Assassin’s Creed Black Flag writer unpacks Blackbeard’s most iconic line

Writer Darby McDevitt tells Polygon how Blackbeard's most iconic quote changed mid-shoot

Assassin’s Creed has had no shortage of quotable lines from the past two decades. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” “We work in the dark to serve the light.” Even Ezio’s “requiescat in pace” refrain, simply Latin for “rest in peace,” has been canonized by fans over the years. But one of the series’ most enduring quotes comes from a single character: Blackbeard’s final words.

Edward Thatch, better known as the pirate Blackbeard, is a supporting character in 2013’s Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, which sent the historical fiction series to the Golden Age of Piracy (the early 1700s). Thatch is a comrade of protagonist Edward Kenway, and instrumental in the mission of establishing a pirate utopia in the Caribbean. At one point, while the duo fight aboard a galleon against overwhelming odds of British redcoats, Thatch shouts to Kenway, “In a world without gold, we might’ve been heroes!” A soldier strikes him down. Cue the slow-motion and dramatic music.

“This quote came about from a desire to give Blackbeard a final line that encapsulated the main theme of Black Flag’s narrative — namely, that some of these pirates (certainly not all!) would have fought for greater causes had they not been thrust into a world or milieu that valued superficial or fleeting pleasures over more righteous causes,” Black Flag writer Darby McDevitt told Polygon over email. “Blackbeard is one of those men. Edward is another.”

Blackbeard’s death is one of Black Flag’s major emotional beats, and his final words are regularly quoted in Reddit posts and fan videos 13 years later. But there’s an alternate universe where that version of the line didn’t even make it into the game. McDevitt said the line in the original script was longer: “In a world without wine, women, and gold, we might have been heroes!”

But during rehearsals, it didn’t feel right. Richard Mark Bonnar (the actor who portrays Blackbeard) didn’t click with the pacing. If Blackbeard was in the middle of a fight for his life, surrounded by enemy soldiers, wouldn’t he keep his one-liners as brief as possible? The director of the scene, Black Flag animation director Kama Dunsmore, requested a rewrite.

“I took one look at the line and realized that gold was the only thing that mattered in this final sentiment. The acquisition of wealth for its own sake was the corrupting influence,” McDevitt said. “So I whittled it down to its current size and we shot it. Mark’s performance sold it so well on the next run-through that we knew we’d made the right decision.”

The response to the line only affirmed that the Black Flag team made the right call. McDevitt, who has been writing Assassin’s Creed scripts for 15 years, said this is the line that’s most frequently mentioned to him by fans. For one thing, it’s snappy and easily quotable, something that fits just as well on an Instagram card or motivational poster as it does in a video game script. (“That’s probably the essential element of any pithy quote — they communicate big ideas in a clear and straightforward way,” McDevitt said.) It also communicates the themes of Black Flag in just one sentence.

“Pirates were thieves on the high seas, and no amount of charisma or iconography should sway us from thinking otherwise,” McDevitt said. “That said, he clearly had some semblance of a conscience — he refrained from killing, for instance. And in the end, he expressed an urge to give up the pirate’s life. That says something interesting about his character, I think.”

To some degree, this ethos is the foundation of Assassin’s Creed’s storytelling. Assassinating people? Typically frowned upon, no matter what era of recorded history you’re looking at. But history, as any historian will tell you, is not immutable. In weaving its long yarn about the fictional conflict between Assassins (who fight for freedom) and Templars (who very much do not), the series’ writers have always explored the gray areas, using famous people from history to explore why people behave the way they do. A crime is rarely the fault of the individual, Assassin’s Creed posits, so much as it is society that created the necessity of said crime.

In March, Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, a remake of Black Flag. It’s unclear whether Blackbeard’s famous line will be in the remake. (McDevitt declined to speak about Black Flag Resynced.) But that one line captures the ethos of Assassin’s Creed in a bottle. It’s hard to imagine any version of the game without that scene.

“It must be said that this quote bears no resemblance to what the history books claim Blackbeard’s final lines were,” McDevitt added. “But that might be the influence of Templar meddling.”