Map Quest

Exploring the amazing cartographic connections behind video games

- Aaron Kylie

GUIDE KASSANDRA steps off a reconstructed trireme warship onto a wharf at the Port of Piraeus in Athens, Greece. The wooden vessel with bronze ram at the bow is powered by 170 oarsmen. Such ships were commonplace in the fourth to seventh centuries BC at the port, which has served Athens since ancient times.

Kassandra, decked out as a fifth-century mercenary, doesn’t break character to reveal her last name. She walks along a series of straight, cobblestone streets, passing wooden carts filled with bundled sacks, a blacksmith tending his anvil and ladies making rope amidst the sounds of lapping waves, the distant ringing of buoy bells and gulls squawking. As she reaches the city’s marble district, artisans re-enact shaping slabs of white marble into statues of celebrated warriors. “They truly are masters of their craft,” says Kassandra.

“Thank you, Kassandra,” quips Benjamin Hall, as a crowd watching Kassandra’s tour on a big screen behind him in a meeting room at the Wyndham Grand Athens hotel breaks into laughter. Like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank in the 1998 film The Truman Show, Kassandra has no clue she’s the main character in a simulated reality. Today Hall, the Canadian-based world director of the video game Kassandra stars in, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, is playing puppeteer with an Xbox One controller.

“The Piraeus was built using the Hippodamian style of urban design, the grid layout that’s very common today in North America,” says Hall. He’s the mastermind behind this historical fiction game’s recreation of ancient Greece circa 431 BC during the Peloponnesian War, and is showcasing the extraordinary efforts his Ubisoft Quebec team went to in designing the world, its cities, its architectural styles and its map — which at a glance appears identical to a real chart of Greece — for a group of journalists.