Assassin’s Creed Unity models didn’t help rebuild Notre-Dame

This summer’s Olympics in Paris revived an old story that Ubisoft’s models of Notre-Dame cathedral, made for 2014’s Assassin’s Creed Unity, had helped rebuild the cathedral after it caught fire in 2019.

People have been saying this since the fire, and I made a YouTube video debunking it in 2021. But weirdly, not everyone in the world has seen it, and videos claiming otherwise continue to garner thousands of views on TikTok.

So let’s debunk it again.

One of the first outlets to spread this story was NME. Here’s what it published in 2019:

It’s also believed that French publisher Ubisoft still holds the original 3D models and photos which could help with rebuilding the cathedral. Ubisoft is yet to comment on the claims and a full restoration plan for Notre-Dame hasn’t been confirmed.

Now, that doesn’t sound very certain, does it? Well, veteran games journalist Keza MacDonald, writing for The Guardian, saw this and reached out to Ubisoft for comment. She published the response from a Ubisoft spokesperson, which probably should have been the final word on the matter:

We are not currently involved in the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, but we would be more than happy to lend our expertise in any way that we can to help with these efforts. […] It is important to keep in mind that what we did for the game was not a scientific reconstruction but rather an artistic vision.

But despite that pretty clear response, the rumors about the Notre-Dame models persisted. They were further spread by an ArtStation blog post from 2023, which is currently one of the first things that comes up when you Google this topic. It’s written by an artist who does not seem to be associated with Ubisoft, and does not provide sources for the claims that he makes in the piece.

In 2019, Ubisoft was saying it wasn’t involved in the restoration. If it had been, I believe the company would have rightfully made a huge deal about it. Much like it did with a news release at the time in which it announced that it was donating €500,000 to Notre-Dame, and giving away Windows PC copies of Unity for a week. The company also made its stance pretty clear: It encouraged people to explore Notre-Dame in the game, and donate to the restoration effort if they could.

Now let’s look at what Ubisoft developers have said about how they designed the cathedral. Senior level artist Caroline Miousse is the person widely credited with building Unity’s Notre-Dame. She’s been interviewed by Destructoid as well as IGN, and Ubisoft’s news blog also did an extensive interview with her that has since been republished by Siggraph.

Miousse was asked what references she worked from to build the cathedral, and here’s what she said:

We were able to find a lot of blueprints showing us exactly how Notre-Dame was constructed. [Maxime Durand, “Assassin’s Creed” historian] helped me a lot with it because he has the historical background. I have tons of books, too. Google was also my best friend for a while. You can just find so much stuff on the internet now.

The Notre-Dame that appears in the game was altered for the sake of level design and gameplay — and for compliance with copyright, because a bunch of elements, like the rose window and the organ, fall under copyright and can’t legally be recreated.

But even so, it does not sound like Ubisoft made detailed scans of the cathedral to work off of. Miousse mentioned photos, blueprints, books, and Google.

You know who did make scans of the cathedral?

Hundreds of people who have studied it for decades!

Among them was Cédric Gachaud, the CEO of a company called Life3D, which was scanning the cathedral for restoration work that was ongoing before the fire. In 2019, he spoke about it with premier French newspaper Le Monde. You can find his original quote at the link, but here is my translation of it:

The people behind Assassin’s Creed did an amazing job. But these are graphic artists, very skillful, who work based on photographs and blueprints that they’ve recovered. They’re looking for a coherent visual. But if a statue is two meters taller than in reality, it’s not important for them. We are looking for millimetric precision, we work with engineers, with data analysts.

Le Monde also dug up a quote from the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s resident historian, Maxime Durand, who spoke with Quebecois paper La Presse about Notre-Dame’s restoration. As above, the quote is in French, and here is my translation:

The monument we’ve recreated has a beautiful artistic liberty. I can’t say that those who are reconstructing the cathedral will necessarily be interested in our modeling of it.

Again, if Ubisoft had been able to contribute the game’s models to the restoration, the company would have rightfully been bragging to high heaven about it. But it isn’t. Everyone involved in the game insists on their game’s creative, artistic vision, over and over again.

The cathedral restoration effort involves “fifty research teams and laboratories spread across France and brings together a total of 175 researchers,” according to the French Ministry of Culture. Those individuals span such varied disciplines as “archaeologists, historians, art historians, anthropologists, physicists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists.”

To further demonstrate why this scientific work is so different from what Ubisoft did, we can look at the scans done by the late Andrew Tallon of Vassar College. The laser technology he used to scan the cathedral has a margin of error that’s “often fewer than five millimeters.”

That’s the kind of data that exists. During a 2023 visit to Vassar, Philippe Villeneuve, the architect-in-chief of the Notre-Dame project, confirmed that Tallon’s data on the cathedral’s vaulted ceilings had aided in their reconstruction.

Tallon was far from alone in doing this work. Professor Dr. Stephen Albrecht is another of the people involved in the restoration. He and his colleagues had spent 20 years working on the cathedral. Before the fire, they had been doing 3D scans of the transept, and that data was given to the restoration.

Ubisoft didn’t do scans like this. Because it didn’t need to. Because the cathedral in the game is an artistic creation that captures what it feels like. It does feel real, it does feel accurate, and that’s a huge achievement.

We don’t need to make up stories about the video game being so literally accurate that it could help rebuild Notre-Dame. It’s a discredit to the artists that made Unity’s Notre-Dame, erasing the incredible work that they did. And it’s a discredit to the scientists who have been working to understand and maintain the real cathedral all along.