Even 26 years ago, Alien: Isolation creative director Alistair Hope was desperate to make videogames, he tells us. “I actually have Edge to thank in part for that. I got right to the end of my fine art degree. Was I really going to have a go at being a traditional artist? And I picked up a copy of Edge, the one with Mario 64 on the cover. It was this era as 16bit was moving into the 3D world, and it all looked super-exciting. Then, at the back, there were adverts for jobs in game development. That blew my mind. I’d always assumed it would be such a cool job that it wouldn’t be advertised anywhere. From that moment, I decided that’s what I’m going to do – and three months later I started at CA.”
Last year, Creative Assembly opened its third location in Horsham, West Sussex. With over 800 employees, it is now the largest game developer in the UK. But when Hope joined in 1996 – nearly a decade into the studio’s existence – he was its eighth employee, working “in a tiny unit in a small industrial estate in the
