The History of Creative Assembly (Total War / Alien Isolation) - Documentary

[MUSIC PLAYING] - Hello, and welcome to Noclip's second guest documentary and its very first to be delving into a studio based out of England, which means of course the weather is dreadful, but we'll press on regardless. So we're here to tell the story of Creative Assembly, a studio that began its life in a spare bedroom porting other people's games but grew into something much, much more significant. It's perhaps best known for just a couple of words. As short as those words may be, they ho

ld some real significance for strategy fans around the world. And of course those words are Total War. Now this is a studio I visited plenty of times over the course of my career, usually to take a look at the latest Total War project, or more recently with People Make Games to find out about a bizarre television show that somehow got made in the early 2000s. But despite a dozen or more trips, until now, I'd only seen one side of Creative Assembly, the PC strategy powerhouse. But there is a

nother side. These days, they're known as the console team and they're the folks behind games like Alien Isolation and Halo Wars. And they've actually been around since the very beginning. They even predate Total War altogether. - I joined in I think like, uh, 93-ish? Yeah. Working in one room above an estate agent's. Three coders working exclusively in 70 language, you know, the language which has all kind of one to one mapping with processor instructions and bears no resemblance to anything

that's human readable and is just kind of, you know, to do the simplest task, you've got some reams of code. And so that's where the name of Creative Assembly comes from. - This was just before we seriously started thinking about Total War, where we were making sports games for Electronic Arts. And we were making the kind of niche sports games, I guess. The guys had done FIFA on PC, and then I think Electronic Arts had asked us to look at some other sports. It's kind of a really good appre

nticeship because maybe when you kind of get into video games development, you kind of think, I've got this burning desire to make my game. And actually it was pretty healthy to be on, to kind of get into something like that where now there's an audience, and they know what they want. And you need to make a game that everybody's going to fall in love with. - Mike Simpson joined. He was our producer at Psygnosis, and so he was a kind of a guy with kind of industry clout and an understandin

g of game design. - So I joined Creative Assembly in 96, but I'd been working with the founder of Creative Assembly, Tim Ansell, for probably five or six years before then. I was working as a producer for a publisher, Psygnosis, and he was a sole developer when I first met him working on ports of various PC games, very early PC games. There were five people when I joined. So yeah, the reason I joined CA was not to make the Total War series of games. I had wanted-- I wanted to make an RPG.

That was my, that was the thing I was into at the time. And I joined up with Tim where we were going to make an RPG based on monkey Journey to the West, and we were going to do it in Singapore. CHRIS: All right. - So the idea was I'd join, and we'd set up a new studio in Singapore because there were these massive government subsidies there. It became fairly clear that all of those subsidies had huge strings attached, and, you know, it turned out that making games in Horsham was pretty much as

good as making them in Singapore. So we decided to stay. While we were looking into the Singapore thing, a number of things happened. I mean, first, we noticed there were a lot of people making Command & Conquer clones. Like Command & Conquer had been out for a little while. There were a lot of games like Kill, Krush 'n' Destroy, which were really quite easy looking games to make. And they were doing really well, and we thought, OK, well, maybe we should put the whole RPG thing on hold for

awhile, and make one of these quick and easy Command & Conquer clones. But also at the same time the first 3D card, Voodoo, came out, 3D effects, the kind of thing that in the past you wouldn't have been able to consider doing suddenly became possible. So rather than having a top down view like all of the previous Command & Conquer games, we thought about, okay, well, what if we start tilting the camera down and putting you in the General's eyes and having a rolling landscape. And because

of those 3D cards, rolling landscapes were suddenly a thing that you could do. 'Cause before everything was square angles and corners. And out of that and a few experiments with flocking, we ended up with this medieval battlefield with lots and lots of little guys and a General's viewpoint. And that started to evolve into and to Shogun: Total War. KEVIN MCDOWELL: So when I came here for my interview, they took me around and they showed me a pre-release build of Shogun: Total War, which hadn't

been announced. So in my sketchbook I had this idea for a game where you control an army, but you don't control the individual guys. You control these groups of guys, and you move and fight and you take over territory. And I thought, oh my god, this place is awesome. Even if they're just hiring me to work on sports games, I just want to be around, you know, this kind of awesome creative thing that they're working on. But it was quite different back in those times because the games industr

y, you know, you can say that it started in the 70s or in the 80s, but for me as a 3D artist, it really started the mid to late 90s. That's when all the tools changed, when the games went from being, you know, top down or side scrolling to having full 3D views. I was an experienced 3D game developer. I had three years of experience, and that was a lot back then. MIKE: With the 3D cards, you know, one of the programmers who was actually a pretty good mathematician had this idea of turning

spline based ridge into a landscape. To our great surprise that actually worked. I don't think anybody expected that to work in real time, and it worked. And suddenly there were all these little guys running across the landscape, and that's the point where we thought, OK, that we could start making really quite big battlefields that way. And from there we evolved into wrapping up those battles with a turn based strategy wrapper. I think the turn based strategy part probably ends up being sli

