It's hard to remember Creative Assembly wasn't always synonymous with the Total War series, and yet, once upon a time, they were so well-known for sports games that pivoting away was seen as a risk. That's part of the story told in a retrospective video about the making of Total War: Shogun put together to coincide with its 25th anniversary. It makes for a fascinating insight into how different things were for the studio at the end of the 20th century.
"When I joined there were five people and they were working on sports games for Electronic Arts," says former executive producer Mike Simpson, who was hired in 1996. "I joined in order to start something new. The idea was I was going to head up a team producing an RPG, and we were going to base it on Monkey: Journey to the West. It was going to be done in a new studio we were going to set up in Singapore. None of that happened. Instead we ended up looking at making a quick and cheerful B-grade RTS because we'd seen so many other people doing it after Command & Conquer came out. We thought we'd make one of those games quickly to give us some funds that we could then use to make the RPG that we really wanted to make."
Shogun was a big enough hit that the Total War series became the studio's main focus, with occasional sidesteps like Alien: Isolation and Viking: Battle for Asgard in later years. During early work on Shogun, however, CA was still creating sports games, which fed into its development.
"When I joined I was called in to help with Australian Rules Football, which has I think 30 people on the field," says principal creative director Al Hope, who'd been hired as a trainee artist in 1996. The football game's tech proved helpful when it came time to depict armies clashing in feudal Japan. "We had already built up our experience of putting a large number of—well, for then a large number of characters for a sports game on the screen, and I guess we were going to take that and really push it further."
Assisted by AFL of all the things, Total War: Shogun stood out from the strategy pack and led to a successful series that's still going today. We'd eventually get videogame adaptations of Monkey like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and Black Myth: Wukong, but Creative Assembly's never eventuated. I'd love to see them try their hands at an RPG now, though.
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