THE MAKING OF SHOGUN TOTAL WAR

Winston Churchill might have once uttered the phrase, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” but we can’t help but think that it’s better suited to the Total War series. After all, since its inception, it has handed the reins (or is that reigns?) of the most notable empires the world has known over to its players and said: “Here, you try.” It’s a franchise that has carried Creative Assembly from little-known work-for-hire studio developing sports titles for EA through to the big leagues with a studio now its own battalion in size and replete with its own on-site motion-capture facility.

Prior to the release of the very first game, the small developer based in Horsham didn’t dream of such an epic scale. Founded in 1987 by Tim Ansell before growing to a respectable small-sized team over the years, the studio had reached a point just before the turn of the millennium that it was ready to step out of the shadow of EA’s sports games and take on a project of its own with the hopes of writing its own history. “During the mid-to-late-Nineties the PC market clones, which were selling well,” explains Joss Adley of the early days of the game. “Tim saw an opportunity to start a new speculative RTS project in addition to the ongoing sport titles development.”