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Total War: Shogun started out as ‘a quick and cheerful B-grade RTS’ to help Creative Assembly raise funds for its dream game—an RPG based on Monkey: Journey to the West

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.”

Total War 25th Anniversary: Shogun Retrospective – YouTube
Total War: Shogun started out as ‘a quick and cheerful B-grade RTS’ to help Creative Assembly raise funds for its dream game—an RPG based on Monkey: Journey to the West


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