CURRENT ASSEMBLY
Founded 1987
Employees 843
Key staff Gareth Edmondson (studio director), Alistair Hope (creative director)
URL www.creative-assembly.com
Selected softography Rome: Total War, Alien: Isolation, Total War: Warhammer
Current projects Untitled sci-fi shooter
Even 26 years ago, Alien: Isolation creative director Alistair Hope was desperate to make videogames, he tells us. "I actually 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 north of Horsham". At the time, Creative Assembly was making sports games for EA. "The first game I actually worked on was Australian rules football [AFL]. It was such a great apprenticeship, you know? This wasn't about, 'OK, what's the game you want to make?' It was about, 'There's an audience for this game: understand it, and then create something that they're going to love'. And that seemed like a really healthy way to start."
The game the studio did want to make, though, was only a few years away. The 2000 release of Shogun: Total War changed Creative Assembly's trajectory forever, the debut of a series that took a team which was "typecast at the time as 'the sports games guys" and turned it into a giant in a completely different genre, one the members were truly passionate about. After Shogun came Medieval, then Rome - three landmark strategy games in the space of four years. It's perhaps no surprise that in 2004, the year of Rome's release, Creative Assembly was snapped up by the game's publisher, Sega. More Total War games followed, along with the studio's first console games, Spartan: Total Warrior and Viking: Battle For Asgard. (Put a pin in that last one - it's going to be important.)
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/Fyf0mFKJn1658838797629/3331558930.jpg]
Hope says that, as a long-term employee, it's sometimes difficult to for him to comprehend the scale of the business today. "It's really weird for me because in my head we're still a small studio. The culture has developed, for sure, but that spirit is still the same. It feels like a larger version of what we had creative freedom, that we really want people to excel in whatever passion they have." Still, he recognises that there have been a few changes. He remembers working on an early Shogun prototype, "using particles to spray people onto the screen". Nowadays, its approach to virtual humans is a little more advanced: the company has its own 45-camera motion-capture suite in Bulgaria, as part of CA Sofia its first office outside of the UK, and indeed outside of Horsham.
Formerly Crytek Black Sea, CA Sofia was acquired in 2017. Black Sea was a "closely knit team", creative director Maya Georgieva says, employing developers who "hailed back to the dawn of the game industry in Bulgaria". But after facing financial problems, Crytek dissolved the studio in 2016. "There was the option of falling apart and everybody saving themselves, but we wanted to remain together," Georgieva says, "so we did everything in our hands to achieve that."
"Was it hard? Yes." Many at Sofia knew Total War in name only. "A few among us, like me, were actually fans," Georgieva says. Still, the team "hit the ground running", releasing two expansions for Rome II, then their own title, 2020's Troy. "From the get-go, we got a lot of creative freedom and a lot of ambitious tasks, but there was also a feeling that everything could be questioned," Georgieva says. "We didn't get, like, 'This is the bible of Total War: these are the rules'." Sofia has since doubled in size, but like the Horsham studio - still aims to keep that initial spark and heart. "We definitely don't want to turn into an evil corporation. But that doesn't seem like something that's very likely to happen."
As much as the historical Total War games remain at the core of Creative Assembly, today they're only half the story. After revisiting the series' origins with 2011's Shogun 2, the studio started to look toward new futures, signing a deal with Games Workshop to bring its miniatures to digital life. Chief product officer Rob Bartholomew calls it a meeting of "two old grande dames of British entertainment".
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/Fyf0mFKJn1658838797629/0168903616.jpg]
Creative Assembly's approach to adapting the tabletop games was a familiar one. "We treated the Warhammer IP like a history subject," says Bartholomew, himself a fan since childhood. "We don't want to make it up." One advantage over real-world history is that they're able to directly ask the people who wrote it in the first place for lore: "The number of times we'll say something like, 'We could really do with some sort of lord character who kind of does this have you got anything like that?' And they'll come back in five minutes and go, 'Well, there's this guy from a roleplaying book', or 'We did this limited run of models here".
The games have brought in players who might otherwise never have learned their cavalry from their crossbowmen - and, with its Warhammer trilogy now complete, Bartholomew argues that Total War has yet to reach its prime. "We're still a relatively small fish in the strategy pond, which is a crazy thing to say. There's about between 80 and 100 million people around the world playing strategy games of some description. Not everyone will want a Total War game."
It's perhaps for this reason that the studio has continued to explore beyond the bounds of the series - and indeed genre - with which it is most associated. Or maybe it's just a case of making sure that it doesn't end up pigeonholed again, this time as 'the Total War studio'. Either way, it'd be hard to think of a bolder pivot for these veterans of sports and strategy than a first-person game based on one of cinema's most beloved science-fiction series.
"Tim Heaton, who was then head of the studio, gave us about a week when we pitched the idea," explains Hope, who led the Alien: Isolation project. "The myth and number of days changes, depending on who you talk to, but it ...
