At that point, other people started to show interest.Īt first, I just wanted to let Chris look at what he wanted to look at for his book. I got it working on Twitch, and then I just streamed it for a bit so that they could see it, and then we could go and look at stuff together, and we sort of talked about things on Twitter. I had never streamed before, but thankfully, I had some assistance from a kind friend of mine. Gemma Renshaw: I put it on my Twitch channel. Kate Sheppard: When Gemma responded, I just sort of virtually elbowed my way in, and we all sort of met, and Chris and I were just asking her to show us around all of these places. So when Gemma had offered to show me around, Kate wanted to join in too. I can tell it looks amazing, and eventually Gemma just responds – we know each other from Twitter and various other things over the years – and she says, “I've got it, I could show you around if you like.”Īt the same time, Kate and I were doing our own podcast together, which was a kind of virtual trip up the Nile from the perspective of historic travelers, Europeans mostly.
I kept asking, “What’s this?” “How can I get this?” So eventually I just posted something on Twitter saying, “Look, can somebody tell me how I can get this game?”, because at this point I've discovered there's such a thing as a Discovery Tour, so I don't even have to be able to play the game, I can just walk around. What I was finding were all these things from this videogame called Assassin's Creed Origins.
So I was Googling for images of visualizations of Alexandria, and I knew that there was a guy called Jean-Claude Golvin, a French artist who had painted a load of reconstruction drawings of various places in the ancient world, including in Egypt and Alexandria, but I wasn't finding them. I wanted to be able to send him stuff saying, “Look, this is what it looked like.” Where did the idea for “Playing in the Past” come from? What made you want to stream it to the public?Ĭhris Naunton: Last summer, I was writing a book for children about Cleopatra, which is going to be called “Cleopatra Tells All,” and I was at the stage where I needed to give the illustrator ideas for what I specifically wanted Alexandria to look like. To find out what experts in the field think about Origins’ depiction of Egypt and why they decided to livestream their lectures, we spoke with Renshaw, Sheppard, and Naunton.
The world of Assassin’s Creed Origins was already the focus of the post-launch Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed – Ancient Egypt, which turns Ptolemaic Egypt into a living museum complete with guided tours.
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The next episode of “Playing in the Past” takes place tomorrow, March 4 at 9AM PT and will feature a different focus and a different guest speaker, as you can see in the full schedule below: Naunton began by comparing photos from his travels to vistas in the game before taking up the reins himself and moving throughout the world on his own. Together, the three Egyptologists took viewers through a tour of Thebes.
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The series is broadcast on Twitch, where Naunton was joined by a PhD student at Southampton University, Gemma Renshaw, and associate professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Dr. Chris Naunton referred to it as “the best visualization of ancient Egypt.” Naunton’s remark came during the first episode of “ Playing in the Past” a six-part series dedicated to looking at Egyptian history through the lens of Assassin’s Creed Origins. Assassin’s Creed Origins’ rendition of Ptolemaic Egypt is one of the most accurate interactive representations of the period, so much so that Egyptologist Dr.