ghtly more than half of the game in the end. And the battles themselves, you know, they're fun and they're interesting. But as an experience on their own, they're not really enough to keep you coming back and back and back and back. For characters that turn up on the battlefield, you know, you need some context. And it wasn't really until we started getting backing from EA that we had enough time and budget to be able to think about it properly and say, okay, let's design something which

is going to be more than the sum of the parts after that. We started off with just using Japanese content for our first demo. I mean it provided a great setting, which was reasonably simple, right? So there weren't too many different troop types and, you know, we could have this kind of zen simplicity thing running through it without making it too deep and complicated. So CA, since I joined, there always were two teams, and when I joined there were five people. And hen I joined, they were al

l busy making, I think it was a rugby world cup game when I first joined. And they stayed doing that, making sports games for EA for quite a while and then went on to make action games. And you know, they're still there. It's the same team. They made Alien Isolation, and Halo Wars 2, and so on. And alongside them gradually the Total War team grew. So-- But by the end of Shogun 1, there were probably 15 or 16 of us, which sounds ridiculously small. CHRIS: Why do you think Creative Assembly did

n't go all in on one of those two things? Because they both sound like they had-- Like Shogun was obviously a success or that maybe had a longer tail on it than some of the sports stuff, and the sports games were doing really well in their own right. Like, how come Creative Assembly didn't become a studio that just did one of those two things? - Well, Tim Ansell is a, you know, true businessman, and you know, during those early years, you know, studios came and went pretty rapidly, especial

ly small studios. And so having speculative projects and safe projects going simultaneously is obviously a very good way to run a business. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHRIS: Now, you may have noticed that there's a fairly significant part of the Creative Assembly story that we have missing a presence. Although we'd be very lucky to interview some real veterans from the studio, people that have been there 10, 20 years, there is one person that we haven't spoken to as of yet. The founder of Creative Asse

mbly himself, Tim Ansell. And, well, that's because he doesn't work here anymore. Following the acquisition by Sega in 2005, he left the studio, and not on particularly good terms either. I feel it's important that we do talk to him if we're going to tell the history of Creative Assembly. And so that's where we're off to next. But unfortunately due to time constraints, I can't take Noclip's wonderful camera operator Jeremy with me. And so, sorry Jeremy, The camera footage is going to take a

slight dip in quality over the next few minutes. Uh, forgive me for that. [MUSIC PLAYING] - Well, originally I kind of left school with no qualifications at all really and then ended up getting the first job I got offered, which was working in the print room with an architect. And did that for a few years, and they started sending me to-- They'd released a college to become an architectural technician, which I wasn't interested in. And oh, along along the way they-- That's right, they, sorry, t

hey bought a Apple II computer to work out all sorts of engineering calculations, and it kind of caught my interest. So I asked the boss if I could, have a go, and he said fine. So I used to spend my evenings teaching myself to use an Apple, an Applesoft BASIC and then went on to 6502 assembly language. And then when I was at school, at college, I got a lucky break 'cause one of the mates there, oh, he said, I've got a mate who runs his own computer company. They'll give me a number if you'd l

ike. So I went, yeah, whatever. I've heard people say that all the time, you know. And anyway, much to my amazement, next week he came in and said, oh, I saw him down at the pub, and here's his number. Give him a call. So I went, oh, well, wow. OK. So that was a guy called Graeme Devine who subsequently went on to write 7th Guest. CHRIS: Right. - And but yeah, I worked for him for about 18 months or so and-- Until that went pop and then I found myself on my own, and that's how I got started

. CHRIS: So the original plan was just as a one person entity, then. - Didn't really have a grand plan, to be honest. It was just have a job mostly. But I've just always been someone that's sort of seen opportunities and take them when they come along rather than been a great visionary with a grand plan, so. So I just found that I was getting offered far more work than I could cope with. And so it seemed silly to turn that down. Plus I saw very early on that the day of the one man band wa

s disappearing. So it was a case of grow or die, really, Yeah, I hired my first two employees, 1989, just before my first son was born. And I remember the first one worked in the spare bedroom at home. And then my son was born, and we needed that back. So went and got first little 200 square foot office above an estate agent. ANNOUNCER: EA Sports, it's in the game. TIM: Often when you call a large company, it's so crucial who is you get put through to. You get put through to the wrong person

, it's probably the end of the line. And I got put through to a guy called Matt Webster who happened to be the associate producer on a new game they were doing. And when he told me it was a football game, to be quite honest with you, I thought, that sounds a bit sad, but I tried to remain enthus-- Sort of retain enthusiastic tone just in case I wanted to do it. So, yeah, I then I then went up to meet them fairly soon after, and I was really blown away by their enthusiasm and passion for every

thing really. They seemed like a really nice bunch of guys, and it seemed very friendly atmosphere. And they were absolutely desperate for me to start. I can't even begin to tell you, like before we even signed the contract, literally the next day they sent down a taxi with a Mac in it with all the source code on so I could get started. CHRIS: Right. We should probably say which football game that was. - Ah, yeah. Well, at the time it was known as FIFA International Soccer, which I guess is

