Meet Darby McDevitt, the WWU alum behind the worlds of Assassin's Creed

For WWU alumnus Darby McDevitt, what started with a love for playing Pac-Man on his Atari 2600 became a lifetime of writing and creating award-winning video games. 

In a career spanning 26 years, he has shipped over 20 video game titles, many of them at Ubisoft Montreal for the Assassin's Creed series, for which he has been a writer and narrative director. 

Arriving at Western in the Fall of 1994, he came with a developing love for music, which lead him to a music production major at Fairhaven College. After multiple frustrations, including a failed audition with fellow WWU students Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla of future Death Cab for Cutie fame, Darby questioned this career path, which led him to rediscover his love for books and writing.

An introvert, he preferred the quiet of the library to the performance stage. He spent hours in Wilson Library reading widely and deeply, discovering new worlds and classic works. He invented a game for himself, selecting new books at random by running his finger along the spines in the stacks, his eyes closed, and plucking from the shelves whatever book he stopped on. He eventually worked in the library in Special Collections and surrounded himself with the books he loved. 

“My literature classes were amazing,” he said. “I loved Irish literature in particular.”

After graduating from Western in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in English, McDevitt further immersed himself in literature at University College Dublin, where he earned a master’s degree in Anglo-Irish literature and drama. When he returned to Seattle, he joined a band with his brother called Sneaky Thieves, and — trying his hand at film production — directed several of their music videos as well.

This love of literature, travel, music, visual media and history all fed into McDevitt’s eventual passion for scripting games as deep and immersive as Assassin’s Creed. 

Assassin's Creed is an open-world, third-person game series that takes place in various historical time periods, including Assassin’s Creed III, set during the American Revolution; Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, in the golden age of piracy (and about to enjoy a refresh from Ubisoft Montreal); Assassin's Creed: Unity, anchored in Paris during the French Revolution; and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, which puts the player in England’s Viking Age. Noted for their sweeping beauty and rich level of detail, there are over 14 games in the series so far, and McDevitt has had a role in nearly half of them.

His award nominations for Assassin’s Creed include two from the Writer’s Guild of America for Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and Assassin’s Creed: Unity; and two BAFTA Games Award nominations (shared) for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations — one for Best Action Game and one for Best Online Multiplayer. In 2013, he won a Canadian Videogame Award for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag for Best Writing. He won again in 2021 for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Assassin's Creed is beloved for its innovative gameplay, with dopamine-inducing flips, jumps and glides as the player’s character parkours through compelling historic landscapes — zipping over narrow alleys and leaping along tiled rooftops. The fandom of devoted followers celebrate Assassin's Creed Day,  breathlessly argue game lore online, and even name their children after the characters. Much of the deep character development, compelling storytelling and rich historical details are directly attributable to McDevitt, who spends much of his time reading and researching the time periods explored in each game. 

“The part of my job I adore most is researching various historical periods. I want the games I work on to be more than just a fun waste of time,” McDevitt said.

A tricky collaborative process, creating a game requires that the game’s designers, writers and programmers work on parallel tracks, building the images and interactions that make the game fun to experience in separate spaces. But the foundational story structure, character development and historic sensibility often come from McDevitt.

“It’s a collaboration, but each person on the team has a lot of autonomy — visual artists, writers, level designers, the creative director — we all work at the same time but separately to build the world of the game,” McDevitt said. And though the designers and developers don’t necessarily have a completed script when they begin, McDevitt must always keep in mind how the story connects with the world and the gameplay as he writes. 

“I think about the experience I want to give the players. I think about the historical details that will make it feel real, what objects the players should interact with, the location of the game and how they explore it,” McDevitt said. 

“Sometimes the best games follow the wisdom of the crowd, the desire lines of the players’ curiosity,” he said. 

Desire lines or desire paths are trails that people or animals create outside the bounds of paved or bricked walkways or roads. They are intuitive pathways through an area that are often dirt trails or partings in underbrush. McDevitt thinks a lot about how these desire lines support the storytelling and world-building of the game, and how the player’s curiosity can often be their greatest motivator.

Complex games like Assassin’s Creed can take several years to develop. McDevitt has been lucky in having a string of successful games shipping regularly. But there was an early career game failure that caused him to question his entire career. 

“The misery of a game falling apart after many years is horrible,” he said. “With every game, you hope you have the time, materials, and the people to get it right.”

Luckily for him, the boom-bust cycle of game development has been mostly boom for McDevitt. 

This year, McDevitt added a novel publication to his considerable portfolio. “The Halter” is a sci-fi noir novel set in Seattle that is inspired, in part, by his English classes at Western. It is not his first novel — he has self-published a few over the years — but it is his first published with Diversion Books.

“Writing has been a long-time passion for me,” he said. “And publishing a novel was a goal set for myself back in my undergraduate days at Western.”

Part of “The Halter” is inspired by reading “Gulliver’s Travels” for an Irish Literature class at Western. 

“Gulliver comes upon Laputa, a floating island on which the scientists are engaged in experiments that are intricate and pointless,” McDevitt said. “It’s a chaotic playground of ideas and experiments, and that shows up in ‘The Halter’ in a virtual world, in which science is practiced without limitations.”

McDevitt owes his love of words and worlds to his time at Western. He especially remembers classes with professors of English William Lyne and Kathryn Trueblood.

“Katy Trueblood had just published her first book, and I remember how excited she was and thought that was so cool. I learned so much from her. Bill Lyne got me into Pynchon and postmodern literature,” he said.

His professors remembered him fondly as well.

“Darby was a wonderful student, and I’m not surprised that he’s had such creative success. Among all the students I’ve taught, Darby stands out, even after all this time,” said Lyne. “He was smart, focused and such a talented writer.  He has clearly taken the skills that he learned at Western and is sharing them with the world.”

Trueblood echoed these sentiments. 

“Darby was wicked-smart, creative and inquisitive. He has had a rich career as a narrative designer and writer of award-winning videogames, and he never lost that passion for writing,” she said.

McDevitt describes games as having a “rich underlying architecture” which is also a great way to describe his love of music, literature and history and the sweeping, meandering paths and desire lines laid out for his characters. His successful career as a game writer is cut through with the desire lines of his novels, music and travels. 

His next project, Assassin’s Creed: (codename) Hexe is hotly anticipated by fans of the series. Rumored to be set in Europe at some point during the height of the witch trials, McDevitt is tight-lipped when asked for details. 

“You’ll have to wait and see,” he says with a smile.

Whatever is ahead for McDevitt — more historical immersion in Assassin’s Creed or more novels — it will be a desire line of deep creative expression.

“Games are so much more than a story — they are actually beautiful places to spend time with the history, the politics, the architecture of the era. I try to create not just a great story and dialogue, but also the most interesting places for players to inhabit.”

Assassin's Creed: Black Flag has been re-synched and updated this month and Assassin’s Creed: (codename) Hexe is currently in production.