Renaissance Man

Italian historian Marcello Simonetta came to Yale in 1995 to earn a PhD and wound up solving one of Italy’s oldest and bloodiest mysteries—the Florentine Pazzi family’s conspiracy to overthrow the de' Medici—after poring over literally millions of documents in a university microfilm collection with a trusty family-heirloom decoder.

That research caught the eye of the Assassin’s Creed II team as it was deciding when and where to set the historical fantasy game. Simonetta eventually landed a job with Ubisoft as a historian-consultant to assure ACII’s historical accuracy. But, as he says, getting all the facts right doesn’t necessarily make a better game.

How did you come to be involved with Assassin’s Creed II?