generally now known as FIFA 94 even though the numbering didn't start till the next version. And of course it wasn't released at the time, so nobody had any idea how big it was going to be. I think to be fair, nor did they. Yeah, at the time FIFA really opened doors for us. You know, you just mentioned, I mean obviously I didn't write FIFA. We just ported it onto the PC. But nevertheless, if you went around telling people you just worked on the PC version of FIFA, then every door you can imag

ine just swung open. ANNOUNCER: Santamaria, Nboku. Nigeria offside. TIM: The commentary actually came about completely by accident really. I was just in the office on my own one night. EA were doing the sound effects, and they hadn't given to me yet, and I wanted to crack on with the, audio code. So in order to check it out, I just decided to record some placeholder sound effects just to check them. So I literally said the names of all the sound effects. There was like pass 1, pass 2, ref whi

stle 1, ball, you know, hit post sort of thing. And I'd literally just spoke things in a monotone voice, and played them back, and played the game, and checked they were all being triggered in the right places. But then when this happened that I realized that it kind of sounded like a weird, rudimentary commentary. So subsequently came up with the idea of recording the three phrases, everything with to and by and on their own. So you'd have like Smith, pass to Smith, kick by Smith sort of thing

, and then you could chop them all up and put it with all other phrases. ANNOUNCER: Strike by Favado! -To me, the voice of commentary at the time was Tony Gubba. And so I just asked, literally just asked EA, you know, can we get him? And very quickly they just came back and said yeah. I think somebody knew his agent or something. They very quickly came back and said, yeah, we got him. So I booked a recording studio near Crawley that I'd used personally making music. And we spent the day recordin

g him, and yeah, he was he was lege. - Tim was loving it, hobnobbing with the Gubba, with his comb-over and all that business. TIM: But he didn't complain once. He was really good and you know, he was sort of screaming away, of course. So that certainly helped. Gave us, put it on the map a bit. Gave us a bit more kudos. But then we took several steps backwards by agreeing to do a rugby game for them, just because I sort of liked EA at the time. - Continued working for Electronic Arts, doing kin

d of every sort of sports game known to man with a kind of an oval ball and a small ball. And we did them all, kind of. Rugby league, rugby union, Australian rugby league, Australian rules football, world cup cricket, world cup rugby, you know, all of that kind of business. And so that was, that was, you know, paying the bills. - EA understandably wanted the same level of quality across their sports brand obviously, but a game that's going to sell millions of units like FIFA can obviously comma

nd a big budget. And a game that sells maybe a hundred, 120,000 units, like some of these other ones, doesn't. And so trying to produce a game to the same production values as, that was hard work for very little money and very little kudos. So, it became clear quite early on that the only way we were going to make any money really was to do something original. So yeah, it had been in the plan for some time. And I think the final kicker for me was a very lazy Command and Conquer clone that ca

me along that EA were releasing that I seem to remember had a sales forecast of 450,000 units. I just thought, holy cow, you know, there's us busting our balls to do this stuff, a hundred, 120,00 units and little kudos, and there's this that of course they liked more because it's got much bigger sales forecast . And it hasn't got one original idea. And so we could do better than that without even getting out of first gear. So that definitely, that's it. We're doing it. Normally, original gam

e development is a Monte Carlo or bust scenario. You know, all the guys who create a new game and it's successful, you'll hear about them. They're the latest success story and off down to the Ferrari garage. But you don't hear about all the ones who fail, and they probably don't have a house anymore. And I was at the time I had a wife and two young kids and didn't really much fancy that scenario. Plus I also had a few employees by then who also pay their mortgages based on what I pay them. So

I took their security seriously as well. So I decided to try and do it sort of a slower, safer way. If Shogun hadn't worked, we would have survived. So we ran the sports teams as a way of keeping the company running. And so if Shogun had been a complete and utter disaster, it would have been bad, but we would have still been there. We could have still picked ourselves up and gone on and tried something else. And so we really were genuinely aiming for sort of a a B minus title, just to sort of sh

ow people, look, we do do our own original games. The only way we didn't compromise was I knew it had to be 3D. The more we did of it, the more we could see the potential. We were saying, you know, this has got, this is no, this is good. You know, and so we'd go back to the guys that were funding it and say, look, well, you know, a bit more time, bit more budget, we really think you might have something here. And it's-- And that's how it kind of started to grow into a Shogun that eventually end

ed up selling a million units. [MUSIC PLAYING] MIKE: When we finished Shogun, we actually started on Rome and Medieval at the same time. So Rome took a long time to make, it was four years, and it wasn't really until we finished Medieval 1 and the whole team started focusing on it that it really started to come together. When we were trying to pick what to do next, pretty much everything you can imagine is on that list. And we're just arguing about the order in which we're going to do things.

