A Horsham games studio, part of Sega, best known for the Total War strategy series and Alien: Isolation.
Creative Assembly is a British games studio in Horsham, West Sussex. It is best known for Total War, a series of strategy games combining big battles with empire management, set in times from feudal Japan and ancient Rome to the fantasy world of Warhammer. It also made the horror game Alien: Isolation. The studio is part of Sega Europe.
Tim Ansell founded The Creative Assembly in 1987. Early on it ported Amiga games to MS-DOS and worked on EA Sports titles, including an early PC version of FIFA in 1993, which helped pay for original games. Shogun: Total War in 2000 was the breakthrough, and Michael Simpson, hired as creative director in 1996, became central to the series. Sega bought the studio in 2005. We did not find a mission statement from the studio itself.
Horsham is the studio's headquarters and is its only UK location we could confirm. Wikipedia reports 882 employees in 2023, which has been described in the press as making it the largest game studio in the UK, though the figure may have changed since the studio and Sega restructured in 2023 and 2024. An April 2021 article reports around 800 permanent staff at that time, a third UK studio opening, and a motion capture facility moving to a purpose-designed site in Horsham. Creative Assembly also has a studio in Sofia, Bulgaria, formerly Crytek Black Sea.
Tim Heaton joined as studio director in January 2009, though Wikipedia's infobox names Gareth Edmondson in the role, so check current leadership. Total War is over 20 years old, and the same 2021 article says it has sold more than 36 million standalone games. We did not find the studio's own description of its culture, so this paragraph relies on the public record: a long-running studio that has stayed in the same town for nearly forty years and kept making the same flagship series. In 2021 the studio director said the team planned to move towards flexible working and to use office time for creative collaboration, a statement worth checking against how the studio works today.
Total War needs people who enjoy history, strategy and detail. Programmers build battle engines and artificial intelligence, artists create armies and landscapes, designers balance the rules, and historians and writers help with settings. Audio, production and testing staff keep big projects on track. History, computer science, art and design, and writing backgrounds can all be useful. Sega Europe's recruitment pages list current Creative Assembly vacancies.
Website: www.creative-assembly.com
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