Assassin's Creed is REAL!

So since I've got my new computer I've become kind of a blog/feed/news fanatic. I really like sitting on my computer all day and reading news from around the world while sitting in my family's bonus room and watching The Godfather on my Xbox 360.

So I was on one of my blogs

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/the-first-islamist-terrorists.html

In the post Sullivan descibes a sect of Islamic Assassins who lived in the Middle East during the Crusades-----which is the setting of the first Assassin's Creed game! 

"Even the most powerful and carefully guarded rulers of the age—the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs, the sultans and viziers of the Great Seljuk and Ayyubid empires, the princes of the Crusader states, and emirs who ruled important cities like Damascus, Homs, and Mosul—lived in dread of the chameleonlike Assassin agents. Known as a fida'i (one who risks his life voluntarily, from the Arabic word for "sacrifice"; the plural in Arabic is fidaiyn, or the present-day fedayeen), such an agent might spend months or even years stalking and infiltrating an enemy of his faith before plunging a dagger into the victim's chest, often in a very public place."

The Assassin's Creed game takes place in Acre, Jerusalem and Damascus! They were even described as "chameleonlike" which is the EXACT point of the game!

While I didn't disparage the idea of Assassins existing during the Crusades, I didn't know they were completely real and there were records!

Sullivan goes further and quotes

"Perhaps most terrifying, the Assassins chose not only a close and personal manner of killing but performed it implacably, refusing to flee afterward and appearing to welcome their own swift death. Fanatical and disciplined, Hasan-i Sabbah and his successors were brilliant practitioners of asymmetric warfare. They developed a means of attack that negated most of their enemies' advantages while requiring the Assassins to hazard only a small number of their own fighters. As with any effective form of deterrence, the Assassins' targeted killings of hostile political, military, and religious leaders eventually produced a stable and lasting balance of power between them and their enemies, reducing the level of conflict and loss of life on both sides."

The assassins he describes working for a balance of power in the Middle East mirror the brotherhood of assassins in the Assassin's Creed game, which I think is totally badass. Right down the "close and personal manner of killing" (Altair gets away with some pretty impressive assassinations in public). It somehow makes me happy to think that the game I'm playing is really true...perhaps its mostly fiction but its based on FACT!