And rather than trying to figure out what's going to sell best or anything like that, we'd basically just make the game that we wanted to play most. And Medieval does seem to be like the most fun and wanted to do more with castles and sieges and so on. And that seemed like a good way to push it forward. Those first two years we ended up with two years of work and we looked at it and thought, hmm, this isn't actually very good. We actually went back to Activision at that point and said we're goin

g to need more time. And they gave us another year. We had plans to make it a year quicker. - Everything was new, and there was a very loose template in Shogun I that we could follow. But we pretty much changed everything. So we changed the way the campaign map worked entirely. So it went from the region based map to the very open world campaign. And with the 3D models there was a lot more we could do on the battles to make them exciting. - So yeah, doing everything in 3D for the first time, bu

ilding a 3D engine that could display thousands of men. There was nothing else that could do that at the time, nothing else got close. So it needed to be really, really, really efficient. And it was things like building cities where the buildings in the city matched what was on the campaign map, which sounds like a really small thing, but actually, that actually cost a lot of effort. So that's actually, I guess that's a surprising thing about all the Total War games. It may actually be quite s

mall things in them, which ended up sinking huge amounts of the effort, and sometimes it's surprising where those ended up being. Shogun 1 is a good example of that. The throne room in Shogun I took, it couldn't-- It took just more than a quarter of the total budget of the game just for that one scene of guys coming in and out of the throne room and speaking a bit. It was, that was hard. - Warriors of Sparta, today our city faces her greatest enemy! TIM: When we first had Spartan to pitch, wh

en Activision dropped it and we got it back to pitch it, literally Sega were the first people we pitched it to, or I tried to. I phoned them up and left a message, heard nothing. tried again, and eventually gave up and tried all sorts of other people. And that year all in all was the worst year of my life. And when I tell you that subsequent year getting divorced, which everyone will appreciate is bad. Not that year was worse. Yeah. And then irony of it was things were getting pretty desperate

. How all, you know, I was running out of irons in the fire. And then one day I'm in the office, and somebody says to me, there's a phone call for you, it's a guy from Sega. Picks up the phone, he says, oh, hi, my name's Gary Rowe. And I'm a productor acquisition manager or something for Sega. I wonder if by chance you might have any product we might be interested in. And unfortunately I have to say, my words to him were, are you taking the piss? Because I just couldn't believe this, you kno

w, like I said, I phoned you six months ago. He was like, he never got any of the messages. So once they got that then things moved real quick, and I really liked Sega. I thought they were a really good fit for CA. And they liked us, and yeah. So it worked well because they were just a good fit from the beginning. CHRIS: Am I right in thinking from pretty early on they mentioned the word acquisition, like they might be interested? - Yeah. They said from the first get go, they said, oh, we've be

en working together a few months. We might like to start talks about acquisitions. and I said, OK, fine, you know. Sure. Whatever. And then probably after about three weeks they said, oh, you know, we'd like to start those talks. I said, I thought you want to work together for a bit. Ah, we know each other. It was quite great. Yeah. CHRIS: And what was your feeling at that point? You said that you just had a pretty rough year and found the job and the responsibility as quite stressful. Was t

hat-- Did you see that as like a way to take a step back, or did you have conflicting feelings, or how did you feel about the idea of selling? - Well, that's the thing, 'cause as well as the company, there's me as a person, and I'd been working really hard for 18 years with a lot of stress and, as you will probably appreciate with divorce coming, a few personal issues going on in the background as well. And everyone has their breaking point, and I had 100% reached mine. And I've been through

along the way three full on bouts of suicidal depression, and I was spent. I was completely shot. And me personally, I needed to get out. You know, I actually didn't want to leave. I just needed a break, and I really should have just negotiated or tried to negotiate myself a sabbatical. And I kind of regret that, but I didn't. And I was just so desperate to just get out of there. I just did exactly that. And that's one of my regrets really. Because I'm sure everybody just thought that I was j

ust after the money and then just was off. But the truth of the matter is when once the sale went through, I hadn't really seen much of my kids for such a long time, and I was just so spent after that tough year we'd had, and obviously all the personal issues that were going on. But to be honest, I had a six month contract with Sega, and I didn't even go into the office that much really, which is, so it was hardly surprising when September came, they got rid of me really. I was about as much us

e as a chocolate teapot and, which is a shame, but again, probably made everyone think, he's lost interest, which I hadn't. But like I said, I just personally was done, and I needed a break. And it took me quite a few months, probably a year to really get my shit back together. It was one of those things I wanted to be able to leave, but I didn't want to actually leave. I wanted the pressure of having to be there to go, but I didn't want to actually go, you know, the, the money sort of lifted al

l that stress from me, so I don't have to worry about that anymore. But it was weird. I was in such a bad place at the time that to be honest, I felt really ashamed, and I actually couldn't go in the office. And I sort of felt I'd let everybody down. CHRIS: What did you feel ashamed about? - No idea. Yeah, it actually is a bit much, I'm sorry. CHRIS: Oh, yeah, I see. TIM: Yeah, I'd always espoused how good it was being an independent developer, and then I'd gone and sold. And I sort of felt, a

gain, because I wasn't turning up much, everyone would think I was just after the money and I didn't care. And none of that was true. And then what I guess in a way, what made it worse was then when I left Sega censored my, you know, sort of leaving departing note to strip it of any emotional content. So I couldn't really say anything other than bare basic facts. I couldn't even tell anybody how actually even felt. And I mean, it had been my, I mean it was my life for 18 years, you know, on Sept

