This month The Creative Assembly celebrates turning a quarter of a century old. Will Freeman looks at how adapting to change – and staying the same – has enabled the studio thrive for so long
FEW GAMES DEVELOPMENT studios make it to their 25th anniversary. There are those in the business – institutions like Nintendo and Sega – that started out long before they were making digital entertainment, and thus have numerous decades behind them. But The Creative Assembly has never done
anything but work with video games, and as such, its quarter of a century of service is quite remarkable. Today the firm is owned by Sega, employs
over 200 staff, and dominates a good chunk of the PC market with its Total War RTS series. But, like so many long-standing studios,
The Creative Assembly began with just one man. His name is Tim Ansell, and after two years of professional programming work, he finally opened the doors to The Creative Assembly in 1987.
glamorous. Ansell and a small team worked tirelessly porting numerous games from the hugely popular Amiga and ZX Spectrum to the IBM PC compatible DOS platform. However, despite the fact a fledgling The
Creative Assembly was yet to work on original IP, Ansell managed to secure the team some impressive projects, which allowed the young studio to build a solid reputation and foundation for the future.
OUT OF THE SHADOWS Early titles included ports of MicroStyle’s Stunt Car Racer, and Shadow of the Beast for Psygnosis, where Ansell first met The Creative Assembly’s now studio director Mike Simpson. Simpson remembers those early days as a time when Ansell was undeterred by tough technical challenges – perhaps the reason he
found himself attracted to porting – and various new technologies. “Tim always liked to try new things,” offers
Simpson. “He ended up porting some games to the Fujitsu FM Towns, which was a Japanese PC, and one of the first devices with a CD-ROM drive. “Back then the studio wasn’t afraid to try new things, and I guess that’s a little bit down to Tim. He was quite a techy developer who was picking up stuff and doing new things all the time. Things kind of happened by accident more than by design, and porting work is what we found ourselves doing. “ Members of the early Creative Assembly
team also found themselves producing titles under the EA Sports label, working on some of the first FIFA releases, as well games such as Rugby World Cup, Cricket World Cup and Australian Football League games.
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Studio director Mike Simpson (above) says The Creative Assembly was always willing to try new things and test out new tech. Main image: The CA team today