Founded 1987
Employees 843
Key staff Gareth Edmondson (studio director), Alistair Hope (creative director)
URL www.creative-assembly.com
Selected softography Rome: Total War, Alien: Isolation, Total War: Warhammer
Current projects Untitled sci-fi shooter
Even 26 years ago, Alien: Isolation creative director Alistair Hope was desperate to make videogames, he tells us. "I actually 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 north of Horsham". At the time, Creative Assembly was making sports games for EA. "The first game I actually worked on was Australian rules football [AFL]. It was such a great apprenticeship, you know? This wasn't about, 'OK, what's the game you want to make?' It was about, 'There's an audience for this game: understand it, and then create something that they're going to love'. And that seemed like a really healthy way to start."
The game the studio did want to make, though, was only a few years away. The 2000 release of Shogun: Total War changed Creative Assembly's trajectory forever, the debut of a series that took a team which was "typecast at the time as 'the sports games guys" and turned it into a giant in a completely different genre, one the members were truly passionate about. After Shogun came Medieval, then Rome - three landmark strategy games in the space of four years. It's perhaps no surprise that in 2004, the year of Rome's release, Creative Assembly was snapped up by the game's publisher, Sega. More Total War games followed, along with the studio's first console games, Spartan: Total Warrior and Viking: Battle For Asgard. (Put a pin in that last one - it's going to be important.)
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/Fyf0mFKJn1658838797629/3331558930.jpg]
Hope says that, as a long-term employee, it's sometimes difficult to for him to comprehend the scale of the business today. "It's really weird for me because in my head we're still a small studio. The culture has developed, for sure, but that spirit is still the same. It feels like a larger version of what we had creative freedom, that we really want people to excel in whatever passion they have." Still, he recognises that there have been a few changes. He remembers working on an early Shogun prototype, "using particles to spray people onto the screen". Nowadays, its approach to virtual humans is a little more advanced: the company has its own 45-camera motion-capture suite in Bulgaria, as part of CA Sofia its first office outside of the UK, and indeed outside of Horsham.
Formerly Crytek Black Sea, CA Sofia was acquired in 2017. Black Sea was a "closely knit team", creative director Maya Georgieva says, employing developers who "hailed back to the dawn of the game industry in Bulgaria". But after facing financial problems, Crytek dissolved the studio in 2016. "There was the option of falling apart and everybody saving themselves, but we wanted to remain together," Georgieva says, "so we did everything in our hands to achieve that."
"Was it hard? Yes." Many at Sofia knew Total War in name only. "A few among us, like me, were actually fans," Georgieva says. Still, the team "hit the ground running", releasing two expansions for Rome II, then their own title, 2020's Troy. "From the get-go, we got a lot of creative freedom and a lot of ambitious tasks, but there was also a feeling that everything could be questioned," Georgieva says. "We didn't get, like, 'This is the bible of Total War: these are the rules'." Sofia has since doubled in size, but like the Horsham studio - still aims to keep that initial spark and heart. "We definitely don't want to turn into an evil corporation. But that doesn't seem like something that's very likely to happen."
As much as the historical Total War games remain at the core of Creative Assembly, today they're only half the story. After revisiting the series' origins with 2011's Shogun 2, the studio started to look toward new futures, signing a deal with Games Workshop to bring its miniatures to digital life. Chief product officer Rob Bartholomew calls it a meeting of "two old grande dames of British entertainment".
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1655216247/articles/Fyf0mFKJn1658838797629/0168903616.jpg]
Creative Assembly's approach to adapting the tabletop games was a familiar one. "We treated the Warhammer IP like a history subject," says Bartholomew, himself a fan since childhood. "We don't want to make it up." One advantage over real-world history is that they're able to directly ask the people who wrote it in the first place for lore: "The number of times we'll say something like, 'We could really do with some sort of lord character who kind of does this have you got anything like that?' And they'll come back in five minutes and go, 'Well, there's this guy from a roleplaying book', or 'We did this limited run of models here".
The games have brought in players who might otherwise never have learned their cavalry from their crossbowmen - and, with its Warhammer trilogy now complete, Bartholomew argues that Total War has yet to reach its prime. "We're still a relatively small fish in the strategy pond, which is a crazy thing to say. There's about between 80 and 100 million people around the world playing strategy games of some description. Not everyone will want a Total War game."
It's perhaps for this reason that the studio has continued to explore beyond the bounds of the series - and indeed genre - with which it is most associated. Or maybe it's just a case of making sure that it doesn't end up pigeonholed again, this time as 'the Total War studio'. Either way, it'd be hard to think of a bolder pivot for these veterans of sports and strategy than a first-person game based on one of cinema's most beloved science-fiction series.
"Tim Heaton, who was then head of the studio, gave us about a week when we pitched the idea," explains Hope, who led the Alien: Isolation project. "The myth and number of days changes, depending on who you talk to, but it ...
You're reading a preview of
Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2022