ember the 4th I was a husband, a full time dad, a boss whose opinion on everything mattered and at the center of something good and creative and whatever. And on September the 5th I was none of those things. I was single, I was a part time dad. And the biggest decision I'd make all week was what to eat for dinner. And it took me about a year or two to actually stop checking my emails every 15 minutes. It's like, no one emails you, Tim. It's just spam. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHRIS: We start, Tim with y

our full name and job title. - Yes. My name is Tim Heaton. I'm the studio director here at Creative Assembly. CHRIS: Cool. So you joined the team as studio director in 2009? - Yeah. CHRIS: How big was the, was the studio at that point? How many people? - We were 90 people at that stage. CHRIS: 90, OK. Do you know how many people are here now? TIM HEATON: There are 590 altogether here in Horsham and in Sophia. We were just finishing Total War Empire. There was a console game just out, Viking:

Battle for Asgard. You know, I thought it was kind of a really interesting game, really good, but, not finished, but not been allowed to really kind of bring all its goodness to the fore. So there were two things, really two things to do. And one was to look at Total War and like look at opportunities with that 'cause it was a hugely respected franchise. Then it seemed like people were, you know, were kind of really interested in where Total War would go next. And then there was a console team h

ere, the team that delivered Viking, You know, they're in different buildings, but we've only had to do that because we've kind of run out of space in this building. But they are in two different buildings, and they're two different teams. And they have real different vibes. Obviously the Total War one is quite collegiate. It's quite studied. And console team is a little bit more rock and roll. What we call the command team on that team are really passionate about pushing different, different

places to go within gaming. So yeah, that team is very much the one that will experiment. NARRATOR: Rome is not the only power rising along the shores of the Mediterranean. Another people, the Carthaginians have imperial ambitions. KEVIN: If you go back and look at Rome, it's a bit cartoony. It's a bit, you know, the tech is quite like hand painted textures. So we did have-- It did have a bit of a stylized hand painted look to it, which is something that we have dropped over the years. So w

e've become a more kind of gritty, real looking, but we always want to shovel some style on top of it as well. - We have to be very methodical in how we make these things true to history. So there's a massive challenge with that, and someone would always point out something that's not exactly right. KEVIN: So my number one thing about looking at the art direction for Total War is it's not exactly authenticity. So the way I look at it is if you think of a Greek Spartan warrior, right? This i

mage of a helmet pops into your head, which is probably going to be a Corinthian helmet. And there's a certain perfect looking Corinthian helmet that is the most quintessential Corinthian helmet. That's the Corinthian helmet that we want to use in game, is the iconic version of it. So all of these other Corinthian helmets are authentic, but that, there is one Corinthian helmet that is the quintessential one. And that's the one we want to use. - So getting back to the Shogun content for Shogun 2

, it was really nice to go back to that familiar stuff that we all got so immersed in the first time round. And with all of the changes in tech since then, we had a chance to do it again, and do it much, much, much better. It let us focus a lot more on the art side than we'd been able to do before. So it's the first time we've really tried to make a project that was art led rather than tech or design led. - We decided then to go on a very stylized approach for movies. We did these, wood block

painting style movies for events and stuff like that. And that was great fun to work on. And we had this very talented artist who could amazingly recreate these really traditional looking paintings. And no one believed that they were original. Everyone was like, where did you steal these from? And it was a smaller scale I think in another term. So yeah, it probably was more art related. It's-- We weren't going into the whole massive expanses of a giant map or something. It was just, the cam

paign was smaller, but we could put so much more detail art-wise. - It was nice to pursue the, again, the kind of zen simplicity thing. Now, one of the most difficult things when we're making any games is to make a game which is deep but simple, and with Total War in some ways it's even harder. Because we've always got a rich feature set, and making that deep but not complicated is really, really hard. And Shogun gave us a really good platform to have a go at boiling the game down to its es

sentials and making something that was reasonably simple but still very, very deep. - Yeah, the big changes since I've been here are we knew that people would happily have take more Total War content, right? That we had these fans that were vociferous, and you know, would expect them for every single release. So we wanted to think about that, but we wanted to think about not, you know, not tying teams into really strict deadlines as well. And I think running multiple teams lets you let be a

bit more dynamic so you can concentrate a bit more on quality. So we set out with a strategy to do more, to build more than one game team. And that is incredibly difficult for Total War because there are all these specialists, right? Everybody on a Total War team is a specialist, and you can't just clone them. So we have a, you know, battle AI specialist, campaign AI specialist, et cetera. They've been with the company for years, and it was a bit how do we find more of those people? So we we

nt out looking, and it took us five years I think to find, you know, a set of skills where we could start thinking right, second team. - As much as this documentary is about the exponential success of Creative Assembly and Total War over the years, it's not always been smooth sailing. Fans of the series will remember one game's launch in particular, Total War Rome 2 in 2013, a game that arrived with its fair share of problems. - There was so much that we wanted to get into the, into the origina

