“In a world without gold, we might’ve been heroes!” has outlived the 2013 game that gave it to Blackbeard. Darby McDevitt says the line from Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag was trimmed down in rehearsal, then made after a rewrite request from Kama Dunsmore, and it has since become the line fans bring up most often.
McDevitt, who has been writing Assassin’s Creed scripts for 15 years, said the speech was meant to give Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard, a final line that captured the game’s central idea. The original version was longer: “In a world without wine, women, and gold, we might have been heroes!”
Black Flag, released in 2013, sent the series to the Golden Age of Piracy in the early 1700s, where Blackbeard’s death became one of the game’s most emotional beats. McDevitt said the longer version did not feel right during rehearsals, and the team saw the problem in plain terms: the line was trying to do too much.
“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. He said the team shortened it, shot the scene, and then Richard Mark Bonnar’s performance “sold it so well on the next run-through that we knew we’d made the right decision.”
The writer said the quote was built around a bigger point about piracy and regret. Some of those men, he said, might have fought for greater causes if they had not been surrounded by superficial or fleeting pleasures. But the line works because it stays simple. “That’s probably the essential element of any pithy quote — they communicate big ideas in a clear and straightforward way,” McDevitt said, adding that pirates were thieves on the high seas and should not be romanticized away from that fact.
That is why the shorter version stuck. Thirteen years after Black Flag released, McDevitt says fans are still quoting it back to him, and Blackbeard’s last words remain the scene that best explains why the game endured: not because it dressed piracy up, but because it showed how quickly greed can hollow out a heroic life.
