The Creative Assembly is a British video game developer established in 1987 by Tim Ansell and based in the West Sussex town of Horsham. An Australian branch is also operated from Fortitude Valley, Queensland. In its early years, the company worked on porting games to DOS from Amiga and ZX Spectrum platforms, later working with Electronic Arts to produce a variety of games under the EA Sports brand. In 1999, the company had sufficient resources to attempt a new and original project, proceeding to develop the strategy computer game Shogun: Total War. Shogun: Total War was highly successful for the Creative Assembly and is regarded as one of the benchmark strategy games. Subsequent titles in the Total War series built on the triumph of Shogun: Total War, increasing the company's critical and commercial success.

In March 2005, the Creative Assembly was acquired by Japanese giant Sega as a European subsidiary. Under Sega, further Total War titles were developed, and the Creative Assembly entered the console market with action-adventure games such as Spartan: Total Warrior and Viking: Battle for Asgard. The company's most recent products are Napoleon: Total War and the real-time strategy title, Stormrise.

History

The Creative Assembly was founded on 18 August 1987 as a limited company. The founder, Tim Ansell, had begun professional computer programming in 1985, working on video game titles for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and Atari 80. Initially, Ansell kept the company small so he could personally work on computer programming. The company's early work, often produced personally by Ansell, involved porting games from the Amiga and ZX Spectrum platforms to DOS, such as the 1989 titles Geoff Crammond's Stunt Car Racer and Shadow of the Beast by Psygnosis. The Creative Assembly began work with Electronic Arts in 1993, producing titles under the EA Sports label, starting with the DOS version of the early FIFA names. With EA Sports, The Creative Assembly was able to produce low development