What Assassin’s Creed Owes to Sartre’s Idea of Freedom

The story begins at Alamut Castle, which was like a secret lab for the architect of an alternate reality, Hassan-i Sabbah. This man lived in the 11th century and understood that swords break, but ideas spread like wildfire. The Nizaris, or the Assassins as they came to be known, were a small band surrounded by the Crusader, Fatimid, and Seljuk empires, and their main weapon was precision assassination that could shake entire regimes from within — pick a major target, a minister or an emir, take them out in a single moment, and leave the whole world asking: how did that happen?

An Illusion Built on Belief

Marco Polo, the Italian explorer who visited the East in the 13th century, told legends of a paradise garden full of houris and hashish, but at its core it was psychological — Sabbah was building an alternate reality inside his followers’ minds, convincing them that death wasn’t an end, but a passage to a real paradise, so the man would die smiling because he lived inside that illusion and believed it completely.

Historians today treat a good part of the Alamut legend as exactly that — legend. The word “assassin” is believed to derive from “hashishin,” but the vivid detail Marco Polo passed down, of young men drugged with hashish and waking inside a walled garden of wine and women engineered to look like paradise, comes from secondhand accounts written by the Nizaris’ enemies, Crusader and Sunni chroniclers with every reason to paint the sect as drugged fanatics rather than a disciplined political movement. The historian Bernard Lewis, whose scholarship on the group remains a standard reference, treats the hashish story as closer to hostile propaganda than documented practice. What was real was the strategy itself — a numerically tiny sect surviving for nearly two centuries against much larger powers by trading open warfare for a reputation so frightening that a single killing could paralyze an enemy’s entire chain of command.

From Killer to Seeker of Truth

Which brings us to the game itself, where the bird, son of no one — the hero whose name means “the bird, son of no one” — stands as a symbol for a man with no roots to hold onto. His journey begins in 1191 in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, arrogant like Superman, breaking the three rules of the Creed by working alone, killing without mercy, and stealing, so his mentor strips him of his rank and weapons, and this psychological purging turns him from a killing machine into “a seeker of truth.” “We became free… and that is the greatest lie in history.” These are the bird’s own words after his first mission, and they open the door to the nine assassinations that follow, each one leaving behind a victim’s final words that shake his convictions to the core — like a Templar leader telling him the Templars aren’t villains, they just want world peace through controlling minds so no one ever fights again, and the bird starts seeing the world from a new angle: are the people he’s killing really enemies, or do they simply have a different vision for order?

Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted

The game draws inspiration from philosophical cinema like “The Matrix,” made in 1999 by the Wachowski siblings, where reality is an illusion — but Assassin’s Creed ties it to real history, and the Creed itself, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” which says reality is a social construct, that laws are illusions we built to control each other, and the Assassin is the one who discovers the void beneath that foundation, then chooses his own path freely, but bears the responsibility for what comes after.

The Creed’s actual line has its own layered history outside the game, too. Nietzsche cites almost the identical phrase in On the Genealogy of Morals, attributing to the historical Assassins a form of skepticism so total it dissolves even its own certainties — a nobility, in his reading, that dares to look past every comforting belief and doesn’t flinch at what’s left. William S. Burroughs later made Hassan-i Sabbah a recurring figure across his own fiction, using the same phrase as a kind of literary incantation for total liberation from inherited control. The game isn’t inventing the connection between the Assassins and radical freedom; it’s picking up a phrase that had already traveled through a philosopher and a novelist before it ever reached a controller.

Where the game actually strains against Sartre is in its own ending, not its slogan. Sartre’s freedom is radical precisely because nothing stands behind it — no god, no hidden design, no puppeteer to blame, which is why he calls the refusal to own that freedom “bad faith.” Assassin’s Creed, though, eventually reveals that the entire Assassin-Templar war has been steered for millennia by an older civilization’s relics, the Pieces of Eden, artifacts that can bend human will directly. That’s a much more Nietzschean twist than a Sartrean one — closer to forces working on the will from outside than to a self that’s simply, terrifyingly free and has no one else to blame. The game wants both ideas at once: a hero who discovers he’s radically responsible for his own choices, inside a plot that keeps revealing he was being maneuvered the whole time. That tension, more than the tagline, is the most honest thing the series has to say about freedom.