l game. We were so ambitious with that game. We wanted to take everything that everybody loved about the first game and make it so much better that we probably were too ambitious with it. And it did take us a long time after release to really get to the point where we could look at it and go, yep, that's the game we actually were intending to make. - You know, we made a mistake. And it was the studio that made the mistake, or you know, I made that mistake. We decided to go ahead and launch that

game, and it wasn't quite ready. And we knew we weren't quite ready, but we thought it was going to be fine and we would manage fine. And it was a real watershed moment when we realized we'd made a terrible mistake. The game wasn't right, it wasn't stable, and we had to go back and finish it. MIKE: It's very easy if you're in a hurry to get a game out, to underestimate exactly what state it's in when it comes to bugs, right? That's the, I don't think people quite realize how when you're making

that go, no go decision on whether you'll launch a game, you have to make that decision a long, long time before the game is actually released. It's like firing a shotgun really. Once you pulled the trigger, you can't actually stick the bullets back down the barrel. It's coming out. And, that's what we found with Rome 2. - For me, it was watershed within the studio to see the disappointment within the team because actually Rome 2 kind of sold OK in its, you know, in its release, and it's very

easy to go, hey everybody, everything's fine because we're still selling games. But the team were just so unhappy. The fans' response, that's absolutely what they're looking for. And Total War fans are not quiet. They don't, they don't keep it to themselves. They tell us, you know, and we want to hear it. And we will try and make things right. So Viking came out on the last day of Sega's financial year, right. That's kind of because it had to be done. And the team itself didn't know what it w

as there for, right. This console team that had existed in CA for a long time, but it had kind of run out of ideas. And they'd gone to Sega entrustingly, and they'd said, what game do you want us to make next, which was a typical developer publisher relationship in those days, 10 years ago. We were asked to do an Olympics game. I don't know whether you've ever played an Olympics game, right, but you don't want to do 30 different mini games in a major game. So we decided, right, well, let's go

out and find something that feels appropriate for us. Obviously Sega had this Alien license that had been used on some games before, and Alien Colonial Marines was in development then. - They were making three games based on the Alien license with Fox, one of which wasn't going particularly well. And they thought there was an opportunity that we could think about there. And the one that wasn't going well wasn't Colonial Marines. You know, Jesus. How badly could that one have been? - We kind of

sat back a bit and went, you know what, nobody's done a survival horror game. And we could use the same technology as we used on Viking actually for an alien game. Al Hope kind of set out a five page kind of vision document of what an alien survival horror game would be, and Sega went, there is no way we want to do another Alien game. Right? No chance. So go back, think again. Won't you please, will you do an Olympics game? Please. And we went, right. The only way to really do this is skunkwork

s. So we did a demo in five weeks, and we didn't tell Sega we were doing it. And we used the tech from Viking. ALISTAIR: So we had this idea for a game, a kind of survival horror game based in the Alien universe. And so we got permission to put together a small, more of a mood demo, and what'd it be like to just, just be in that space. - And we went in, and we also did a bit of a work with Sega in that we showed some of the actual games players at Sega this demo. And so there was a kind of voi

ce of opinion already in the room when we eventually showed it to the execs at Sega And when we showed it to the execs, they were kind of like, oh wow, this looks pretty good. And then they had everybody around them go, this is a great game. It's going to be great. - I think. I think we're kind of born out of a desire for kind of authenticity. Alien Isolation is very authentic to the original Alien movie. It's an extension and an expansion of the original universe. You know, and, and with Halo

Wars as well, you know, we're considered a safe pair of hands who understand people, other people's IPs. And, you know, we can be respectful and reverent of it and dig in and understand the nature of an IP extremely well. [WOOSH] [EXPLOSION] [WIND BLOWING] - We'd actually got to the point where we could start running two teams in parallel, and that meant we could do something else. And we'd finally got to the point where we could, start work on a Warhammer game without slowing down the pace at

which we were doing our started games. And in a way, there's not that much difference between making a historical Total War and making a Warhammer game. Rather than being authentic to history, we end up being authentic to this IP that already exists. And that means, you know, what we actually end up doing is very similar. We go out, we do our research, and we immerse ourselves totally in the content, which is why I ended up painting a lot of figures and fighting a lot of tabletop games. We to

yed with the idea of doing another fantasy IP. I mean, we thought about doing, doing Lord of the Rings games and various other things, right? But up to that point, we'd never really been able to do it without having to make a choice between historical or fantasy. And we didn't want to do that. We always wanted to do both. So it was the first point where we could. - It takes a long time to produce something. And by the end of it, actually we're all hyped about doing something a little bit differ

ent. It's like, OK, this really worked, but let's do something different. And Warhammer, it being fantasy was obviously a big opportunity to go a little bit crazy with how the style could be so different from what we'd done previously on historical titles. Really excited for all the artists definitely. And the animators, all the creatures they get to work on. It's very different, and it had to look different. And it had to be in keeping with obviously all the Warhammer fans and what they were e

