotion we can convey, even when the representation of history is not fully accurate. This is an example of the difference between accuracy and authenticity.
Can you share more about the idea of using games as historical preservation?
DP: It’s really about making history accessible. Many historians and scientists work on historical preservation of course. There are also plenty of very serious documentaries, but they do not have the same tools, the same creative vision, and of course not the same goals as the videogames industry. By rebuilding history in our worlds, we make them accessible to a much larger public. And when we partner with experts in their field, we can also help them realize their vision and innovate quickly at an affordable cost.
For example, when Ubisoft launched Far Cry Primal, we recreated a prehistoric era. True to its franchise, Far Cry is a first-person shooter adventure game, not a history game per se, but because the setting was prehistory, the development team worked closely with scientific and historians. The team rendered an amazing world with prehistoric animals, environments and daily life. As the game was live, an international documentary team reached out to us to see if they could use imagery from Far Cry Primal in their documentary about the role of prehistoric women. This collaboration with the documentary team ultimately resulted in about 20 minutes of footage from the game being incorporated into the final documentary. Thanks to our images, we can immerse and engage people far more than the information alone can achieve. And the data speaks for itself: documentaries featuring strong visuals to support the scientific narrative reach a broader and far more diverse audience - so much so that we have collaborated on several projects with major documentary producers.
And then there are some ways where our impact in history preservation and representation aligned with the experts. In the case of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is set in Ancient Greece, we rendered the statues and sites in full color – not as you would see them in museums, as white marble, their original colors lost to time. This attention to historical details, beyond the usual representation of Ancient Greece, was noticed by museum curators and opened the invitation for Ubisoft to contribute to an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, which is the oldest museum in the world! We contributed to an exhibition about Knossos in Greece with artifacts from the site, and we amplified the experience by producing a film for the exhibit utilizing the world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to explain how we worked with archeologists to reproduce Knossos as it was during that time in history.
Partnering With Museums
How do museum partnerships come about?
DP: Sometimes it’s just meeting people by attending cultural industry events or by folks who have seen our projects and want to include them in their exhibits and projects. Then, because you’ve already worked with one group in this historical and cultural context, the work gains visibility and more groups are interested in working with us. Most people in “traditional culture” are very open to working with videogames.
The first project I worked on came about when I was in touch with a small startup who was conducting preservation work through photogrammetry, especially in the Middle East. They mentioned they had an exhibit coming up at the Arab World Institute about age-old cities like Mosul, Palmyra, and Aleppo, and they asked if we wanted to be part of it. I had them send me one of their models, and had my team put it into VR, and suddenly we were in a tunnel of an Assyrian temple in Mosul. It felt so true, it was fantastic! So, we decided to develop a full immersive VR experience as part of the exhibit.
Another example was when we worked with the Chateau de Versailles and created an augmented reality experience that brought the Rabbids into the gardens of Versailles. As a way to engaging visiting children, visitors can play with the Rabbids through this app on their phones and learn a lot about Versailles, the fountain, the gardens, et cetera. A couple weeks after the app was made available, the head at Versailles confessed she was criticized for letting the Rabbids into Versailles, but she was happy she did it and saw the value of engaging families into the visit differently. There are people ready to take the risk, they trust us to do a good job, and we trust them on location or scientific aspects they want to bring in, and that makes the partnership worthwhile for both parties and long-lasting. We did another collaboration where we brought Versailles into Just Dance 2024, so the whole world can now dance the minuet on baroque music 400 years after it was created.
It’s funny because all these things we do with museums are called hybridization, which is defined as an improbable marriage between two things. As the head of Versailles put it, a successful hybridization is an improbable marriage whose result is so obvious that everyone says “how did we not think of this before?”
Check out some of the museum collaborations below:
- Samurai at the British Museum (Assassin’s Creed Shadows)
- Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey)
- Artifacts in Play with Assassin’s Creed Mirage at the Shangri La Museum (Assassin’s Creed Mirage)
- Alexander the Great: Making of a Myth at The British Library (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey)
- Chaeronea, 2 August 338 BC: A Day That Changed the World Exhibit at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey)
- Lady Sapiens documentary, aired on PBS (Far Cry Primal)
- Rabbids at Versailles, a free AR app at the Chateau Versailles (Rabbids)
