Best known to geekdom for his roles in both Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, a prequel to the much-beloved Alien franchises, and what amounts to the origin story of Holocaust survivor and master of magnetism Erik Lensherr, aka Magneto, in X-Men: First Class, Michael Fassbender is now throwing his weight behind Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed movie by not only starring but co-producing it. Variety reports that the Irish-German A-lister “was [Ubisoft's] first choice” to play the series’ hero, though they did not say whether that hero was Desmond Miles, the present-day hero through which all the games are tied together; one of Desmond’s Assassin ancestors, whether Altaïr, Ezio, or someone one new; or both at the same time, not a stretch considering the plot of the franchise.

To quickly recap, Desmond is a bartender who gets kidnapped by Abstergo Industries, a giant corporate front for the present-day incarnation of the Knights Templar, who seek to save humanity from its inevitable self-destruction by subduing everyone, using out-of-place artifacts that grant supernatural powers. Fighting a shadow war against them are the Assassin Order, who seek to keep people free to make their own choices, of which Desmond is a wayward member, and like it says on the tin, are masters of ending life. The Templars put Desmond into a machine called the Animus, which allows him to relive memories from his Assassin ancestors, so that they may find where the Assassins hid some of these out-of-place artifacts. Desmond is eventually broken out of Abstergo but still needs to use the Assassins’ Animus 2.0 to train himself up as the newest member of the ancient order. As of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Desmond is fairly competent as an Assassin, but we have yet to play him for more than 5-10 minutes at a time in any game. Perhaps Assassin’s Creed III, set in the American Revolution, will change that. And perhaps Michael Fassbender can add another title to the VERY short list of video game movies people are willing to sit through that don’t include zombies or Angelina Jolie.

Assassin’s Creed, as a franchise, has sold more than 30 million units, with the next set to drop the night before Halloween, Oct. 30. For more information on the game as well as the movie, follow @Ubisoft and @AssassinsCreed on Twitter, like them on Facebook, and visit ubisoft.com. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, @zero1gaming, like us on Facebook as well, and subscribe to our feed, Zero1GamingTV, on YouTube.