BETA | STUDIOS // THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLY
TO BE THIS GOOD...
WHEN IT WAS first rumoured that The Creative Assembly was about to become the subject of a publisher acquisition, initial speculation suggested the sometime Total War series publisher Activision was set to invest. Eventually, it was in fact Sega that picked up the developer; a factor current studio director Mike Simpson is sure has served to better his team’s output. “I think for most independent
developers, the way you make money in the business isn’t by making games; it’s by selling your company,” offers Simpson. “That’s life for indies. Certainly, we’d been at it for long enough for our founder Tim Ansell to feel that it was time for him to do that. So that’s what he did.” Simpson does concede that being an in-house dev does change the studio to an extent, but he asserts that it has in essence remained the same. “Acquisition changes what you’re
The Creative Assembly studio directors Tim Heaton (left) and Mike Simpson (right) winning their 2012 Develop Award for In-House Studio
that’s not your job, that’s my job’. If something needs doing and someone can do it, they get on and do it. That makes the job more interesting I think, and we’ve managed to keep that small team mindset.” And keeping that state of mind, Simpson suggests, is all about courting a democracy of ideas in the team, where anyone can contribute designs to a project. “We aspire to that with a passion,” he
insists. “In practice, you’ve obviously got to have systems that filter out the bad stuff and let the good stuff bubble to the top. What happens is that teams gradually figure out who the people in the teams are that have the good ideas and the ones that get listened to the most. But everyone can put ideas forward, and they’ll be listened to.” Something about the way the team works
has obviously impressed the wider industry; so much so that in March 2005, Sega acquired The Creative Assembly (see panel: To be this good...).
HALF THE BATTLE Today, The Creative Assembly remains focused on the Total War series, and continues to develop console games. Yet the studio cannot be accused of resting on its laurels. Despite its RTS series being famed for intricacy and depth, the Total War team has managed to take its goliath of PC gaming and squeeze it into the confines of iOS and the operating system’s diminutive platforms. Total War Battles: Shogun, which like its main canon sister-titles has done remarkably well, demonstrates a studio ever-ready to
48 | AUGUST 2012
embrace new challenges and technologies. Developing for iPad might not be the same kind of outsider bet that saw Ansell porting games to FM Towns all those years ago, but it is an undertaking of the same kid of spirit. “Making Total War Battles fits into the
category of the kind of things we’ve always wanted to do; those points where we split off
I don’t think we ever lost that small team
mentality. We don’t have boards of managers, We just get on with making the games.
Mike Simpson, Studio Director
sideways and look at other platforms. Until now we just never really had the resources to do it. As we’ve become more established and got our act together internally more, we started looking around and thinking ‘it would be nice to have a go at that.’ That’s all it takes, and then off we go. That’s what we do at The Creative Assembly.” And there it is; a case of the relaxed
go-getting approach of the studio. Never daunted by new realms, always optimistic, and, by Simpson’s account, still the same company it was a quarter of a century ago this very month, The Creative Assembly looks like a studio on a journey that is only just beginning.
worrying about in the long-term; you’re not worried about survival anymore,” he says. “As an indie developer that’s your biggest thing. Every time you make a game you bet the whole company on it. If it fails once, you might survive, but if you have two bad ones in a row, you’re dead. In some ways that tends to go away when you become an internal studio. “Although in practice I don’t think it
really does,” Simpson continues. “There’s plenty of internal studios that have been acquired that have had a couple of bad projects and have then been killed. You still have to produce the quality. Simpson then states his belief that while the developer is still very much the same studio it was before Sega moved to acquire it, there is nowalso a new freedom with regard to the studio’s own roadmap. “When you’re owned by a publisher,
you’ve got much more power to do what you hope to do; that’s the big difference. As an indie, you’re kind of limited on how much you are allowed to bet on the future. When you’ve got a big publisher backing you, you can get more people in, you can do the things that you just didn’t have time to do before.” With the Total War series going strong
and recently expanding to iOS, and the mysterious Alien IP in incubation at The Creative Assembly, it certainly seems that, as part of the wider Sega organisation, the studio Tim Ansell founded is stronger than ever.
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