That One Musical Piece

Well, hello there! Today I want to talk about music in video games. More than that, I want to talk about one specific song in one specific game, which became a leitmotif for an entire series afterwards: Ezio's Family by Jesper Kyd from Assassin's Creed II.

I played Assassin's Creed II on PC in 2009 on a laptop which could not handle it at all. It ran at about 5 fps in a small window on the screen with all the settings on the lowest possible preset. If I dared to look at the horizon while playing the game would cause a blue screen. Still, I managed to play the fame until the Venice Carnival section. Granted, I was about 11 years old back then, I was less patient than I am now, but the game was so mindblowing to me, seemed so well written and the gameplay itself was so fresh that I pushed onwards. Some time passed and in 2012 we got a new PC with a Nvidia 520 GPU and an AMD Athlon II x2 CPU. It was a revelation. Playing the game on a CRT monitor in glorious 1024x768, day after day until I finished it. Then came Brotherhood (which at the time I pirated), and then came Revelations, of which I convinced my father to buy the Collector's Edition for the PS3 (I have my PS3 since Christmas 2010). But I digress, this is about my nostalgia for the early games in the series in a way, but not like this.

When I first heard Ezio's Family it was at the late title card of the game: Ezio had a race with his brother older brother to the top of a belltower. Once I reached the top, a cutscene of the two of them started, still engraved in my mind: "It is a good life we lead, brother" "The best, may it never change" "And may it never change us" then camera pans out and here comes: Ubisoft presents Assassin's Creed II. This was magical. You felt the connection of the brothers, the naive hope of life being easy and filled with happiness all the time. After this moment, the game gives you about an hour to spend with Ezio's family (pun intended), until his father and brothers are hanged by Templar Order agent, Uberto Alberti. This was devastating to see for me, I felt Ezio's pain, his struggle to get to them in time.

As you see, only talking about this song causes me to stroll around memory lane, awakening memories of feelings related to this game. I can certainly say that it occupies a special place in my mind and certainly in my heart. It is also a throwback to an easier time for me, when school was easy, people were not as complicated, as I was just a child and my only worry was finishing my homework early to spend my evenings playing video games. That gentle start of the melody, its pretty lax tempo and the gradual build up of instruments until the vocals pop in is just magical and brings me genuine joy, enven in the remixed versions in later games, which send me back in time (a pretty ironic effect since these games take place in diverse historical periods).

Thanks for reading through my ramblings about this song and what it means to me as a person. I hope this was entertaining in some way to you and if you have had a similar experience, I'd really like to hear about it.

Images: cover, 1, 2.

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