25-year History Of Total War, From An Experimental Side Project...

Getting stuck into the past with some Total War veterans.

Let me take you back to the year 2000, perhaps the peak of me naively thinking things were going to be great forever. Smash Mouth's All Star was constantly on the radio. It sometimes still snowed in October here in Colorado and I'd get a few extra days off school. And I discovered a little game called Shogun: Total War that may have literally changed the course of my entire life.

OK, it wasn't exactly little for the time. I remember being baffled by how I was supposed to free up 700 MB for one game. But the rest was history. Until it branched out into fantasy in 2016, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Total War is a series that I've been onboard for since the very beginning, that shaped my love for both strategy and history, which are still two of the main things people pay me to write about. And I just started up another campaign in Total War: Warhammer 3's new DLC just last night, so I've never stopped playing it either. Across 16 major releases (with Medieval 3 now announced to be on the way) and a quarter freaking century, we've been together longer than any of my romantic relationships and almost all of my interpersonal ones.

So it's hard to find someone whose history with the series goes back further than mine does. But lucky for me, I got to talk to Creative Assembly's battle architect Scott Pitkethly, who has been with the company since before the release of Shogun. And you might be surprised to learn what else CA was up to before they hit it big with their digital toy soldiers.

"When I joined, I wasn't working on Total War to begin with," Pitkethly recalls. "We were still doing sports games at that point and we were porting to the PlayStation 1. That was the very first thing I did. But they were developing Shogun: Total War downstairs."

The seeds of the project were planted not with a Kurosawa movie marathon or even a desire to make an RTS, but someone's side project of extremely optimized 3D terrain. Programmer Anthony "TAG" Taglione showed up one day with a spline-based landscape visualizer he had written entirely in assembly language, which I can only equate to maybe building an entire house out of toothpicks. It's very efficient once it's done but extremely labor-intensive compared to more abstract programming languages.

"Just this amazing landscape demo… no game whatsoever," Pitkethly says. "And he turned up with that and said, 'I want to make a game using this.' And he actu

Source: PC Gamer