xpecting to see. - Everything we do is kind of, you know, what do the Total War players need, and then what works within the parameters of the lore. Then we speak to Games Workshop about those things to kind of just get a feel for it. I think things that are important IP wise are players generally speaking, I think, you know, key characters, the way they look, what their core mechanics are in an army. But like that's all there and available to us to know beforehand. So I think it's about the t

rust that we both have in each other, understanding each other's requirements and needs. - Recently we had a new member join our team as a trainee, and the first thing I did was like, okay, here's the design documents. Just read through and just immerse yourself in the lore of Warhammer. And it might not all make sense at first, but you know, you kind of just have to imagine, you know, just take a bit of time reading the lore, and just think about the world that you're going to be working wit

hin. And you really do have to become a part of it. And I will say myself, I'm, you know, I'm no Warhammer expert. Every time we have a new little pack I'm like, ah OK, I have to learn what these new characters are and the history behind them. But design are really good at printing documents to just explain all of that. Or we have quick meetings to give like an overview so everyone's on the same page as to who these people are and about their backstory and everything. CHRIS: How does Total War

change when you introduce magic and dragons? - Surprisingly little in some ways. I mean it's still fundamentally the same experience. You're still, you know, when you're on the battlefield, you still got this handful of units, and you can see and the opposite you. And you're trying to figure out, okay, what's the combination of things now? Where do I need to put these guys, and what order do I need to do things? And so the core gameplay is not different. You just got more toys, and they're a

bit more wizzy. Now the tabletop game, it inspires what we do. It doesn't, you know, we're not bound by it in any particular way. And that's one of the things Games Workshop says, it says is that none of the computer versions of any of the stuff is exactly the same as the tabletop. They're all different, right? So you use-- So we created our own thing, which was Total War: Warhammer. And so long as we're completely faithful to their IP, then they're completely happy with what we do. - I mean,

we're quite a long way into the process of working within the Warhammer world and obviously the community. Yeah. We've gotten a good piece of what people expect, and how to respond, and what things are the most important to respond to. And like I said, the designers are now, so immersed in the whole Warhammer lore. They're, they blow me away with like, oh, the detail they come out with. It's just, it's just like the Israel history, it's just amazing. You could have a degree in Warhammer, I th

ink. CHRIS: What fantasy or fictional worlds work for a Total War game? - Yeah, so we have a long list, you know, that we kind of keep up to date, and we do talk to other IP holders as well. Other games companies' IP through to things we're seeing on Netflix and Amazon Prime, et cetera, day to day. So nothing's off limits. It's more kind of opportunity cost in a way of what do we really want to do and what uses Total War well? think it's-- I think Warhammer shows that Total War can work wit

h an IP really, really well and still be Total War. It doesn't lose anything in our own games. So yeah, we'll see what we end up with. MIKE: I think with Warhammer, I mean, a lot of our core historical fans came with us on the Warhammer adventure. So, uh, you know, we can see that a lot of the players who played the historical games also play Warhammer. I think we were aware of that, that whenever we're making a historical game after Warhammer, you know, you can't ignore the fact that that

game exists, and it has dragons and fiery things all over the place. And if we're not careful, we ended up making the historical games look a bit dull by comparison. And with Three Kingdoms, having the romance mode helped with that a bit. It meant that we could have larger than life characters. You know, it's not full on magic in any way. It's firmly authentic to the Three Kingdoms novel and so on, but those characters are larger than life from a historical point of view. So it's different, ri

ght? We end up with game, which is, you know, it isn't Warhammer. It's different from Warhammer. It has its own charm, its own beauties, and depth, and interest. And I think there's plenty of room to do that, to be able to flip between fantasy, and having all of the weird and wonderful stuff, and then something which is a bit more grounded but feels more real as well. You know, having those two modes, it does, well, it was, there right from the start. I mean. I don't think we would have made the

game without that, particularly for an Eastern audience. The romance in the Three Kingdoms novel is so well known and you couldn't cover that period in history without people looking at it and thinking you were doing it wrong, right? Because they wouldn't recognize it. It's hard for a Western audience to understand how deeply rooted that particular novel is in that culture. Getting the Three Kingdoms content right for for an Asian audience was super important, I think. I think the character fe

atures in Three Kingdoms has changed things slightly. It's interesting 'cause that was when we started, that was one of the things where we weren't absolutely sure that that would actually work. The idea of building networks of relationships between characters, and using that to drive to drive recruitment and so on. It was very, it was quite a big departure, and-- But now that we've gone there with it, and it works really well, I can see us as pushing forward and developing that further for ot

her titles in other periods of history where that character focus makes sense, and it'll depend on the period. I mean there were some periods where it was all about characters and relationships, and there are other periods where it is more about states and policies, and so on. So it'll depend on the period. CHRIS: You're not going to have Napoleon holding like a bridge on his own then or anything? - No, probably not on his own. So I think it is important to have a balance between doing the popu

lar content that everybody already knows and that they can revel in and go, yay, I know, I understand this, and going out and finding something that is off the beaten track a bit more interesting than actually going here is all this really interesting stuff that you never knew existed. And I'm putting that in front of people. So I think a balance between the two. I think we should be doing both, and we will keep doing that. - Where we're at now and where we were 20 years ago, it is incredibly d

