Maxime Durand is the resident historian at Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise and works at their Montreal studio. He obtained this position immediately after graduating from the University of Montreal with a bachelor’s degree in history and a short stay at McGill University in the context of a student exchange program in the spring of 2010.
His appointment as a historical consultant at Ubisoft was a response to an initial need for the company to have a permanent historian. His presence helps inspire team projects by tapping into historical resources and build the credibility of the interactive re-enactments that the games are known for. The key competencies of this position require a strong sense of research and of compiling documents, but also to synthesize and popularize that research. Those are the skills he acquired during my studies in history at the university. Maxime uses a multitude of monographs, primary sources or museum artefacts on a daily basis, but he also uses several other mediums, such as television series, to support and illustrate his findings. As a student, he was a guide-interpreter at the Château Ramezay Museum in Montreal and at the Mosaïcultures internationales de Montréal.