Yesterday was Assassin’s Creed II‘s 10th anniversary; the game originally launched on November 17th, 2009. With extremely positive reviews and high sales, Assassin’s Creed II went on to establish the franchise as one of Ubisoft’s powerhouses. A new game in the series would proceed to come out every year after for the next six years. One of the elements that made it remembered so is Jesper Kyd’s soundtrack. Featuring many themes that would go on to be used and reused in the series, it’s one of those soundtracks that makes for great listening while doing other tasks even outside of the game (like, say, writing this article). Now Kyd is celebrating the anniversary by releasing 17 unreleased songs from the Assassin’s Creed II soundtrack.
The unreleased tracks, collected under a Soundcloud playlist called “Assassin’s Creed II: Rare Tracks,” contain several variations on tracks that did appear in the game. For example, the first track is “Earth Song Demo (Featuring Melissa Kaplan)” is a different version of the song “Earth,” a track that uses the leitmotifs that would ultimately make their way throughout the series. This version contains singing by Melissa Kaplan from the band Splashdown. It gives an interesting look as to what the song originally was before it was changed to a lyricless version for the final game.
Additionally, there are some tracks that just weren’t part of the official soundtrack. One example is “Assassin’s Creed 2 Official Trailer,” which was the song used in the insanely popular CG trailer released during E3 2009. A couple of the little musical themes when you pick up items or open up treasure chests are included here as well. There are also remixes and alternative versions of songs that actually made it into the full game. It’s a great little collection for fans of the series and its soundtracks.
Ten years later and it’s no surprise that Assassin’s Creed II would probably be cited as the reason why the Assassin’s Creed franchise continues to be so incredibly popular. While there was no new AC release this year (Ubisoft has been taking a little more time off to better develop its games), rumors point towards a Viking-themed game launching next year.
[source: Twitter]
