adminUbisoft educational games are finding a role beyond entertainment, helping museums and documentary makers present historical subjects through interactive worlds and digital film. The company’s research for games such as Assassin’s Creed can also provide visual material for cultural projects, while giving audiences another way to explore the past.
Deborah Papiernik, Ubisoft’s SVP of new business, says the work began with Assassin’s Creed, whose historical settings bring together architecture, characters and extensive research. The series’ in-game codex and Discovery Tour experiences have made some of that material accessible to players in an educational format.
Image credit: Ubisoft
How Ubisoft educational games support museums
The first Discovery Tour launched alongside Assassin’s Creed: Origins in 2017, allowing players to explore the game’s Ancient Egyptian setting. It was offered as a free expansion or as a standalone purchase. Further tours drew on the Viking-era world of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. A standalone mobile app also offers a tour of medieval Baghdad based on Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Ubisoft initially approached museums with Discovery Tour as a possible addition to related exhibitions. As the company learned more about each institution’s needs, collaborations grew to include other formats, such as large-scale projections and short films. For museums with limited production budgets, footage created within a game can offer a quicker and more affordable visual resource than commissioning a CGI film from scratch.
For an exhibition about mummies and mummification at the Museum of Mankind in Paris, Ubisoft drew on research conducted for Assassin’s Creed Origins. In another project, the Arab World Institute in Paris worked with the company on an exhibition about ninth-century Baghdad. With few surviving objects available, concept art, maps and video captured inside Assassin’s Creed Mirage helped create an exhibition that changed over time and ran for about a year. The institute reported a 20% increase in visitorship.
Practical takeaway: Game-based materials can be especially useful when an exhibition needs visual context for a place or period with few surviving artefacts. Museums still need to match those materials to their own curatorial goals and historical evidence.
From game footage to documentaries and city experiences
Ubisoft’s researched game worlds have also contributed to television. For the documentary Lady Sapiens, an international co-production used footage recorded inside Far Cry Primal to illustrate the lives of prehistoric women. Ubisoft filmed tens of hours of material, from which the documentary team selected around 20 minutes. The footage showed aspects of daily life, including women’s role in gathering resources, and the programme reached audiences in France and on PBS in the United States. Papiernik said viewership for the French broadcast was double the usual level for that slot.
Other projects include a Rabbids educational app for the Garden of Versailles and city-wide extended-reality experiences in Boston and New York. These projects use assets from Assassin’s Creed 3 to show what parts of the cities looked like around 250 years ago, including routes associated with the Freedom Trail and Revolutionary Trail.
Ubisoft’s approach is not to build bespoke game assets for outside partners. Papiernik says assets are developed for the games themselves, with research and historical consultation making some of the resulting content suitable for cultural projects. For Assassin’s Creed Mirage expansion Valley of Memory, set in Saudi Arabia’s AlUla region, the team consulted archaeologists regularly. Their discoveries informed updates to details such as the name of a tomb.
The museum work brings in a small amount of revenue and is not a major business for Ubisoft. Papiernik describes it instead as a way to share game content with other sectors and encourage engagement with history. Interactive experiences can combine information with exploration, potentially making the subject more memorable for visitors.
The company aims to extend these collaborations to more countries. One example mentioned by Papiernik is a British Museum exhibition about the Samurai, which included a video featuring Yasuke from Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Ubisoft is also interested in expanding its work beyond existing projects in France, the UK, Boston and New York.
What Ubisoft educational games could mean for cultural projects
Ubisoft educational games show how research created for entertainment can also support museums, documentaries and location-based experiences. The approach does not replace curatorial expertise or archaeological research; it gives cultural organisations another format for sharing information. For visitors, these projects can make historical places and everyday life easier to visualise, especially when original objects are scarce.
The most useful collaborations connect a game’s existing research and visual assets to a clear educational purpose. As Ubisoft explores projects in more regions, the balance between engaging presentation and historically grounded information will remain central to the value of its work.
