France’s iconic Notre Dame Cathedral reopened its doors last week, five years after a catastrophic fire destroyed the 850-year-old landmark. As the first mass was held on Sunday (Dec 8), conspiracy theories that Ubisoft’s models of Notre Dame, created for 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Unity video game helped reconstruct the building also resurfaced. Ever since the fire broke out, a section of social media users have claimed that the French publisher provided its original 3D models and photos to the authorities to restore the medieval building to its old glory.
The action-adventure game was the eighth installment in the Assassin’s Creed series and the successor to 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The main story was set in Paris during the French Revolution where Notre Dame, modelled over a period of 14 months, played a key part in the initial missions.
Despite the claims, the truth cannot be far from it, as per a report in Polygon. Quizzed about helping the French government with the massive reconstruction job, Ubisoft issued a clarification, explaining it had held no conversation on the matter.
“We are not currently involved in the reconstruction of Notre Dame, but we would be more than happy to lend our expertise in any way that we can to help with these efforts,” a studio spokesperson told Guardian, way back in 2019.
“It is important to keep in mind that what we did for the game was not a scientific reconstruction but rather an artistic vision. While we wanted to be very precise with details, there are some differences in terms of scale.”
Ubisoft’s development of Notre Dame
While the rendering of Notre Dame is magnificent in the game, the artists did take several creative liberties for the sake of level design, gameplay and compliance with copyright.
Associate Art Director at Ubisoft Montreal, Caroline Miousse — the person widely credited with building Unity’s Notre Dame also quashed the rumours, stating that art designers only used photos, blueprints, books, and Google to recreate the building.
“We were able to find a lot of blueprints showing us exactly how Notre Dame was constructed. Maxime Durand (Assassin’s Creed historian) helped me a lot with it because he has the historical background. I have tons of books, too. Google was also my best friend for a while. You can just find so much stuff on the internet now,” Ms Miousse said.
While photos and videos can be used to create a game model, it does not offer much help when reconstruction work of the scale of Notre Dame is involved.
“The people behind Assassin’s Creed did an amazing job. But these are graphic artists, very skillful, who work based on photographs and blueprints that they’ve recovered. They’re looking for a coherent visual,” Denis Lachaud, the CEO of a company called Life3D which scanned Notre Dame prior to the fire told Le Monde.
“But if a statue is two meters taller than in reality, it’s not important for them. We are looking for millimetric precision, we work with engineers, with data analysts,” he added.
Ubisoft did not perform such elaborate scans as it did not need to. Though the cathedral feels real and accurate in the game, it is not an exact replica of the building.
If Ubisoft was indeed involved in the reconstruction, it would have certainly publicised the move as it did when donating $565,000 to Notre Dame and offering free Windows PC copies of the game for a week.