Are Video Games the Key to Rebuilding Notre Dame?
By: Bennat Berger
Tags: Architecture, Gaming, Virtual Reality, Notre Dame, Features

Are Video Games the Key to Rebuilding Notre Dame?

How Ubisoft could play a key role in the restoration project

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series isn’t exactly known as a reliable source of history lessons. And yet, the detailed and strikingly accurate 3D renditions of Revolution-era Paris found in Assassin’s Creed Unity might just be the resource that helps restore a charred Notre Dame to its former glory.

Notre Dame consumed by flames (source: AP/Thibault Camus).

On Monday, April 15th, an anchor point of history burned to ruin and ashes. The flames that engulfed Notre Dame were irreverent of the centuries the cathedral had weathered or the revolutions it had survived, charring the cathedral’s medieval wooden interior and tumbling its iconic spire to the ground. The disaster was a national tragedy and a global loss; though firefighters were eventually able to quell the flames, the damage they caused was widespread and significant — though, hopefully, not permanent. French president Emmanuel Macron has already pledged to restore the cathedral within five years, and the global community has already raised nearly $1 billion to support the initiative.

Determination and funds, however, can only go so far. The project at hand isn’t a matter of rebuilding a cathedral that resembles Notre Dame; it’s a matter of restoring the landmark to its former glory. Notre Dame is an architectural link to the past; if we were to rebuild without knowing every detail of the original building, the refreshed cathedral would lose some of what makes Notre Dame such an essential historical touchpoint. Crucial information has quite literally gone up in smoke — but it isn’t gone entirely. The key to Notre Dame’s restoration may come from an unlikely source: Ubisoft, the Montreuil-based game development behind the popular Assassin’s Creed games.

Assassin’s Creed is a renound series of role-playing games which, as the name suggests, offer players the chance to explore narratives as a deadly assassin. Why is this relevant? As it turns out, the eighth installment of the series — Assassin’s Creed Unity — takes place in Paris during the French Revolution — and features a painstakingly detailed, 3D recreation of Notre Dame.

The term “painstaking” isn’t used lightly here. Ubisoft staff historian Maxime Durand dedicated a full four years of work into overseeing historical representations in Unity; his team spent well over 5,000 hours researching every detail of the cathedral. This intensity was, as Durand described in a recent interview for Business Insider, motivated by gameplay necessities. When roleplaying as an assassin, players often need to sneak, run, and climb over buildings to achieve goals.

“Because this is ‘Assassin’s Creed,’ players are able to climb over and go everywhere on the monument, so we have to make sure that the details would be well done.” Durand explained, “Because [Notre Dame Cathedral] was the most iconic monument that we had for ‘Assassin’s Creed Unity,’ obviously we really wanted to put in all the efforts to make sure that it was really, really beautiful but also representative of the monument.”

It’s fair to say that the researchers and designers achieved that goal; level artist Caroline Misousse recently told The Verge that she spent two years modeling the cathedral inside and out, poring over photos to capture the architecture and working with texture artists to hone in on the unique quality of the stone. At one point, she even collaborated with historians to determine which paintings might have hung on the walls at the time. As a result, Unity’s version of Notre Dame is nearly identical to the real building.

Notre Dame as depicted in Assassin’s Creed Unity.

The video game’s model is not a perfect historical mirror, however. Game designers had to take a few liberties with spacing and set modeling to ensure that players could navigate effectively in-game. The model in the game also features the cathedral’s iconic spires, though they would not have existed during the actual historical period of the game. Unity’s art director, Mohamed Gambouz, explained in an article for The Verge that they added the anachronous spires because they were crucial to the player’s recognition of the city. “When people talk about Paris they have postcards in their mind,” he comments, “even if this postcard isn’t accurate or truthful to the setting.”

Small anachronisms and spacing ratios aside, however, Unity’s model is remarkably faithful to the original building — and as a result, Ubisoft holds an incredible amount of research on the cathedral that could be useful during restoration efforts. Unfortunately, because the game was developed between 2010 and 2014, it did not have the 3D-mapping technology that a subsequent game set in ancient Egypt, Assassin’s Creed Origins, used to create detailed blueprints of architectural structures. However, Unity’s research and 3D model could still prove invaluable to those restoring the burned cathedral. The studio has already offered to share its trove of architectural information and donated €500,000 to the restoration efforts. It’s too early to tell whether those leading the initiative will take the studio up on its offer, though the game’s designers have shared their skepticism.

It’s not surprising that the designers wouldn’t expect a call — after all, their work was for a violent role-playing game, rather than a highbrow preservation project. That said, their work has merit as a method for historical preservation, begging the question: should historians take inspiration from Unity and use digital models as a proactive measure to preserve historical sites even in the event of a catastrophe?

I believe the answer is “yes” — and I’m not the only one. Archeologists have already begun to use 3D laser scanning technology to create detailed digital maps for historical sites; in 2015, researchers from Kanazawa University in Japan used 3D scanning technology to map Shang Shu Di, a Chinese heritage site in the Fujian Province. The historians found that the digital tools far outstripped the traditional methods of detailed components mapping for historic buildings, proving that 3D modeling could serve as a valuable means of architectural preservation and research.

The disaster at Notre Dame has made it painfully clear that when history goes up in smoke, it’s gone. We need to make a more concerted effort to map our architectural touchpoints into the digital world — not only as a means to record crucial historical details in the event of a catastrophe but also as a way to preserve and experience our most treasured monuments.

After the fire, Ubisoft made Assassin’s Creed Unity available for free download. In a statement, the studio wrote: “We want to give everyone the chance to experience the majesty and beauty of Notre Dame the best way we know how […] We hope, with this small gesture, we can provide everyone an opportunity to appreciate our virtual homage to this monumental piece of architecture.”

Virtual or not, these 3D memories matter. Notre Dame may lie in physical ruins for the next decade, closed off to tourists and locals alike, but it isn’t out of reach in the virtual world. We can visit a digital echo of the cathedral any time we want, simply by walking an assassin into the gameplay mirror of Notre Dame.