In Assassin's Creed III, the opening Boston sequence depicts the Boston Massacre.
The game recreates the event of March 5, 1770, when British soldiers fired on a crowd in Boston, killing five colonists. In the fiction, the player initially controls Templar agent Haytham Kenway and reaches the scene during the tense confrontation. The sequence blends the historical incident with the game's secret-war narrative.
The Boston Massacre became a powerful piece of revolutionary propaganda. Paul Revere's famous engraving, based partly on an earlier image by Henry Pelham, presented the soldiers as aggressors and helped shape colonial opinion. The actual circumstances were more complicated, and the soldiers were later defended in court by John Adams.
Assassin's Creed III uses other major events of the American Revolution, including the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill. They are separate events, however, and the Boston sequence early in the game specifically centers on the 1770 massacre.