On the heels of the release of a playable 30-minute demo, 1666: Amsterdam creator Patrice Désilets took to the stage at IGN Live today to discuss the game he fought so hard to complete. 1666: Amsterdam’s infamously long development process took over 15 years, which included both the game and Destilets spending time at multiple companies, before he was able to secure the rights back to finally complete his labor of love.
The director of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2, and Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, and co-founder and creative director of Panache Digital Games, Désilets explained his persistence, telling the IGN Live audience, “When you have an idea and you feel there’s something to it, you have to stick with it. That’s how I am.”
Originally, his idea was to have a game where you’d play as the devil, but then series like Lucifer made him feel there’d been a lot of onscreen depictions of Satan lately. That made him switch to something that could represent the devil – in this case, witches.
Though the perspective of the prologue bounces around through multiple characters like Clio in the modern day, her father Aaron in 1999, and the witch Noa in 1666, Désilets broke things down as far as how much time you spend playing in each time period.
As he put it, “5% of the time you’re in present day in a library, with Clio tying to decipher a book. Let’s say 15% of the time you’re in 1999, and the rest you’re in 1666 as Noa.” He described the 1666 and 1999 portions as “kind of like a mirror of each other,”
But there was one other crucial piece of information about 1666: Amsterdam, as Désilets revealed, “The main thing, and it’s very important, is… you play as a cat!”
We then saw footage of the aforementioned feline on screen, with him running and leaping along through the dark and spooky streets, with Désilets noting you play as “a cat who is actually a guy from 1999.”
1666: Amsterdam will be available on PC. The prologue is available to play for free now on Steam and Epic Games Store.
Be sure to keep up with everything going on at IGN Live 2026. You can check the full schedule to see what else is coming up across games, movies, TV, streaming, and more.