ifferent, but it has been a slow kind of step by step path to get where we're at. You know, I guess Sega buying CA in 2005 was probably the most dramatic thing. And the core fundamental difference is once we were owned by Sega, we felt like there was stability. When you're working for an independent game developer that's going from publisher to publisher, obviously it can go wrong badly at any time. So Sega came in. I guess we had a little bit of trepidation. We didn't know how they were going

to handle it, but they've been brilliant. They've been amazing. Could not ask for a better publisher than Sega. You know, we feel like whatever games we're working on, we're going to finish them. They're going to ship. and they're going to be, you know, now we think they're going to be in good shape when they go out. - We used to get physical copies of the new games that came out then, when Sega released and everyone would just queue up massively all down the office just waiting for the physica

l copy of something. And when I talk about that now, people are like, well, what, box games? What are you on about? Get Steam keys. But it's just that whole, you know, that change of technology that's just happened over those years and how we interact with community so much more now. Again, we used to have our biggest releases, in PC Gamer magazine, and it was like, we're on the front cover! This is amazing. And everybody'd get copies. It's like physical things that we used to get, and now it'

s a bit different, but it's a wider audience. So it's, exciting in a different way. - There are core values which the genesis of Creative Assembly and the early years of have brought along with them. You know, it's impossible, you know, there's enough people from those early years still around that some of those core values I think are there, you know, like we're a very collaborative studio. You know, we have a management hierarchy, but that doesn't mean that anybody on any team can't come up

with a great idea and it be acted upon. MIKE: So it's been really interesting seeing how some things have changed going from five to 500, but some things have stayed exactly the same. The kind of core values that we've worked to really have stayed the same all the way through, and we've always had a really strong focus on quality, and that's one of the things that Tim Ansell, the founder of the company, he set that really strongly, to the point where he would, he'd rather the studio close th

an made a bad game, and he would say that quite regularly to publishers. It meant from the publisher's point of view to not negotiate with them, and from-- But from an indie dev's point of view, he's brilliant. He's really, really good. CHRIS: What do you think of Creative Assembly now? Do you follow their work much, or do you have any sort of feelings about, you know, I visited there a few weeks ago, and it's one of the biggest employers in the UK games industry, and it started out of your s

pare bedroom. What does it feel like looking at a company that's now grown to such a size, and it started with you? - Well, it's obviously a fact that things fills me with immense pride. But it's kind of weird because I say, well I guess we haven't been in contact, and it almost feels like kind of two separate lives to me really. It kind of feels like I died and was reborn. So it's almost quite hard for me to connect that that was actually me. It's funny, I actually often find it a bit upsettin

g playing the Total War games. It just kind of brings all of that stuff back, and I kind of prefer just to focus on what I got rather than what I haven't. CHRIS: Have you managed to speak to some of those people in the years since? - No, not really. I mean, I would say partly, I mean I literally never went back in the office. I, you know, all my stuff was literally left there and subsequently I believe put in a box. And I never even collected that. So I literally have not set foot in the offi

ce since that day. It just felt too awkward for me to do so. And strangely they never contact me for anything. So for instance, even when they had things like their 25 or 30 year anniversaries, nobody thought that I might be a part of that having been completely like the number one person breaking in those 25 years. So I don't know. So they didn't keep in contact with me, and I didn't really keep in contact with them. CHRIS: Yeah. Well, um, yeah, a couple people that we interviewed did want me t

o mention that you are always welcome back there. - Oh, OK. CHRIS: Tim mentioned it, and-- TIM: Look, I love their product. I love the people. I love the company. There were so many people in that company, more intelligent than me, much more creative than me. And that's a wonderful environment to be in, and it's not average, you know. It's not what you bump into in your average supermarket. CHRIS: Tim Ansell has yet to take up that offer to revisit the studio he once founded. Perhaps it's one h

e'll need to hear for himself to truly believe, but those early days of Creative Assembly remain an incredibly important period in his life. From his spare bedroom, he grew a company that is now hundreds strong, a team that is right this moment supporting two very different flavors of Total War, both historical and fantasy, as well as working away on a yet to be seen tactical first person shooter. Those days of contract work with FIFA and whatever sports titles he could get a hold of may now be

distant memories that only a few at CA can even claim to remember, but they did help pave the way for what has now become one of the brightest names in British game development and an all time great when it comes to grand strategy. Cool. I think, I think we've, I think we've got most of it, yeah. Thank you for revisiting those years and allowing us to come in and look at this ridiculous view as well. Cool. - Yeah, thank Sega for this. CHRIS: Yeah. [LAUGHING] ANNOUNCER: A strike! The goalie ma

de a meal of that one. Nigeria caught offside. Free kick to be taken. Nigeria offside. Free kick to be taken by Kafriosi. Santamaria. Good control by Santamaria. A shot! Saved by Nboku. - Ready, at ten. Move out quickly. For China! [CHANTING] - Take heed, warriors. [TYPING SOUNDS]